Sandraebere23, 23

Smoking is obviously something that cannot be hidden for so long in a relationship and if, at the end of the day, non-smokers only wish to date other non-smokers then smokers are likely to have a much worse outcome on the dating market than non-smokers. Compared to the dating market for non-smokers the market for smokers is what economists would describe as being “thin”. When markets are thin, there are few buyers and sellers and so it is difficult to achieve an equilibrium in which buyers and sellers can settle on a price at which they both want to trade and few transactions take place. If the market for smokers is thin, then, smokers are more likely to still be single when the market clears because it will be harder for them to find a partner who has all the qualities that they hoped for in a mate simply because they are searching within a smaller pool of singles than are non-smokers. And, if they do find a partner, that partner is more likely to fall short of their ideal mate than they would on a market with more participants. According to the Centre for Disease control 19% of all Americans smoke, so if non-smokers prefer to date other non-smokers then smokers are searching on a dating market that is roughly one quarter of the size of the non-smoking dating market. And the people operating on an even thinner dating market are well-educated smokers; only 10.5% of men and 8% of women with a college degree smoke. The marriage data suggests that people do tend to end up with people who have similar smoking habits as themselves. For example, data collected from recently married couples between 1996 and 2007 found that 92% of non-smoking men and 86% of non-smoking women were married to women/men who also did not smoke. The reason for this last result, that fewer non-smoking women are married to non-smoking men, is a bi-product of the fact that men are more likely to be smokers than are women – 21.5% of men smoke compared to 17% of women. Harder