Whatever that means.
I spent over 8 years feeling secretive and ashamed of the fetish as a result of that relationship, where the fetish, my feelings, and the dynamic did not allow for me to engage in comfortable open communication. As I said earlier, it's not that my partner didn't try. It's just that our dynamic pushed us both further apart romantically. And the fetish was a wedge topic.
After that, I dated someone for about a year. Why bother even giving her initials? It really doesn't matter. Shortly after we met, she'd mentioned that at one point in her life, she and her coworkers used to smoke at work, because they could, and because there was really not a whole lot to do at work, other than goof around. This was in another country, as she was foreign-born. Her openness about the fact that she had smoked, and the fact that I knew she was from a culture where it was not a taboo, made it easy for me to tell her that it was something that turned me on, prior to there having ever been a situation where the smoking would have occurred, since it was not something she was currently doing. Plus, having stifled the fetish for almost 9 years, I probably was eager to have an opportunity to experience those feelings again, with a person, instead of the internet.
When I told her about it, she said "I can do that for you. That's no problem at all". She didn't seem particularly intrigued or not intrigued, and she was not needing to delve into the details of "Why?" or the subtleties of what it meant to have the fetish. She just said "Sure. Whatever."
And she did indeed buy cigarettes and smoke for me. She saw that it turned me on, and I think she enjoyed it well enough that it was not a conflict for her. Nor did she have an addictive personality, so there seemed to be little downside to having the fetish be available in the relationship as something that could please me. She had even said "I would be happy to do this for you every day", which we both understood to mean "maybe once" or "probably not every day, but sometimes".
And it sort of went that way. There was never much conflict around the smoking. She was interested and willing to do it. But it wasn't a topic of intimacy. It wasn't bringing us closer. It was just a fetish, with her indulging it. I think that in some ways, from her culture, there were certain things she was planning on expecting or demanding from me, because I was "The Man", and in return for those things, there would be certain things that she would deliver, as "The Woman". But understanding it was not a critical matter for her. There were one or two conflicts we had around the subject, which related more to the downside of her smoking, and which I actually don't want to write about, because they are not relevant to the core of this blog, which is the fetish. The conflicts were really just communication and intimacy wars that were brewing between us, over other issues, that ended up manifesting themselves in the realm of the fetish, and smoking, as well.
There was definitely an element of manipulation in the relationship. But I am not sure how much of it was with conscious will, versus not. I don't think she would have ever smoked another cigarette in her life, before meeting me, if she hadn't know it would turn me on. And because of that, it always felt like it was something that I was either trying to get her to do for me, or something that she was trying to do for me to get me to do something for her. It became a tool.
I suspect my hindsight is not 20/20.
The positive, with respect to the fetish, that came out of that relationship, I suppose, was that it was not a matter of intense conflict or guilt. It was just something that was occasionally part of the courtship, and didn't even fall into a realm of being a problem. But the downside is that the relationship itself had massive problems and the fetish ended up being, even if only occasionally, a kind of duct tape that was holding together something that had very little cause to be held together in the first place.
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