Let me start by saying I have a five-year-old daughter and if I could choose one thing to dissuade her from in the big bad world of temptations that will all too soon be trying to lure her in (shuddering just thinking about this), it would be: cigarettes. Now let me follow this by saying: I love cigarettes.
I am no longer a “smoker”—and am lucky that my quitting process was more of a natural dwindling down over time than an excruciating withdrawal battle—but we’re still having an on-again, mostly off-again affair. While even the thought of smoking a cigarette sober gives me instant anxiety, sometimes after a few glasses of wine my brain tells me otherwise.
Like the bad-for-me ex-boyfriend I promised myself I wouldn’t text in my actual 20-something smoker days, by the end of the night I may succumb to temptation. Now, instead of a fingerless-glove-wearing bartender, I’m longing for the company of one single cigarette. All I want is to take a slow drag while chatting with whoever I have sheepishly bummed it off, apologizing profusely for my dirty little habit. Not for the actual smoking, but for being the asshole who doesn’t really smoke, yet is in need of one of your exorbitantly overpriced cigs, immediately.
I am not always alone on this mission, however. A few hours deep into a dinner party with the wine flowing, one of us may mumble under our breath that we would love a smoke; ears instantly perk up, heads cock slightly askew. Did I just hear what I thought I heard? If you want to, I could… Could we? Should we?
After a bit more of this back and forth—I’ll buy them if you keep them, I don’t want them in my house… or let’s buy a pack, smoke one, and throw the rest out—American Spirit yellows (a much more appropriate choice for my 42-year-old-mom-sneaking-a-cig era than my former Camel Lights) are procured from the local bodega. Soon, we’re all smelly and satiated as if we were sitting outside (maybe even inside) a bar in 2005.
Ultimately, we end up smoking a few throughout the night, and the pack is relegated to the back of one of our underwear drawers. Or if it comes home with me, it will be hidden in a vintage pitcher that lives on my bookcase, where it will gather dust for weeks, possibly months, until we find ourselves in such a state again.
Recently at a friend’s house, we were able to bypass all that silly should we get them, should we not rigmarole. When the mood struck, the host remembered she had a pack leftover from New Year’s stashed away in an old purse. Elicit treats in hand, we scurried to the corner of her backyard, hiding from our young children like we hid from our parents when we were teens, feverishly washing our hands and putting toothpaste on our tongues and gargling before rejoining the party.
This is all ridiculous, I know (for many reasons I do not need to elaborate on: cigarettes are bad), but my friends don’t seem to be the only people born before 1984 with a special place in their hearts for the addictive little buggers.
When our Jenny co-founder, Elizabeth Nelson, was moonlighting as a personal organizer, helping other middle-age moms declutter their Brooklyn homes, she’d more often than not find a pack of, yes, American Spirits, shoved in the back of a sock drawer. Sometimes, a couple loosies would be rolling around on the top shelf of a cabinet, possibly, like us, to be dug up on a particularly boozy evening.
But not everyone needs alcohol to reignite their cig addiction; stress can certainly do the trick—a particularly bad day can send the best of us rummaging through our junk drawer. In her South Brooklyn neighborhood, usually early in the morning or late at night, Elizabeth will often see another woman her age furtively smoking a cigarette. They’ll exchange a look that says, I am one of you and we will not speak of this. Their own little ex-smoker secret society.
“We might only smoke once or twice a year, but when we need one, we need one,” she told me. “Once one of those women texted me to say she’d just had a heated discussion with her ex-husband about custody schedules and could she please have exactly three cigarettes and no more.”
Having three cigarettes and then going back to life as normal is not something everyone can do. Some may call this lucky, some may not, depending on how you look at it.
While I was a much more casual smoker, my husband was the type that when he quit—which is something I am eternally grateful for—he was feverish for days. We both knew if it was going to stick, he could never just have one cigarette on a night out with friends every couple months or nonchalantly pick it up for a few days on a trip to Paris (though I think that is a requirement, non?). My husband has said he doesn’t have a problem with my dabbling every once in a while, but I’m sure he can’t help but be a little envious when I end up outside with a friend chatting over a smoke.
