Handling A Partner's Unhealthy Habit

I'm seething. My husband, Jon, has snuck outside to smoke. Again. The smell is wafting in through the bedroom window. He's quit a few times, but he always starts up again—just, it seems to me, when abstaining should be getting easier. His backslides strike in the most insidious of ways: A late-night trip to the store for some pizza rolls ends with him walking in ten minutes later, pack of cigarettes in hand, looking dazed. I barely even remember buying these. But now that I have 'em, I'm sure as hell gonna smoke 'em. Or he has a stressful day, starts begging cigarettes off strangers, and next thing you know, all his good intentions go up in, well, smoke.

It's not that I'm perfect. My diet could be more wholesome. I don't get enough exercise. I have a 20-ounce-a-day Mountain Dew habit. But all that seems so minor when compared to Jon's habit of defying the Surgeon General ten to fifteen times a day. Can't he see what he's doing to his health? Doesn't he care enough about me to quit?

I'm not above using the kids against him. "Oh, Daddy's just outside turning his lungs black," I'll say, or "Ew. Do you see what's on the ground there? Daddy's cigarette butt. Isn't that disgusting?" It feels slimy, but isn't it my job to make sure he's healthy?

Actually, the answer is no. Taking on too much responsibility for somebody else's bad habit is a classic sign of codependency, an unhealthy dynamic in which one person becomes too wrapped up in the other's behavior. "It's really about ego," says Sherry Amatenstein, dating columnist and author of Love Lessons from Bad Breakups. "People think, 'There must be something wrong with me if my partner has certain behaviors.'"