Dear Frances:

Like everyone, or almost everyone I am aware of how harmful it is to smoke and to inhale smoke, second hand smoke. My father’s wife (not my mother) died from second hand smoke: my father smoked a lot, died of cancer, smoking while very sick. His wife died shortly after from lung cancer. She never smoked! She has been exposed to his second hand smoke for two decades before she became sick and died shortly after.

I don’t think you can “force (your boyfriend) to quit”, anymore than disease and threatening death in his last days forced my father to quit smoking.

In addition to knowing the physical damage smoke causes, I can’t stand cigarette smoke, it bothers me a lot.

No doubt that you should not be in a room with anyone who smokes. If you are to date or live with a man who smokes, he has to smoke outside, never in the home, not in the room you are in and not anywhere else in the house. Always outside, outdoors or in an outside structure where only he visits.

Basically, either he never smokes in a closed space with you or you break up. What about the option of him always smoking outside?

anita