DH started vaping

[KazMa]

Hello,

Bit of background - my DH was a social smoker (although very rarely smoked, maybe few times a year).

Recently he ordered a vape after trying a friends one and said he’ll only use it when he’s had a stressful day at work. Once it arrived though, he started using it every single day, even on weekends (when relaxing/nothing stressful going on). I got annoyed at him and said I’d rather him not do it on weekends/when we go out as a family as I don’t want our child growing up seeing this! Also, why get addicted to nicotine, why couldn’t he get a zero nicotine vape if he likes the flavour! I’ve also asked him not to do it in the house, but I caught him vaping in our bedroom just before I was bringing baby up to sleep there 🙄

AIBU to be annoyed with him and want him to compromise a bit by vaping a zero nicotine vape outside and not on weekends/family days out?

There's nothing puritanical about not wanting your partner to develop an unnecessary, expensive, and potentially harmful addiction when you have young children and a financial crisis looming. It's just common sense.

Wonder how many posters use caffeine or ingest alcohol?
These can also lead to harmful addiction... and over eating can lead to obesity which is harmful.., Yada yada

@Sarahcoggles it’s not expensive. I honestly think people are just transferring what they learned for years about smoking to vaping, because it feels intuitively right, not because they’ve done any leg work on researching it. You stigmatise this and you are stigmatising a key way of saving the lives of smokers. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, your certainty is really misplaced, according to authorities and institutions who actually monitor the research on this.

@RoundandRound123 I have no problem with vaping as an alternative to smoking for addicted smokers. It seems likely (although we'll know more in a few decades time) that vaping is significantly less harmful than smoking. But let's not forget that smoking was encouraged and advised by doctors until relatively recently, so who knows what the long term effects may be. So in the meantime it would seem sensible for those who are not addicted to nicotine to remain that way.
Addictions are at best inconvenient (not being able to start the day without a cup of coffee) and at worst fatal. No addiction is a good thing. It causes people to prioritise the addictive substance in a way that can be detrimental to others. After all, why else did OP post in the first place, if a non smoking father taking up vaping is such a fine and dandy situation?

If vaping is so harmless, would you be happy for your young children to do it?

I’m a vaper and moved on to one since I quit cigarettes. My health has improved massively and without it I wouldn’t of been able to give up cigarettes. If someone doesn’t accept it they can sod of as I wouldn’t give my vape up for any relationship. And telling someone to give up something harmless they enjoy is a bit controlling imo. Different if he was a heavy drinker or a coke addict I could understand but I don’t think vaping is quite in the same league.

I can not stand liars. If has started lying or omitting info about it to you, I see that as a problem.

My DH vapes, I personally find it ridiculous, he wasn't that heavy a smoker, I was worse and I just stopped, but he vaped. He went through a phase when he first got it of vaping much more than he smoked.

He knows I don't like it, so I don't see him doing it now, He does it in his office with the window open, very rarely now as well, as he knows I hate it. I don't want our asthmatic son anywhere near it, nor do I want to smell it or for our DS to see him doing it.

I do find it ridiculous that he chooses to use it, but I would never have quit smoking because he asked me to, so I can't expect him to quit it, just respect my boundaries around it and he does.

I think that's all you can ask from your DH, but he shouldn't be sneaking out to do it and lying about it, I hate that.

I do also agree that we don't know the long term effects of vaping with regards to our lungs and other health issues.

As a PP rightly pointed out, if it's so harmless would you let your children do it. I know I wouldn't.

And vaping is cheap once you buy the kit. Vape juices are a pound and coils about £10 for a pack of 8. Love the way people spout nonsense about vaping when they don’t know anything about it !

Give the poor bloke a break.
He's vaping, not gambling away your family life savings 😳 if he wants to vape let him bloody vape. He's an adult. Jeez

I think you've missed the point. He wasn't a smoker. As an adult, with children, he's chosen to develop a nicotine addiction when he was way way past the "experimental trying-to-look-cool" teen phase.

Interestingly I'd been wondering how vaping had become so successful and so prevalent, far more prevalent than smoking had seemed to be. And now I know why. Many people seem to think it's like chewing gum or having a penchant for wine gums. Genius marketing. People seem to forget it's an addiction to a drug.

