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I was walking down the street yesterday, on my way home from the gym, when a young man stepped onto the sidewalk right in front of me and proceeded to puff at a cigarette. My eyes immediately rolled in that “Oh sh-t, here we go” way. I tried to slow my pace so as to avoid the lingering vapors, even choosing to wait for the walk light instead of crossing through clear traffic to get on the other side of Atlantic Avenue with him. It was just too much. And did I mention that secondhand smoke is no joke? According to Cancer.gov, “Approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths occur each year among adult nonsmokers in the United States as a result of exposure to secondhand smoke.”
I can’t go for that.
But I do know people who smoke, including one of my sisters. The mother of one of my best friends smoked a lot. And one of my mother’s best friends back in the day smoked like a chimney, and every time we went to her home to watch her movies and play with her dogs, it hit you. (Sadly, the woman died of lung cancer.)
Through encounters with all of those people, I was reminded that the smell of cigarette smoke lingers in clothing like no other (though I will say the smell of grease used to fry fish, chicken, etc. hides in clothes like a mother as well). It even lingers in your mouth, on your tongue, and rests on your lips.
“You could taste it.”
That’s what my co-worker said, face turned up, when explaining what it was like to kiss an ex-boyfriend with a smoking habit. My fiancé was a “social smoker,” as he explained it. Thankfully, it was a habit he dropped long before I met him. But my co-worker’s ex picked up smoking to distract himself from a preoccupation with smoking marijuana (crazy, right?), and like many smokers, made getting his hands on a pack a priority. He would step outside to smoke a cigarette, only to turn right back around not long after to smoke another one. And when he kissed my co-worker, the robust taste of tobacco and nicotine was all in his grill.
How romantic.
Seeped thick into his clothes, fingers and his lips, it was like giving love to an ashtray. This was something that said co-worker dealt with on and off for three years as the pair tried to make their relationship work. And granted, it wasn’t the reason they split (“Smoking was the least of his problems…”), but it definitely was something she wasn’t fond of. Interesting enough, though, despite that experience, dating another smoker is not completely out of the question for my co-worker. To be honest, she was more irritated by her ex’s weed habit, which was the reason he started smoking in the first place…
I couldn’t help but to think about whether or not I would be okay with such struggles of dating a man who smokes (if I was a Blue Tang back in the dating sea). Would the love push me to encourage him to quit? Or, as an adult knowing what I voluntarily walked into, would I allow the guy to smoke as he pleases, but just not around me?
I recently found out that a Belgian actor I have a crush on by the name of Matthias Schoenaerts smokes. As I was looking at some pictures of him in Google images, you know, being a creep, I ran across quite a few with him holding a cigarette in hand. It took some of the allure away and made me think, “Even the finest man can’t seem to make a smoking habit sexy.” But if I’m honest, if I were ever to have the luck of having someone as handsome as Schoenaerts or an Idris Elba or a Michael B. Jordan swing my way, I can’t say I would immediately give them a hard pass if they did so with a cigarette in tow…
But that’s just my opinion. What say you? Is a smoking habit something you could overlook for a guy you really like? Or is it an immediate dealbreaker?
