Who's gonna drive you home?

O/G is five weeks older than me. Most of the time we were dating, it was barely noticeable, but there were a few age-restricted activities that always seemed to fall in those five weeks that made life complicated. One of such was renting a car.

As everyone knows, if you rent a car before you're 25, you are tagged with all sorts of extra fees. It's grossly unfair because I was no bit a better driver on my 25th birthday than I was the day before, but it's based on accident data and I understand a business has to make a decision about risk so whatever.

O/G's 25th birthday was on a week day in early April. I planned to fly to Georgia the following weekend to celebrate. The previous time I had visited, I had flown to Jacksonville, rented a car (taking the hit on extra fees), and driven 90 minutes up I-95 to his house (it had been cheaper to do this than fly directly to Savannah and I was visiting for a long weekend so the drive wasn't a big deal). O/G really liked that I had a rental car because it meant he didn't have to put miles on his car and we could go out to the bars and cab home and then retrieve the other car the next morning. He liked it so much that he requested I do it again for his birthday. And by requested, I mean demanded in his whiny-baby voice.

The smart thing to do would have been for him to rent the car in his name, as by the time I arrived in Savannah on Friday afternoon, he would have already been 25 and thus wouldn't have to pay the extra fees. I suggested this as I was planning my travel but he didn't want to do this. His reasoning? It was his birthday so he didn't want to pay AND it was my turn to visit him and therefore my turn to pay for the travel costs.

I offered to write him a check for the amount of the car rental (since the fee itself usually has to be charged to a credit card in the driver's name), but he didn't like that idea because he didn't feel comfortable letting me drive a car that was rented in his name. Plus, in his words "the travel thing is your problem this time babe". Sort of like how I made it his probably to get him to and from the airport when he came to visit DC or how I left him to deal with his problem when his flight home got canceled during a snow storm. But that's probably why our relationship soured: I never made anything his problem and therefore he did not know how to solve his own problems.

In the end, I rented a car and paid the extra fees and spent the weekend driving him around on his errands because he didn't want to put miles on his car. After all, it was his birthday and I was a complete pushover back then.