I remember hearing the story of a woman who’d grown up in a society that didn’t do deoderant (I don’t remember which one) who’d married an American man and her saying that sharing a bed with him was like sleeping with a ghost because she couldn’t smell him.

I think culturally we’re weird about smell.  I mean Americans, but also a lot of Northern Europe.  People who love perfume say Japan’s not a perfume country and thus not a fragrance country, but Japan is a heavily fragranced country, they just don’t do perfume as much, Japan doesn’t have a tradition of wearing fragrance on skin, instead one scents clothes, and home and other spaces one exists in (the Japanese incense tradition is an especially lovely one) and strongly scented fabric softeners sell extraordinarily well there.  

In any case, we North Americans, and Northern Europeans (especially north western Europeans, Russia and other Eastern European nations have a very strong history of perfumery) are unusual in our distaste for fragrance, not just our distaste for perfume, but our overall suspicion of scent.

We blamed odeurs for the plague, and in modern times stereotype certain ethnicities as prone to wearing far too much scent, we are deeply suspicious of fragrance chemicals and clamour for unscented products.  We seem to believe that the very act of smelling anything is bad for us.  We do everything we can to avoid producing natural human odors (even those that are regarded as pleasant or inoffensive elsewhere) and seem in general to have some yen for an enviornment completely devoid of smell, which is to me as peculiar a longing as a longing for an enviornment completely devoid of sound, 

Perhaps we lost our ability to stomach fragrances around the time the anglosphere lost our ability to handle spicy food (the 19th century, our food was actually quite spicy until then, when a health fad for bland food created the sensitivity to heat that we’re known for as a culture today) perhaps it has something to do with the weather or protestantism, all I know is that we’re weird about smell as a culture.

In any case, I think this distaste for scent overall leads us to vastly underestimate and ignore our senses of smell, we are unaware of the scents of those we love, we ignore the scented landscape.