Need encouragement/stage 1 advice

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

Part of unconditional love is being able to say "what is there" and important for you, what hopes and aspirations you have and wish to share, what is missing, what consitutes failure and disappointment, and what the meaningful consequences are for both success and failure.

It is not just being a doormat.

So, the gripes you have with the driver's license, smoking, and the lack of sensible shared responsibilities for costs (rent, etc.) are legitimate and more importantly are concrete. In other words, there are very specific measures and actions to be taken to address these gripes.

Do not (and I haven't seen anything in what you've written that suggests this) use the ploy, "if you realy loved me then....you'd renew your drivers license, or quite smoking, or share in rent (or give up that space you don't use, or any other number of situations that you might not like.

It is fair to say that they are so important to you that you are not willing to allow yourself to be "used" this way AND that if he wants to live that way, then he needs a different life situation (but you need to know that you are willing to go through with that before you suggest it out of anger).

When I released my first wife, even though I loved her beyond all reason, it was because I was willing to go through with a divorce even though the outcome I desired was altogether different.

It is one thing to be clueless, altogether different to intentionally choose to ignore or intentionallychoose to act as a direct afront to something that you know and have acknowledged as being important to your partner.

The questions to be asked are these:

1) "Why would you intentionally choose to violate the law and ignore my request for you to renew your driver's license? What are getting from doing that? "

[I would go further and say the days of the "free ride" are over. Tell him to walk, ride a bus, ride a bike, or take a cab, but until he gets his license renewed...no more driving. If he is involved in an accident, even if it is not his fault, not only is he criminally vulnerable, you could be liable for civil and criminal penalties because you knowingly let him drive your car without a license. I would leave it at that.]

2) While smoking is a really bad habit and a drug addiction, you might ask why you have to be subject to a cancer delivery device, in addition to all the other detrimental aspects of it?

You can ask similar thing about rent, but hopefully you get the picture. At your age, you don't want to go 25-30 years and wish you had drwn the line in the sand decades earlier.

The Captain
Kobayashi Maru