AIBU dh smoking

On my lunch break & catching up with a few posts I've replied to.

It strikes me OP you have resigned yourself to staying with a hardened smoker despite hating it. Would you stay with an alcoholic or someone with a violent temper. Admittedly smoking can be done privately without you watching but the results of smoking such as the stink throughout the house & the likelihood of developing lung cancer or clogged arteries resulting in a stroke or heart attack is something you will have to live with & worry about every day. You could say anything can happen to anyone at any given time. The diffence is smokers know what the results will be & they have no consideration for those they will leave behind far too early & often with young children. I feel you should be stronger in your resolve in letting him know how much it's affecting you. Do not give up.

He never fully gave up and his family enabled him and helped him hide it from you.

I'd be ditching the whole lot of them.

You sound controlling and obsessive.

Also hypocritical: you said you would never date a smoker and thats what you did.

How would you feel about a man who says he is disgusted by fat women and would never date one, who then proceeds to go out with one and spend years policing her eating because he had parents who died of a heart attack?

No its not easy to leave but

• he's lied to you
• his health could get much worse and you'd have to care for him
• he's setting a terrible example to your children, will he get them started on smoking?
• he doesn't seem to care about your feelings
• he's wasting over £5k a year, thats a family holiday abroad

If his brother dying of lung cancer didn't stop him smoking he will never stop.

Oh come on. I agree op's DH should give up but it is not "pretty easy" to do so. I started smoking age 14 in the 1970s. I finally gave up for good in 2020. I have not had one since. There are no cravings anymore but I know just one cigarette would lead to me smoking full time again. I think he is in the wrong here of course but to say it's easy to give up smoking is simply untrue.

Your husband has obviously made his choice.
You will need to make your choice.
Your children do not have a choice.
Even if he smokes outside, his clothes, skin and any surface he touches can be contaminated with toxic chemicals and can be transferred to other people,(you and your children ), and affect their health.

As someone who hates smoking I would’ve never got into a relationship with him, you could see where this was going. Smoking killed two of my relatives prematurely and I wouldn’t want that for the father of my children

You said years ago it was a deal breaker. I couldn’t be with a smoker either. Add in the lies and gas lighting and I certainly would not be staying

i would have one more serious conversation saying he is aware it’s deal breaker, that you have seen people die of lung cancer and are not prepared to go through that again , that smoking is anti social and and smelly and awful and that he has promised to give up and has lied and done nothing

so you want a divorce an he can leave and go and stay with mummy and smoke to his hearts content

Hi mum sounds really frustrating: Trying to help him hide it by blocking your view.... and buying him a packet cos he'd had a stressful week!

I've seen behaviour like that in drinkers too - trying to drag others down to their level and not wanting them to give up.

Here's the thing.

Smoking is clearly part of his DNA now (before anyone jumps on me, I don't mean literally, I mean it's so ingrained in him that it might as well be) that he won't stop. You've said it's something he needs to quit, but when addiction is so ingrained that he is easily triggered into starting again, it won't ever go away. His body will eventually lose the ability to cope with it at all, and you will end up playing nurse when he inevitably succumbs the the poison he's putting in his body. That will impact YOUR quality of life, and all for something that he won't quit. Is that what you want for your life?

He is simply DARVO’ing you. Denying, Attacking, Reversing Victim and Offender. The “controlling” accusation is utter misdirection. It was a condition of marrying you that he stop smoking. He voluntarily accepted that but then evaded it, lied about it, deceived you, took your attention/time/money/body and shit all over you because he continued smoking. And somehow you are the controlling one? You are the problem? Bollocks. If I marry someone and expect monogamy but they cheat on me am I +controlling* when I say “no, I expected you to keep your vows?” Of course not.

I have been with my partner 34 years. I have a DS & DD. I would not spend a single day under the same roof as my partner if they started smoking.

Not a day.

We only get treated how we allow ourselves to be treated. First up his family are arseholes and only fanning the flames.

My hubby and I had a similar thing with his weed. He shut it down, occasionally if he's super stressed he has a smoke but stays out long enough that I don't smell it (the smell triggers seizures) and so he misses dinner and he has to do the laundry so there is a cost.

