How falling in love can make you quit smoking

My grandfather told me this story when I was very young and I still remember it because it is such a beautiful story about love and how it can help you get rid of an addiction, especially tobacco addiction.

When my grandfather was around 11 or 12 years old and growing up in the Caribbean, he picked up the nasty habit of smoking. He started smoking with friends since it was something that almost everyone did. I don’t think there is any law on the sale of cigarettes to children. In fact, the way these kids started smoking was by going to the stores to buy cigarettes for their uncles or stepfathers.

Store owners would never think twice about asking for identification before selling cigarettes to minors. As I said before, it was okay to sell cigarettes to children, and as a result, these children started smoking at a very young age.

So my grandfather smoked and his mother smoked and probably the rest of the family smoked too. My grandfather’s name was Oscar. By the time Oscar turned 17, he had already been smoking and drinking occasionally for several years. I do remember that he said that he never smoked or drank in front of his mother.

These days they used to have social dances on the weekends and with those social dances comes good home cooking, homemade cakes and ice cream and of course girls. The girls at that time would not go out alone, they would always be accompanied by their parents or guardians in all social events.

Although many of the children, mostly boys, smoked, it was not okay to smoke at social gatherings, especially if you were a child. In fact, it was frowned upon as a parent to have a child who was a known smoker. However, the boys continued to smoke, because they were considered macho. After all, the tough actors in the movies smoked, therefore the boys thought that they would look good and handsome to the girls if they smoked.

Oscar at one of these social gatherings met a girl who was about 2 years older than him. Being that society was not as liberal as it is today, meeting a young woman at a dance, rather seeing a young woman at a dance and beginning to entertain yourself with the idea that she was easy on the eyes and perhaps the only thing that could do. to do about it was to have a dance together, which means that everyone is involved in the dance. No decadent movements like the ones kids do nowadays.

Anyway, she said, Oscar had seen Marie, the girl from the ball, and had feelings for her. What can be described as the beginning of love. Before long, he was writing her letters and telling her how good she feels about her when he sees her and wanted to know if she felt the same way about him.

His answer was quite vague. She liked to see him too, but there was something about him that she didn’t like. She wouldn’t tell him what he was. She thought that if a young man smoked, that young man should be smart enough to pick up on girls’ subtle little hints. Women can be so complex and sophisticated, Oscar said, that it takes him a long time to begin to know a woman or to know what a woman wants.

Oscar could sense that Marie wasn’t crazy about him, so he started to change his clothes to see if that would change things. He first changed the way he dressed, then the way he walked and the choice of words in his letters. Meanwhile, he kept smoking with his friends and saw himself as some kind of cool guy who enjoyed smoking.

The feeling he felt for Marie grew stronger every time he saw her. For the life of her, she couldn’t see why Marie wasn’t falling in love with him the way he was with her. That started to drive him crazy and made him smoke even more.

What started out as maybe 5-6 cigarettes a day quickly turned into 20-25 cigarettes a day. Now all he could think about was Marie and the more he thought about her, the more he smoked. What can I do to make her fall madly in love with me? He thought.

By then, Marie had moved away for college, only coming back to town every other weekend or so. Oscar was really feeling the agonizing pain of slowly losing his girl. What if he falls for another guy in college? All these thoughts would keep him awake at night.

Finally, one day a letter arrived from Marie saying that she had decided to move permanently to that other city where she would find work after university. She also told him that she could no longer bear the thought of falling in love with someone who might die from a smoke-related disease. She’ll see her, her mother had died two years earlier of a smoke-related illness due to her smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for the past 25 years.

When Oscar discovered that smoking was what was keeping her from falling in love with him, he instantly developed a deep hatred for cigarettes and anything resembling a cigarette. She later joined a group fighting against the sale of cigarettes to minors and also became an advocate for a smoke-free world. He was still involved with the group when he died 16 years ago.