Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with one new essay appearing each day for the first two weeks of February, until Valentine's Day.

It started out like lots of bad romances, by which I mean that from the very beginning, I knew every single reason why not, and I went ahead and did it anyway. I lavished money, I wasted time, I lied to doctors, misled my parents; I let it dictate my choices about where I’d go and what I’d bring and experienced a dull reverberating panic when we were separated for any extended period of time—a transatlantic flight, a workday, a movie. Not that I would admit any of those things. “I’m not a smoker,” I’d say, but if I was honest, smoking was one of the few clubs to which I really belonged. New York was broken up into its own little sects and small republics, its dictatorships and dividing lines, and smoking was one of the few that I chose rather than have chosen for me—it was the box that I ticked myself. Everything else felt impermanent or outwardly imposed; smoking was my own election, my own bad choice, my own $15 for a pack, my problem. Plus, when I was a party reporter, relatively new in town and with distinctly unusual hours, it helped me talk to any and everybody; it was the perfect segue to approach the movie star, who, when made to stand outside their own premiere, like you, like anybody, was neutralized, made human. It was the only vaguely socially acceptable reason to duck out of a dull dinner and find the people you actually wanted to talk to. Smoking was a great equalizer, I surmised. Plus, smoking was fun.

But let’s back up. I didn’t start smoking because it was fun. I started because it seemed sort of louche and glamorous—especially when you think only about the stylish people who smoke, the French, say, or the long-dead movie stars (and you ignore Britney Spears, barefoot at the gas station in her daisy dukes, or the great sweeping swathes of the underprivileged who are preyed on by Big Tobacco, but we’ll get back to that)—and because I was at school in the U.K. for four years and every single one of my friends did. Dinner parties ended with a heavy low-hanging haze, the window cracked to brisk gusts of northern air, regardless of season; the mornings after begun with pots full of sliced lemon or coffee grounds boiling on the stove, DIY air freshener, as we inspected the carpets and curtains for burn marks before the landlord’s next visit. The tobacconist in town sold pastel-color cigarettes with gold-tipped filters in wide impractical boxes lined with delicate paper; porcelain ashtrays were great hostess presents, even for the parents of friends (a concept as alien to me, with my clean-cut health-obsessed American upbringing, as presenting them with artfully arranged bouquets of marijuana), and these we brought back from holidays in foreign locales, hidden hotels on the Amalfi coast, surf spots in the Algarve, along with packs of cigarettes with health warnings printed in languages we couldn’t read. Cigarettes always tasted best on the beach, right after swimming, stubbed out, and buried in the sand. But it wasn’t just taste, it was attitude. Smoking felt like a physical expression of a sort of chicly blasé fatalism: We’re all dying anyways, all the time, even if we ingest only green juice and flax instead of champagne and cigarettes and none of this—the relationships, the work, the wardrobe, the to-do lists, the workouts—none of it will matter, so why not indulge? It was nihilism with some sex appeal, or at least Serge Gainsbourg’s accent and charisma.

Smoking was the excuse given by a beautiful boy the first time he approached me, a boy who later became very important to my personal history—“Hey, do you have a light?” We spent the next few years in the thrall of cigarettes and each other, pretending that none of it mattered and none of it would ever catch up to us. He wasn’t going to leave the U.K. I would never live there again. Our bad habits weren’t anything when it came to fighting against time. We knew, we stayed anyways, taking advantage of the European tendency for long vacations and cheaper airfares, winding through the Tuscan countryside in a rented stick shift, on foot through Venice’s twisting canals, through Paris and London and Berlin, where we smoked with impunity, and Los Angeles, where we didn’t—splitting packs, pulling the covers over our heads, smoking it out, until we couldn’t stay anymore. I broke his heart over the phone and I smoked at least half a pack, crushing each in an ashtray filched from the Ritz in Madrid. See? Serge exhales: dead end.