I wouldn't divorce him, yet. I would formally separate and seek marriage counseling. That is if you want to keep the marriage. If you are done than make the split as amicable as possible for the children.

His mum sounds awful, BTW. Massive sympathy there, in laws can be the worst. Especially in this case where you’re the evil wife trying to stop their lovely boy doing the fun thing that they encouraged from childhood 🤢🤢🤢🤢.

He's not taken you seriously. He's from a family of smokers and probably can't imagine anyone would actually break up a marriage over smoking. You have confirmed this by tolerating his smoking creeping back in. The only options you have are to accept it fully, or properly force him to choose. If you do the second you need to ask him to leave until he's stopped and then he can come home.

It's easy to see where he gets his manipulative ways!

Ex-smoker here. Nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs there is - it's very hard to kick. You have to really want to (not know that you ought to, but really want to). Too often, other smokers will encourage you to relapse if you're trying to give up. My first few attempts were sabotaged by smokers pressing cigarettes on me. (Misery loves company).

But he should be honest with you - if he really doesn't want to give up, then he should say so and allow you to make your own choice. He should have been honest like this from the start. His family seem to be colluding with him and making it harder for him to stop.

If his O2 levels are dropping so low, then he is well on his way to COPD.

I'm honestly not sure what you can do. I managed to give up over 50 years ago after a 20+ a day habit. It was a killer, but I desperately wanted to stop, and I was no longer in close touch with most of my smoking friends, which made it easier. My DM smoked, but she was very supportive of me giving up and never smoked in front of me or offered me a cigarette when I was in the process of stopping.

I have no useful advice. If he genuinely doesn't want to give up, then he won't, but insist on honesty. Don't give him a hard time for smoking (but obviously, ouside and not in front of the kids), unless you truly can't stand it, in which case, you probably need to think about the future of your relationship. Good luck.

Probably at the point where he chose cigarettes over his wife sleeping on the sofa with a wound that won’t heal?!

I can see the logic of the sunk cost fallacy here, you’ve got history, you’ve put the time and energy in, now you’ve got kids. So you might as well stick with what you’ve got…but… you’re prioritising your past over your future.

If you don’t deal with the issue (you don’t have to leave, but counselling, GP, ultimatum, patches etc) then ultimately you WILL be married to a smoker. Which is what you say you don’t want.

@OneTwinklyBird I’m in a similar position.

Also told him when we met that it was a deal breaker for me.

he also said he would stop. We were at uni together and used to smoke marijuana together occasionally, but I never smoked cigarettes and thought we were on the same page.

Years later, married with kids, turns out he’d never stopped smoking, he just hid it. He smoked cigarettes and marijuana daily and also did cocaine occasionally (I don’t know how frequent this was).

This came out when it was also revealed that he had been sexting another woman when we were going through a bad patch.

It was like I didn’t know him at all.

We almost split, and he moved out for around a month. He had some trauma from childhood and he saw a therapist for around a year.

He now no longer smokes. He started off on the patches but then gave them up and manages alone. He unfortunately now has some health problems from all the years of smoking and I think it has frightened him into stopping.

We get on well but I get very, very angry when I think about it too much. The money he has wasted over the years, the damage he has done to his health, the time he wasted sexting that horrid woman, how comfortable he felt about lying about it all.

I hate it.

i just feel very frustrated. He’s a good person and a wonderful dad to our kids. He’s just left everybody down so badly with all this. And yes I feel gaslit. I stated my boundaries and he just trampled all over them.

At the root of it there is very much an element of sexism and male entitlement. He was going to do what he wanted to do and to hell with me. And all it’s done is damage his health, our finances and our relationship.

very silly. Very frustrating.

Why?

Why?

The OP made it clear from the start she didn't want to be in a relationship with a smoker. He was given the get out card which he chose not to take.

When you find out your partner is being deceitful, doing something they know was a deal breaker in the relationship, then the OP is within their rights to feel really pissed off and let down.

It's not dramatic. Its facts.