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Good morning. I am a long standing quitter and have been at this for a long time. I'm not proud of this. I have done a great job of overcoming the psycological reasons for smoking and I no longer romance the smoke. BUT I obviously have to work on the stinking thinking that smoking can give me anything: pleasure, satisfaction etc. I live with a partner who smokes and I started smoking with him again occasionally. Oh yes, that stinking thinking that I can have just one or I can smoke for the night with him and stop the next day. We all know how that story ends. I know that if I want to protect this new quit, I can't have one puff ever. I decided that I need to get back to basis and focus on not one puff ever. I am not going to smoke today.
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A lot of couples struggle when one person quits smoking and the other does not. I’ve been reflecting on recent Quit Train discussions on this topic, because for decades I was "the smoking spouse." I didn’t smoke in our home or in our car. But the smoke clung to me and was present everywhere I went. It caused a ton of tension with my mate. The stink. The health worries. The temptation to join in. She H-A-T-E-D my smoking. That felt like a very personal rejection to me. She knew I was a smoker before we got together (and even joined in sometimes), so why couldn’t she accept me for who I was? I was making my own choices. Why did she want me to give up something I loved? She had bad habits that bugged me, so why couldn’t I have a bad habit that bugged her? All of this felt very visceral and valid on the surface. But in actuality it was stinkin thinkin, and a rotten heap of rationalization. My smoking was not a mere “bad habit.” It was a raging addiction. And living with an addict is tough. Getting my fix of nicotine was always the priority, always the organizing principle of our lives, one that I superimposed on her without her consent. Smoking was how I spent a lot of my time and money. Over and over again, I’d walk away from her – literally and figuratively – to go smoke. Over and over again, I chose to put my own gratification first - above her feelings and fears. This de-centered and abandoned her in subtle but significant ways. Not the kind of spouse I wanted to be. My partner knew better than to try to force me to quit. She knew that breaking an addiction only happens from an internal commitment. But we still fought about it. And what I learned during those fights (eventually… begrudgingly… belatedly…) turned out to be important. It helped me recognize how my smoking affected her. I also became weary of all the tension around the issue. I had an ambivalent relationship with smoking anyway. Was it really worth all the crap it was causing? As this was percolating, I was also watching my father die. He was sick for many years, and my mother sacrificed everything for his care. It depleted her physically, financially, and emotionally. Watching that slow motion tragedy was instructive. I didn’t want that for my relationship. Getting old is hard enough, even without complications from smoking. There’s no predicting what the lotto of life will toss our way, but my smoking was unilaterally increasing the odds of a bad outcome that would affect her deeply. Again, not the kind of spouse I wanted to be. I ultimately made my own decision to stop smoking. My partner was not the only reason I quit, but it was a big one. To this day, supporting her wellbeing is something I can hold onto and use to protect my quit when cravings arise. Two highly independent people will always butt heads occasionally. I still annoy her sometimes, and vice versa. But quitting has right-sized our conflicts. Before I quit, small tensions absorbed extra energy from the major unresolved conflict between us (smoking). Refreshingly, now we just argue about dishes or yard work or whatever, without loaded subtext. I was fearful that I would feel resentful, but the opposite is actually true. Quitting is freeing. It's so much simpler. And the benefits for my partner are a beautiful part of my recovery journey. I’m grateful for the chance to be on this healing road, with plenty of help from the good souls here on the Quit Train.
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Mr. Pixel quit smoking at the same time as I did. He was a little more of a casual smoker, and so far, the effects of quitting haven't hit him hard, at least physically. His Hell Week was just a normal week. Once Week Two, aka Heck Week, rolled around, I was up and around, and ready to start rejoining the living again. I knew that it would be an adjustment to get back to my usual routines without a smoke at hand. I was prepared for that. I knew my brain would need to relearn a few things, and I was prepared to deal with some changes. But I never once thought that the way Mr. P and I related to each other would change as a result of stopping the cancer sticks as well. That was a bit of a shock at first. When we'd get home from work, the first thing we would do is head outside for a smoke and discuss the day. Then we'd go in and start making dinner. The rest of the evening was punctuated by smoke breaks. Looking back, it's almost like smoking was the scaffolding on which we hung the rest of our lives; we fit in what we had to do, and what we wanted to do, between smokes. When we took that underlying structure away, we were both at a loss. That led to some crankiness and some petty squabbling, which is usually not our style. There were times we would sit on the couch and uncomfortably stare at each other. Now what? And that's not us either. We've been together for over a decade and have never, ever been at a loss for conversation or activities. We're curious, and active and interested in so many things. We have a lot in common, and a lot of differences, so it's always an adventure. And it's good. There's always something going on around here. This was just weird. But slowly, we came to realize that, even though we've been together a long time, and we knew each other really well, we've never known a time where we were together as non-smokers. Every single thing we've ever done over the course of 13 years has been punctuated in some way by a smoke; dates, trips, dinners, walks, parties, funerals, weddings, work, even workouts. Smoking was as deeply woven into the fabric of our relationship as our feelings for one another. It was a frightening realization. Could we make this better? How? Now what, indeed. So we started by asking each other one question, "What do you need right now to feel 'normal', other than a smoke?" Answering that proved to be the key. It turned out that it wasn't really the smoke itself that we missed, but rather the routine of heading outside, walking around a bit, talking about our day or the news or whatever. That particular smoke was actually a signal for us to shake the day off and ease into the evening. It was a bridge from crazy day to relaxing night. And without that signal, we were kind of lost. So, we took a walk. And we talked. And we didn't smoke. And it worked. After a few days, that became our new normal and we no longer missed having that after work smoke. We still had that thing that we actually needed - the reason for the smoke - without the smoke itself. From that point on, anytime we felt 'off', we would go back to that question, "What do you need right now?". And it's working. I've come to realize that as we remove that scaffolding, we're revealing the beautiful structure underneath. We've been building it for over a decade, and it's solid. It can withstand much more than I thought it could, and, best of all, it's at the point where we can continue to build upon it, without all that messy, ugly scaffolding. After all, scaffolding is only ever meant to be temporary anyway. The building underneath? That's the real deal.
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