I am going on 3 years of being an ex-smoker, though I still like to indulge every now and again (no more than a couple of times a week). My problem is this: I am finding it difficult to admit this to my boyfriend. He HATES smoking and I have hidden this guilty pleasure from him in the past, which made way for him to develop a weird connection between me lying and me smoking. I want to be completely open with him and hope that he can one day understand that it’s possible to partake every so often without the risk of becoming a full on smoker again. Help!
Hello Smokey!
I enjoy dividing large groups of people like smokers into five arbitrary subgroups that are named after one or two of their more negative features. Smokers are really easy to classify, so let’s have some fun and begin with the group that you are a member of, Smokey:
Social Stevie: The gadfly called Social Stevie is great at saving money because he never buys cigarettes. By some miracle of nature he remains ever unaware that cigarettes are expensive, which must be why he has no problem asking for one. What’s great about Social Stevie is that he feels the need to make it explicitly clear that he doesn’t smoke. He loves the terms “not often” and “only when…”. Social Stevie is an amazing conversationalist until the smoker he is leeching from runs out of cigarettes. When that happens, Social Stevie will be off like a bolt of lightning to find a new best bud.
Ol’ Yellow Beard: Look out, it’s Ol’ Yellow Beard! Ol’ Yellow Beard somehow takes up the entire sidewalk, and he’s great at making people recoil in horror as he approaches. Everyone wonders why he refuses to shave off the disgusting stained hairs on his face, but no one has ever asked him to do it. Why? Because no one has spoken to Ol’ Yellow Beard since he started to grow his beard… since he maybe murdered his brother in the woods behind the old family cabin. Word to to the wise: don’t touch Ol’ Yellow Beard’s smokes.
Selfish Sam: Selfish Sam doesn’t give a shit if you are downwind while she’s smoking. In fact, she revels in it! Selfish Sam has just as much right to smoke as you do to not smoke, and because Canada is a free country, you can go take a hike. Selfish Sam loves smoking in the car with her kids because “they’ll be fine.” She can’t believe they made a god-damned law to stop her from smoking in restaurants. It’s her damned table, she’s paying for the damned meal, so she should be able to do what she god-damned well pleases, goddammit.
Sneaky Susan: Go into the garage and check behind the old box of mouse traps and you’ll find Sneaky Susan’s two year-old pack of cigarettes. She’s forgotten about them, but she’s got another pack buried in the backyard. “I’m just heading to the corner store to get a lotto ticket,” says Sneaky Susan before she begins her daily caper of ducking behind the shed to take a puff and lean back orgasmically against the tin wall. Everyone knows you smoke, Sneaky Susan!
Desperate Dan: Desperate Dan always sprints out of the movie theatre. At every event he attends, Desperate Dan sits as close to an exit as possible so he can make his pathetic escape. At a wedding, Desperate Dan is the guest heard sighing during the first speech. Why would you invite Desperate Dan to the amusement park when you already know that he thinks roller-coaster rides are too long? No person in the world has fallen down more stairs than Desperate Dan, but in the end he always gets the cigarette he so desperately needs.
Your denial and declaration of innocence is sort of endearing in a puppy that tore apart the garbage sort of way, but the bottom line is that you are not an ex-smoker. Even if you smoke occassionally, you still smoke, and the toxins from those cigarettes are harmful to your body. According the handsome CNN correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, even a few cigarettes a week have the potential to lead to life-threatening complications like heart disease and stroke. And if you’re lucky enough to avoid those atrocities, there’s always cancer or an assortment of lung conditions that are looking for a healthy host to bother.
Being a smoker myself, I’m not going to try to advise you on how to quit (even though you don’t consider yourself a smoker), but I can speak first hand about how disgusting it is. It smells, you can see the filter turning yellow after the first drag, and it smells. It really smells! You would certainly be better off if you never, ever smoked again. You already knew that, I’m sure. Wait, you don’t smoke, right? I keep forgetting that. Now, I couldn’t find any financially-backed polls that measured the amount of non-smokers who dislike smoking, but my brain just calculated that it probably rests somewhere close to 100 per cent. That’s a loose figure, but I feel confident in my assertation. So, technically, your boyfriend is justified in his hatred of smoking. I just used my brain again and figured out that he likely cares for you and is therefore concerned about your well-being.
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Kirk Heron is Toronto Standard‘s advice columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @ohnowhattodo.
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