Right now my boyfriend of two years and I are having a bit of a fight over honesty. A few months ago I caught him in a lie about smoking cigars, I had asked him not to for his health and my own. He lied about it multiple times and when I finally caught him on the bs he promised if he did again he would tell me why and when he did so if he was smoking too much I could tell him to stop. Recently the same thing happened with drinking. It is his first year off at college and if he wants to drink- fine, I can't stop him and I don't care- I do however want to know. Like with the smoking just so if he goes overboard I can tell him if its too much or if its the night before an exam to tell him not to go out. He recently lied again about his first time drinking. He said he didn't- his friends were bragging to me about seeing him drunk the next day. He said he only had two drinks- they said five drinks in they had to take him home. It's being lied to like that that makes me want to know more. I don't care if he drinks its the fact that he lies about it. I have tried to explain that to him but his logic is "yes- I want you to know when I drink so you can tell me if I do too much but no- I will not tell you because now it feels like a job and you're babysitting me." I am not trying to babysit him, I can see where he would get that from but it would be the same with any of the medication I was on, he knows my schedule and how much I am supposed to take and if I was abusing that he'd call me out for it. Most of his family has/has had issues with drinking and it worries me the way he answered some of my questions already sounding like an alcoholic after only drinking once (but then again he has lied before so I don't even know fully if this was his first time drinking.) I just can't handle the lying, I just want to know the truth, I don't know if I'm trying to know too much or if he is being a dick about me wanting to know these things. Please help.

I don't think he should be lying about something so simple, but you've got to accept that you're both autonomous human beings who are going to make decisions for yourselves. You don't need to know every time he drinks or smokes if you're actually okay with him doing these things. It's not up to you to tell him to stop, it's up to him to know his limits. You've got to trust that he's not going to abuse those things. Same with your medication- he needs to trust you're not going to abuse. If those are things you guys can't trust in each other then you gotta start looking into your own individual problems with substance abuse. And that is not your responsibility at all. You shouldn't be in a relationship to fix someone or hold them to your own standards. You're not each other's children, you're adults who want to be in each other's lives. Calling out abuse as you see it is one thing, but you basically are babysitting him if you've decided you're the one who decides when he should stop.

Obviously smoking and abuse of alcohol is damaging to your health, and I'm not at all trying to deny that. But you need to be honest too and see what your real problem is here. If you're trying to actually track the number of his drinks it's more like babysitting/policing what he's doing than just caring about his health. It honestly sounds like you're more worried about that he does drink, than the lying part. If you don't want to date someone who drinks and smokes then that's a whole different discussion you guys need to have. Once you find a solution to that, the whole honesty thing is going to be a lot simpler to deal with.

I'm gonna say I had to learn this lesson the hard way, and I'm hoping to pass a little bit of my experience on to you. When my fiance and I started dating, it was his first year of college, and I was in my last year. We met on neopets (don't laugh) and were in a long-distance relationship for a little over a year before we moved in together when I was done with college. I said a lot of the same things you are saying, like, "I don't care if you drink, I just want to know how much because I care about you", "I don't care what you're doing, I just want to know where you are, how long you'll be gone, and who you're with, because I care about you." And I honestly believed that. I was lying to myself. Really, I was just being an insecure control freak, masking it as "caring" about him.

Eventually (as in, years later) he approached me about it and said he wasn't okay with me trying to be his mother. I stepped back and looked at myself, and realized what I was doing to him and our relationship. I wasn't giving myself a chance to trust him to make good decisions by himself. I was forcing him to report to me every little thing he was doing. And that's not okay, in a relationship between two adults who should be mature enough to take care of themselves.

I came to realize that I was projecting my mistakes onto him. I've made a lot of bad decisions in my life, and I thought I was trying to protect him and prevent him from making the same bad decisions. What I was really doing was not allowing him to make mistakes and learn his own lessons! Most people need to experience things firsthand in order to learn from them.

It's still a constant everyday struggle for me, over six years later, to not express my need to know every last detail about his time apart from me. But it's getting easier. Something that helps is knowing that if he deliberately breaks my trust, that's on him, not me, and that would not be the type of person I'd want to be with anyway.

I get that you care about him a lot, and I get wanting honesty from him. But you have to let him be his own person and trust him. If you don't trust him, you, he, and your relationship will never grow. But if you feel like you can't trust him, then that's another whole discussion you'll have to have with him. A strong relationship is based on trust, and honesty will flow from the trust. Give him a chance to show you that you can trust him. And if he can't show you that, then do you really want to be with a person like that?

I'm sorry this got so long.

I can understand how bad it must feel for you to know that he has lied, I suppose you are now wondering what else he might have lied about in the past and what might be lie about in the future. Thats going to make it hard for you to completely trust him which is I think going to undermine your relationship.

Bottom line I think is to decide if you are able to live with the knowledge that he will probably lie about things in the future, if you can not come to terms with that then it might be better to talk to him about that and decide if this is a relationship that you want to stay in.

Its worth bearing in mind that when he lied it was perhaps because he didnt want you to worry so it is not without hope and if he is young there is a chance that he will change and that small lies do not necessarily mean he will tell big lies.

It is how you feel thats the important part, if you lose trust will you lose respect for him too? good luck

I'm gonna speak slightly from the boyfriend's POV, as I've done the things you've mentioned to my friends unfortunately. I had bouts of smoking in the past. Hiding it. Smoking in my car, outside on the job, in my room, all of that. Eventually people found out, and got upset. I also had my good bouts of getting very drunk. I tried to hide it, but when I get drunk enough, I apparently tend to call everyone in my phone at 2 AM. Hard to ignore that.

With that in mind, the reason I did the things I did was this: I wanted my independence. My sense of independence, at least. I felt like my friends didn't understand my side of the story, and that they had no control over me. I sometimes did it to spite them in that sense. Stupid reasons, I know. I eventually found out that there is really no independence when it comes to substance abuse. There's no side of the story, either. It's a dumb thing.

Perhaps that is one reason he is doing it. I'm not saying that is the reason, but it's a thought. Talk to him about it in a compassionate manner. Don't judge him, keep an open mind. If you force him to give the truth, he'll clam up more and more.

Good luck to you and to him. Hopefully your relationship will be better than what is written.