“I quit smoking years ago but I still dream about it,” Molly Ringwald recently captioned a pic of her younger self with a stubby cigarette in hand—many a commenter echoing her sentiment.
I first saw her quote on an Instagram account called Cigfluencers; yes, there is an Instagram account called Cigfluencers. Founded just over two years ago and now with almost 40K followers, it’s full of pics of celebs both past and present enjoying a smoke. It certainly has an ick factor, but admittedly for me, the ick comes more from the influencer half of the word than the cigarette part.
Of course, fetishizing smoking is problematic; the images of stars smoking today actually seem a little sad (even you, hot chef). But there is no denying that the pics of our Gen X celebs dragging on cigs in the ‘90s look fucking cool. And seemingly everyone smoked (statistically 26 percent of people did, compared to 11 percent today). There is even a photo of the supposed goody two-shoes Reese Witherspoon caught in the act. And Leo. And Kate. And Chloë. And Jennifer. And Brad. And “one cigarette per week” Gwyneth. And fucking Winona. Of course, Winona.
While all I want is for the kids these days not to smoke, I know there is a bit of nostalgia for a simpler time going on with the youth at the moment; a time when there was no internet, no cell phones, and you could smoke carelessly with ignorant confidence that you will never become a 40-something smoking a clandestine cig at 7 a.m. after a fight with your partner.
A report on teenage smoking in the 1990s states that there was concern “the youth are not appropriately recognizing the long-run implications of their smoking decisions … young smokers clearly underestimated that they will be smoking in their early twenties and beyond.”
While the amount of people with the habit peaked in the mid-1960s, youth smoking began to rise in the ‘90s. By 1997, the amount of teenage smokers was up 33 percent, while adult smoking continued to decline. I, and many of my elder millennial and Gen X counterparts, certainly fell victim to this trend.
I took my first drag of a cigarette at a bus stop behind my middle school somewhere around 1995. I didn’t like the way it instantly made me slightly nauseous and slightly more anxious, but I liked holding the cigarette between my fingers and how it made me feel connected to whoever I was secretly smoking with; all of a sudden I was a part of something.
A teenager’s greatest fear is being left out—and that’s not to say it ends when you enter adulthood. Remember the episode of Friends when Rachel pretends to be a smoker so she doesn’t miss out on her coworkers’ cigarette break conversations? Though when it comes to iconic New York television characters, I identify more with my fellow former smoker Carrie Bradshaw (who also has the occasional dalliance in And Just Like That), than the bumbling Rachel Green, we have all been there in one way or another.
It’s true, having a smoke with someone can be a bonding experience, though at this age it feels more like a covert mission. When I was in my late 20s, a friend of mine was in a cab driving through Manhattan one evening when she spotted my brother, who is 10 years older than us and had two small children at the time. His smoking days were behind him, his leaving-the-house-at-night days were behind him, but there he was alone on the street with a cigarette in hand thinking no one could see him—a look of pure contentment on his face. “I’ve never seen him so happy,” my friend half-joked.
In a podcast I love for women over 40, the hosts sometimes fondly reminisce about their former smoking days: how it made going to parties easier because they always had a reason to escape or how they will occasionally have a “vacation cigarette.” In a recent episode, one host, who is about eight years my senior, tells the other that she no longer experiences that pesky craving that creeps in after a drink or two, where you find yourself unwittingly scanning the streets for someone with a cig you can bum.
While this happens to me a lot less than it used to, I am still that person. It’s reassuring to hear the urge will continue to fade, eventually becoming just another relic of the past. This is a good thing, but I’m sure I’ll miss, as a friend of mine says, “being bad.” I guess I’ll just have to start dreaming about it.
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Megan Cahn started her editorial career at Sassy’s less irreverent younger cousin, CosmoGIRL. She went on to work in the women’s lifestyle space at publications such as ELLE, Refinery29, Cup of Jo, and Best Life. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, cat, and five-year-old daughter, who has adopted her childhood Cabbage Patch Kids collection.
