Bad Breath Is the Literal Worst

Bad breath ended my marriage.

I mean, okay, it was one of the things that ended my marriage. My ex’s breath was unsavory for years, and I gently tried telling him many, many times. I told him his breath smelled like coffee. (It smelled like death.) I bought mouthwash and asked him to use it before we had sex. I read articles about bad breath and dropped random facts into conversation like, “Hey! Did you know the bacteria that cause bad breath live on your tongue and that brushing your tongue can get rid of them?”

Nothing changed.

To be clear, I’m not talking about the bad breath you get when you’ve just eaten onions or garlic or sipped an Americano. I’m talking about the bad breath that festers in the back of the mouth, that tastes and smells like a decomposing corpse. That bad breath I simply cannot tolerate.

Eventually, when my ex’s mouth didn’t improve, I stopped wanting to kiss him. He told me I was “too sensitive.” Over time, we started having less sex.

Or was it me? Was I the problem?

This is one of the mind-fucky things about a long relationship: after a while, even your sensory experiences become questionable. If someone tells you enough times that you’re overreacting, you begin to wonder whether your disgust is a character flaw or even a diagnosis. My ex chewed and snored loudly, too, and it made me rage — this one actually is a diagnosis: misophonia! — yet he always rolled his eyes and implied that there was something wrong with me. (My boys, however, always backed me. “Dad is the loudest chewer.” God bless them.)

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Still, though, I couldn’t shape the worry that somehow I was to blame. Maybe I was being too precious. Maybe everyone’s husband has a little swamp mouth and other wives don’t notice. Maybe intimacy means accepting the full human package: the socks on the floor, the loud chewing, the emotional unavailability, the rotting flesh behind the molars.

Or maybe not. The true litmus test began when I began dating after we divorced. Would I find every guy’s breath gross, proving I was truly “too sensitive?” Did I just not like kissing anymore?

Well, nope. Nope nope nope. I still love kissing (though some kisses are better than others), and most men’s breath is just fine. I’ll go with 80 percent. Four out of five men have pleasant, totally tolerable, very kissable breath. (One of the reasons I’m still seeing the guy I met in January is because, the first weekend we met up in a hotel, one of the first things he did was brush his teeth. He brushes when he wakes up, when he goes to bed, and after every meal. Big green flag!)

But that other 20 percent with the nasty mouth funk? I’m out so fast I can’t even retch.

The thing about breath is that it feels more intimate than almost anything else. It, and the saliva that harbors it, is literally being pushed inside your highly sensorily sensitive mouth every time you smooch. It goes straight to the lizard brain, the part of you that says mate or flee. And once my lizard brain says flee, I have never once successfully talked it back into the room.

My first bad breath dating experience happened with a guy I invited over after a dinner date. When I kissed him in the restaurant parking lot, I didn’t notice that anything was amiss. But after a few minutes of kissing on my bed, I was horrified. It was similar to my ex’s problem: a sour rotting stench that lurks at the back of the tongue and can’t always be detected in short tentative kisses. But when your tongues start tangoing, it’s torture.

I don’t really know how to deal with this kind of bad breath when I encounter it on the dating scene. There’s one guy I quite like who has just a touch of death breath. I have tried to get over it so many times and just…. can’t. Should I say to him, “Your breath sucks, can you address it?” I probably should, but I can’t shed my social conditioning long enough to do it. It just seems so harsh. But if it’s in the service of him getting laid more, perhaps he would want to hear it?

I also wonder how my ex is doing on the dating scene. (I know he’s there, because when our couples therapist asked what we were most looking forward to after divorce, he said “having sex with other people.”) Is he meeting women who don’t notice or care about his toxic breath? Have any of them commented on it? Is he finding he can never get past that third date and has no idea why?

I tried to tell you, dude, and you didn’t want to hear it.

I can’t help but think about the bigger picture here, too. My ex’s breath was one thing; his refusal to respect my feelings was another. If someone I loved told me, gently and repeatedly, that something about my body was making it hard for them to be close to me — something was probably curable with a tongue scraper and a dentist appointment! — I would like to think I would listen, care and be responsive. The worst thing about it all was the fact that he expected me to swallow my disgust and call it love. Good riddance to that marriage, and good riddance to that breath.

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