@Sarahcoggles i never said it was harmless, at all, so that’s a strawman. Children or teens using drugs, whether caffeine or nicotine, is different because the possibility of causing developmental disruption is far higher than with an adult so it’s not comparable really. I wouldn’t give tea or coffee to a child personally, but I know people who were sort of raised on these- they’re fine but I would be surprised if it had some negative impact on them.

However, most teens in particular take up smoking as a means of rebellion to some extent, if they instead took up vaping as their form of rebellion, I wouldn’t be delighted, but I would be secretly thrilled it wasn’t tobacco, alcohol, cannabis, or other harder drugs. @KazMa said he was previously a social smoker, there’s a good chance that was more regular than she realised, it’s also possible that whatever is causing him stress now would have led to him getting more into smoking.

Overall, I just find it grim how many people expect to have such control over their adult partner, it’s so disrespectful to my mind. I just don’t understand why people can’t accept that they can’t have everything exactly as they want it in life, other people are autonomous. The people you love are going to do things you don’t want them to do, that’s there choice or their vice, why expect they will always fall into line with what you judge to be right or wrong? It’s not like he’s being unfaithful or has taken up meth. If that’s the worst thing he does the whole marriage I reckon they are probably doing well. The dishonesty is troubling for sure, but if it’s not emotionally safe to be honest I can see why that would happen. I don’t think people should bully each other for their failings.

I’d been wondering how vaping had become so successful and so prevalent, far more prevalent than smoking had seemed to be. And now I know why. Many people seem to think it’s like chewing gum …

@Sarahcoggles It’s been allowed to be successful in the UK only because we’re not a nation of tobacco growers. Imagine being in a country that bans vaping because the government owns the tobacco companies (ahem … India) or somewhere that makes it almost impossible to run vaping businesses because tobacco companies hold a metaphorical gun to the President’s head (ahem .. USA).

I assume you’re too young to remember when people smoked everywhere: pubs, cinemas, at their work desks? Most people smoked, and they smoked everywhere.

We don’t live in a ideal world where nobody ever does anything that’ll harm them. Vaping is about reducing the harm of using nicotine - while tobacco plants exist, there will always be people that use it 🤷‍♀️

@HariboReckoning exactly, it used to be that in the 70s in the UK something like 35% of all male adult deaths were attributable to smoking. It continues to this day to be a major cause of premature death here and worldwide as well, and all the evidence suggests that as much as 90% of the harm is reduced in an E-cigarette versus a tobacco cigarette.

It’s such a shame that people don’t know that much of the seeds of doubt being sewn about vaping originates from the tobacco industry, and that they are not propagating good health messaging but rather disinformation when they condemn vaping along the same lines as smoking. That’s an interesting fact about India, I believe they still have a huge number of smokers over the age of 15 (something like a third of them) so a solid alternative to smoking culture could have a massive impact on their public health.

I'm 54 so I remember people smoking everywhere.

I think vaping is, as far as we currently know, a less harmful means of nicotine addicts getting their fix than via cigarettes. So in that respect it is totally a good thing.

But the marketing has led to people thinking it's harmless, fun, nice flavours, child friendly etc. And yes, I'd rather my teen vaped than smoked. But that's a teen I'm talking about. Teens experiment, it's what they do, and we all just hope they come out the other side unscathed.

But this thread isn't about teens. It's about a grown man, with responsibilities and a family, actively choosing to develop an addiction to a drug that most people his age are trying to give up!

And it's not about controlling other people. My partner has the right to start drinking a bottle of vodka with breakfast if he wants to, but it would render him unattractive to me, and I would split up with him. I have the right to do that.

@Sarahcoggles
you say “My partner has the right to start drinking a bottle of vodka with breakfast if he wants to, but it would render him unattractive to me, and I would split up with him. I have the right to do that.”

of course you do! you have the right to leave your partner for any reason really, as does OP. The issue is not leaving someone over this, the issue is staying and trying to get them to do want you want them to do with threats of leaving. If she doesn’t actually want to leave him, and she’s said as much, then she’s just using control tactics to get her own way. It’s not nice in my opinion, and it’s a lot more unpleasant than vaping too.

@RoundandRound123 well I wouldn't bother trying to reason with an adult to chose to get addicted to nicotine, because I wouldn't get how their brain was working.

I expect none of you drink around children?

@Kione oh that’s different because that’s something THEY do that’s not good for their health, that’s no problem at all. I mean when have you ever heard of alcohol being harmful for health really? And it’s definitely not like it’s involved in the majority of domestic abuse cases either so completely risk free.