Smoking is a habit that nearly 14% of the adult population in the US still engage in, despite decades of research into the harm caused by tobacco use. Tobacco use is responsible for nearly 800,000 deaths per year, but tobacco companies are clever. They’ve changed their marketing techniques, rebranded their products, and made their tobacco even more addictive.
If you’re in a relationship as a smoker, you could be putting much more than your personal health at risk. If your partner is a non-smoker, the habit could cause issues with finances, intimacy, and much more. The bottom line? You might be slowly sabotaging your relationship with smoking.
Let’s look closer at the ways smoking can affect a relationship.
Putting your Partner at Risk
It’s no secret that smoking can kill you and cause serious physical harm to the smoker, but did you know that second-hand smoke is also incredibly dangerous and deadly in a lot of cases? The health effects of second-hand smoking are similar to that of first-hand smoking and cause cancer, lung disease, and more.
When you smoke around your partner, you’re actively endangering their physical health. That’s not an understatement; you are actually putting them at risk of developing cancer or lung disease! This is hardly indicative of a loving, caring partner.
It’s time to quit smoking so you don’t destroy your partner’s health alongside your own. You care about them and want them to live a happy, healthy life. It’s time to show just how true that is by leaving tobacco behind for good.
If you’re not sure where to start, try Black Buffalo, nicotine gum, or even vape pens. You can also join a tobacco support group if you don’t want to do it on your own!
Hygiene
The attraction is a matter of opinion, of course, but it’s not too far-fetched to say that your partner likely enjoys it when you don’t smell like stale cigarettes. Cigarette smoke sticks to everything; fabrics, hard surfaces, hair, skin, teeth, the list goes on. The smell becomes especially unpleasant when you’ve let it sit for any amount of time, gradually becoming more as time goes on. If you’re in a relationship, you could be putting your partner off when you smell like cigarettes, and if you’re looking for a relationship, you could be limiting your dating options.
The way you smell actually plays a huge role in attraction. The smell is associated with memory, and certain smells can trigger different feelings in people. Disrupting that all-important sense with stale cigarettes is a good way to turn off potential dates. Not everyone wants to date a smoker, either, for the simple fact that smoking is a deadly habit.
Physical Intimacy and Fertility
If you’re planning on being physically intimate with your partner, you might want to listen closely. Smoking has an adverse effect on both the heart and lungs, which play a role in arousal. Remember, in order for physical arousal to occur and be maintained, you need a steady flow of fresh, oxygenated blood. If you have trouble with circulation or breathing due to smoking, your love life could suffer greatly.
Not to mention, smoking can cause infertility in both men and women. Cigarettes are laced with thousands of chemicals from the growth and processing of tobacco, and those chemicals end up in your tobacco products. Chemicals like arsenic, carbon monoxide, and cyanide poison the blood and make breathing/blood flow a hundred times more difficult for the body and damage reproductive cells.
You’re essentially destroying your chances of having a family when you smoke, and this might be something you and your partner really want. This could have an adverse effect on the relationship; if they want children, but your smoking has made that impossible, the relationship could potentially crumble.
Potential for Disease/Cancer
Let’s not forget that you’re actively increasing your risk for heart and lung disease, cancer, heart attack and stroke, and more ailments with every cigarette. Your partner will have to suffer through your ailments, watching your body slowly deteriorate, and that’s simply not something that a rational person wants to experience.
If you’ve ever known someone who had lung or throat cancer from smoking, you know how terrible it can be to watch them slowly succumb to the disease. It takes a very strong person to witness this in a partner, and not everyone is ready for that burden; nor should they be! You can’t honestly expect another person to stick by you while you actively destroy your health.
The Bottom Line
Smoking isn’t a habit that’s compatible with a happy, healthy relationship. The two are direct contradictions of one another since your habit will actively destroy your health, hygiene, and fertility. If you want to have better relationships and expand your dating options, it’s time to quit tobacco once and for all.
