Hi all, this is Danny and I’d like to introduce my wife Rowena, here. I let her use my account. I haven’t read nor edited what she wrote and I’ll read it along with you after I click the submit button.
Creative commons image via flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/doug88888/5844870342/sizes/q/
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When I was young, I promised myself that I would not marry a smoker. But like they always say, promises are made to be broken. I did marry one. When I first learned that my husband (who was just my classmate then) was a smoker, I said to myself “I will make him stop”. So from the time we became a couple, I have been trying to make him quit smoking. I even made him my “Behavior Modification Project” subject. The longest period he was able to stop was a week, but after that, he began consuming more than he used to. It was so disappointing.
Eleven years have passed and my husband is still a smoker. Every time I hear him cough, I worry. He is aware that the bad effects of smoking are already getting to him. He will always express his desire to quit smoking but he will also have so many reasons why he wouldn’t. Even reducing his consumption to 10 stick a day appears to be very difficult for him. Sometimes I feel that he doesn’t really mean it. I am not a smoker so I would never really know nor understand how it is to be a smoker but I believe that if you really want to stop smoking, you will be able to. That is how his grandfather did it. He said that he was able to quit because he wanted to.
Being a wife of a smoker makes me feel sad, angry and scared. I feel sad because I am losing hope. Quitting seems like an impossible task for him. I am angry because I am helpless. There is nothing I could do to make him stop from harming himself. I get scared whenever I hear him cough. I can’t help thinking about lung cancer and other smoking-related diseases. Whenever I talk to him about it, he would just enumerate names of old people we know who are smokers but are still alive and healthy. I am hoping and praying for him to be as blessed as those men if he would not be able to quit soon enough.