Woman Asks Partner’s Family for Mileage Reimbursement After Using Her Car. Now She’s Being Called ‘Heartless’

A woman turned to Reddit for advice after growing increasingly frustrated that her partner and her partner’s family had come to depend heavily on her car.

She explained that she’d moved to a new state with her partner for work and that the car was entirely hers: “I own one car. I bought it myself, I put the down payment on it, the title is solely in my name.”

She pays about $500 a month for the vehicle, not including gas, and covers every expense herself. Yet, she said, she’s the one who uses it the least.

In her post, she said her partner, “P,” hadn’t found work in their new city. Instead, P regularly drives the car “about 3 hours out of state to work overnight shifts in her hometown.” Every week, P leaves on Wednesday morning and returns around mid-day Friday, meaning the car is gone nearly half the week.

During that time, the woman is left without transportation. She wrote that she has “no access to my own car for emergencies, appointments, last-minute work needs, or basic errands.”

Her hybrid work schedule offers some flexibility, but unexpected situations have forced her to spend extra money on deliveries or rideshares “just to function,” and she sometimes has to rely on the city bus.

At first, she tried to be understanding, but over time her feelings changed. “Lately I’ve started to feel taken advantage of,” she admitted, adding that she believes P’s family background plays a role.

As the oldest daughter in a single-parent household, P has long shouldered many caregiving responsibilities — responsibilities the woman feels “aren’t fair to her” but that still heavily influence their current situation.

When P returns to her hometown for work each week, she stays with her mother, grandfather, siblings and nephew in what the woman described as a “crowded house.” According to the post, the siblings have jobs but “do not contribute financially to the household or to transportation costs.”

Because P is “the only one besides her grandpa who drives,” the woman’s car has essentially become the family’s shared vehicle. It’s used for “transporting her mom and sister to and from work, running errands for her grandfather, school transportation for her nephew and random errands for the household.”

The woman said she was concerned not just about the wear and tear on the car but also about P’s emotional state. P “ALWAYS says yes, even when she’s exhausted and on the verge of a breakdown,” she wrote.

The pressure often spills over into their relationship: “Sometimes I feel like she can be irritable from all the pressure and takes her frustrations out on me.”

Eventually, the imbalance became too much to ignore. “Basically, I feel like I’m paying for the car entirely, using it the least, and her whole family is benefiting from free transportation,” she said. She emphasized that she empathizes with P but feels that “because she won’t set boundaries with her family, I get the worst of her.”

After months of feeling conflicted, she finally raised the issue. “This morning, I finally asked her to request mileage reimbursement from her family,” she wrote. She stressed that she wasn’t trying to stop P from helping them.

“I want to make it clear that I am NOT asking her to stop helping her family,” she said. Instead, she simply wanted some recognition of the financial impact: “If multiple people are going to be using the car, I need some help with the costs.”

The discussion didn’t go the way she hoped. P reacted strongly, calling the request for mileage reimbursement “cold” and “cruel.” She argued that her family “needs her” and said that asking for money made the woman “heartless.” The disagreement escalated to the point where P suggested she was being forced to choose “between me and her family.”

Feeling overwhelmed and unsure if she was in the wrong, the woman turned to Reddit — and commenters didn’t mince words.

One wrote, “If she doesn’t want to collect money from her family, she can pay herself. Or she can go buy her own car.”

Another commenter pointed out the risk of so many people using a car they don’t pay for: “Free things are never taken care of as well as what someone paid for to own.”