Online dating has become one of the most popular ways to find “the one.” According to the most recent statistics, more than 41 million Americans have at least tried online dating, many of whom have found incredible success and a renewed belief in their love lives. In fact, 17% of all marriages last year were between couples who found each other on an online dating site, like Match.com and eHarmony.

While the potential to find love online is undoubtedly there, there are certain things that can either hold you back or help you find a partner — that bit doesn’t change between the online and physical realms. While you should expect a bad profile picture, risqué photographs, and creeper tactics to be a big turn off when trying to connect with people online, did you ever expect that smoking would be the cause of your failure?

Sadly, Smoking is Killing Your Love Life

Statistics from Hinge, a popular mobile dating application, show that people who smoke are far less likely to find love than their healthy-lunged counterparts. Men, in particular, take a hit if they light up. The difference isn’t slight, either. Among Hinge’s users, men who identify themselves as smokers are rejected 89% of the time. To put this in other terms, men who smoke are 61-times less likely to find love on online dating services than men who stay smoke free. A previous study on selection habits among Match.com users found similar results: 89% of users preferred dating a non-smoker. In short, choosing to smoke is not only impacting your wallet and quite literally killing you, your dirty habit is almost completely ruining any chance you have of finding love online.

“Women raise their standards when using online dating because they have hundreds and usually thousands of men to choose from,” explains Dan Bacon, Founder of TheModernMan.com. “If a smoker wants to find himself a girlfriend, he should avoid online dating and go and talk to women in bars. In that environment, he doesn’t have to compete with hundreds of guys talking to her at the same time. Additionally, he might even spot some women who are smoking and find himself a more suitable match that way.”

Why Does It Matter?

Now, if you’re a smoker and reading this, you might be thinking, “but they’re supposed to love me for me,” or some other oft-quoted and completely cliched line about true love. Here’s the thing: smoking comes with real consequences, both for smokers and the people in their lives. There are simple issues, like the smell smoking imparts to skin, hair, breath, and every other part of a smoker that makes dating them unpleasant, but there are also life-changing — life-ending — effects to consider, too.

More than 480,000 Americans die each and every year from smoking. The problem, of course, is that it isn’t just smokers that suffer from cigarettes. Friends, family, loved ones: their health is put in risk whenever they’re around smokers. Non-smokers who are regularly exposed to cigarette smoke are as much as 30% more likely to develop heart disease and are equally more likely to have a stroke. Of course, there is a laundry-list of cancers they’re also more likely to develop.

Knowing what smoking does to smokers and those around them, who can possibly be surprised when rational people don’t want to put themselves in harm’s way? Yes, it sucks, and yes, people should absolutely love the person you are, but can you blame others for wanting to live happy, healthy lives?