Past tenses

Your loth isn't wrong, it's just an even older spelling.

www.thefreedictionary.com/loath

You can consider yourself even more truly archaic!

I don't see how you can suggest to use "striven" is anything to do with the passive voice TriciaF. It is an intransitive verb , so takes no object, therefore can only be used in the active voice,
"Striven" is indeed the past participle and not only foreign students of English would know that!!

"strive" vb intrans, past strove, past participle striven"

It's not really all that complicated
And Elegran said it all back at 12.34 Dare I suggest the benefits of a Scottish and duration?

Fell at the final hurdle, my iPad has apparently NEVER heard of a Scottish EDUCATION

If it was the passive voice, you would be saying the equivalent of "I have been striven" which is nonsense. You can strive, but you can't strive someone or something else (that is the non-technical version of Alea's transitive and non-transitive verbs, for those who were looking out of the window at that lesson)

You can be driven because drive can be either a transitive or intransitive verb - "I drive a Porsche" - transitive, or "I drive every day" - intransitive.

And in case "every day" confuses, that is not the object of the verb.

It was because I was comparing striven with driven, eg I was driven.
Too complicated for me!

So you were using "was driven" as the verb in the past tense, passive voice, not just "driven" - the past participle, which is a part of that past tense of the verb?

Sorry to be so pedantic (but this is Pedants' corner, it is permitted)

BTW, alea, my education was English up until the age of 16 or so - starting with a very small army school, then a primary school in working-class Brighton, then LA grammar school- Varndean - in the 50s (where most of the teachers were elderly women who had returned to fill vacancies when the men were off to war.)

Ah well, Elegran, the compliment stands!!

Elegran - yes, someone drove me, gave me a lift, so I was passively driven

Both are correct, but “Strove” is more popular.
Let´s look at Google Ngram Viewer tool which displays a graph showing how phrases have occurred in a corpus of books over the years.

Source: en.learniv.com/info/en/irregular-verbs/strived-or-strove-what-is-correct-and-how-to-use-it/

How about smelled or smelt. ? I can’t decide.

I have always used I strive, I strove, and I have striven and can't really see the problem, as we all say I drive, I drove and I have driven,

All languages have stong, or irregular verbs, and most of us learnt them by heart in all other languages than our native tongue.

‘Strove’ is the simple past. ‘Striven’ is the past participle, as in ‘has striven’, ‘had striven’ or e.g ‘would have striven...’