Chantix and Marriage Counseling: Quitting Smoking Saved My Marriage
Chantix and Marriage Counseling: Quitting Smoking Saved My Marriage
My name is Tara Price. Iām 44 years old, I live in Phoenix, and I smoked for 21 years. I quit three years ago, and I want to tell you how that happened, because it did not happen the way I expected it to.
I started smoking at 23. I know thatās older than most people ā most of my friends had started in high school. For me it happened during a rough stretch after college, working a front-desk job at a hotel, spending a lot of time in parking lots with coworkers who smoked. It started as a social thing, as it always does. Within six months I needed a cigarette to get through a shift. Within a year I needed one to start my day. That was my life for the next two decades.
My husband, Mark, knew I smoked when we got married. Heās never smoked. He didnāt love it, but he accepted it, the way you accept things about someone you love. What changed was the years piling up. By the time weād been married fourteen years, the smoking had become something larger than just a habit. It was a symbol of everything we argued about. Heād say I was choosing cigarettes over our kids. Iād say he was controlling. Weād both walk away angrier than before.
The Ultimatum
We ended up in couples counseling with a therapist named Dr. Elaine Rourke. She practiced in Scottsdale, and she was sharp and direct in a way that neither Mark nor I were prepared for. In our third session, Mark told her that heād decided he couldnāt stay in the marriage if I kept smoking. Not as a threat. As a statement of his limit. I remember the way the air shifted in that room.
I expected Dr. Rourke to mediate, to soften the moment. Instead she asked me what I thought the smoking was doing for me.
That question stopped me cold.
I gave the usual answers. Stress relief. Habit. It calms me down. She kept asking, gently but persistently, what I got from stepping outside and being alone for five minutes that I couldnāt get any other way. We spent most of that session on that question. By the end, I understood something I hadnāt let myself see before: I used smoking as an exit. Whenever things felt too heavy, too demanding, too close, I had a socially acceptable reason to leave the room. A cigarette was permission to disappear.
That wasnāt Markās problem. That was mine.
Getting on Chantix
Dr. Rourke suggested I talk to my doctor about medication. Sheād seen several clients use Chantix successfully alongside therapy, and she thought the combination made sense for me. Two weeks later I had a prescription in hand.
If youāve read about Chantix, you probably know it works differently from nicotine patches or gum. It doesnāt replace the nicotine. Instead it partially blocks the receptors in your brain that smoking activates, so the reward you used to feel starts to fade. At the same time, even while youāre still smoking during the first week, you start to notice that the cigarettes feel like less. The satisfaction shrinks.
That first week was strange but not terrible. By week two I had set a quit date, and I stuck to it. The physical side of withdrawal was more manageable than I expected, maybe a 4 out of 10 on the worst days. The Chantix handled a lot of what used to derail me.
What it couldnāt handle was everything else.
The Hardest Part
Week three without cigarettes nearly ended my marriage.
Chantix comes with a warning about mood changes, and I want to be honest about this: I was angrier than I had been in years. Not at Mark specifically, not at anyone specifically. I was just raw and irritable and thin-skinned in a way that made living with me genuinely difficult. We had a fight on a Tuesday night about something I canāt even remember now, and it escalated until both of us were saying things that couldnāt be unsaid. I remember standing in our kitchen at 11 p.m. thinking that we were going to end a fourteen-year marriage over nothing.
The only thing that kept me from walking out was remembering Dr. Rourkeās question. What is this doing for you? If I walked out, I knew exactly where I was going. To the 7-Eleven two blocks away.
I sat down at the kitchen table instead. I told Mark I needed to stop talking for ten minutes. I went to the bedroom, put in headphones, and breathed. It was the hardest ten minutes of the entire quit process.
We went to our next session with Dr. Rourke and told her everything. She worked with us on what was actually happening. The anger I felt in withdrawal was real, but it was also surfacing things Iād been smoking down for years. The exit strategy was gone. I had to actually be present in my marriage in a way Iād been avoiding.
Thatās the part nobody tells you. Sometimes quitting smoking forces you to deal with things you were using smoking to avoid.
Getting Through It
I stayed on Chantix for twelve weeks, the full recommended course. I wonāt say it was smooth. There were weird dreams, some nights I slept badly, and there were cravings that ambushed me in moments I didnāt expect. The worst triggers for me were driving alone and afternoons at work around 3 p.m. I learned to keep sparkling water in my car and to take a short walk at 3 rather than going to the break room.
Dr. Rourke kept meeting with us through this entire period. She was helping us rebuild a communication pattern that didnāt rely on me disappearing and Mark escalating. That work was harder than quitting smoking, if Iām being straight with you.
About two months in, something shifted. I noticed I was staying in difficult conversations longer. Not because I forced myself to, but because I didnāt have the option to leave in the old way and had slowly built a new way of getting through them. Mark noticed it too. That was the first time in years he told me he felt like I was actually there.
Three Years Later
I have been smoke-free for three years. Mark and I are still married. We still see Dr. Rourke occasionally, not for crisis management but as maintenance, which I think of as preventive care for a relationship the same way a checkup is preventive care for your body.
My lungs feel different. I live in Phoenix, which is not an easy city for breathing ā the summer heat, the dust storms. For years I used to wake up coughing. I donāt anymore. I can swim laps in the community pool with my kids and actually keep up with them.
The money is not nothing either. I smoked about a pack a day, and in Arizona that was running me close to $9 a pack. Do the math over 21 years and itās a number Iād rather not look at too long. Over three years of not smoking Iāve saved more than $9,000. Some of that went toward the Chantix prescription, some toward the counseling copays, and the rest has gone toward things I can actually point to: a weekend trip to Sedona with Mark, new bikes for our daughters.
But none of that is the main thing.
The main thing is that Iām present now. Iām in my life in a way I wasnāt before. I didnāt fully understand how much of my daily existence I was spending managing an addiction until I stopped spending it that way.
What Iād Say to You
If youāre still smoking and youāre reading this, I want you to know something: if youāre using cigarettes to get through hard moments in your relationships, quitting is going to feel terrifying because it means those hard moments are going to get louder before they get quieter. I know that. I lived that. It nearly broke us.
But hereās what I didnāt know going in: you can get through those moments without the exit. They donāt kill you. They actually make you stronger in ways that a cigarette never could.
The Chantix gave me enough space from the physical craving to do the harder emotional work. The counseling gave me the tools to do it. Neither one alone would have been enough for me. For you it might look different. Patches, gum, cold turkey, a support group, a single conversation with your doctor ā whatever gets you through the door is the right approach.
You are not doing this alone. There are more people who have been exactly where you are than you can count, and most of them, on the other side, will tell you the same thing: they only wish theyād started sooner.
Start when you can. Start now if you can. The life on the other side of this is yours and itās real, and it is waiting for you.