When my husband and I were married 22 years ago we were both smokers - confirmed smokers - defiant smokers - you can't take away my right to smoke smokers - smoke until it kills us smokers. We were unafraid of death and we were offended by society's conspiracy to make smokers feel like the scourge of the earth. Then, 5 years and two children into our marriage, my husband decided it would be most cost effective for him to quit smoking because our health insurance was about to significantly raise premiums for those people who smoked. So, he tried and tried, but he lived with me... still a confirmed, defiant, you can't take away my right to smoke, smoke until it kills me, and I don't give a damn how much it costs smoker. He couldn't quite bring himself to quit smoking when I was smoking while sitting right next to him while we watched TV, after dinner, after sex, before bed, and first thing in the morning day after day. He quit several times over a period of 2 years. Three weeks here, two weeks there, a day here, or five days there, that was all he could do.

Finally, the company that he worked for offered a stop smoking clinic. They hooked electrodes up to his skin and told him to smoke away. With every inhale, he received a little jolt of electricity throughout his body. For everyone else who was hooked up to the shock therapy, it worked like a charm, but my husband? No, he would light up without aversion after the therapy was over. He knew the difference between smoking while he was hooked up and smoking while he was not. He suffered the little twitches that came with the first cigarette or two after he came home from each day's therapy session and then he was completely capable of keeping up with me smoke for smoke. This smoking cessation clinic was his last ditch effort to quit and he was beginning to feel defeated, ruled by the cigarette, in bondage to a 3 inch master. He needed to be victorious over it. He wanted to master it.

What he came to believe was that he could only win if I quit with him. Well there we had a problem. He married a smoker, after all. Why should I have to quit? I liked smoking and did not mind being in bondage to it. I could stare down the most superior looks from the meanest smoker-hating crowd. I would have been happy to have smoked myself into old age. I actually felt betrayed that he had become one of the peers who was pressuring me into stopping.

Then one day, he must have been on close terms with God that day, my husband

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