Uncovering A Bad Relationship Through Personal Growth

Assuming you undergo a self-creation when pursuing personal growth and development, how are you certain that your partner will still love you as you change?  Can you change “too much” for your other half?  Is it possible that you have changed what your partner had always loved about you, and should this stop you from pursuing your personal growth?

Recognize with one fell swoop, we rarely change in entirety.  Brain injury changes you completely in one swoop, however, personal change happens very gradually.  You go back to school, change careers, take up a new hobby or adopt new dreams and goals.  Some of these are more substantial than others, but your overall character and personality hardly change.  These decisions, more importantly, are based on a firm existing self that arises all of your decisions in the past, which are based on your character.  In this sense, what we do for personal growth and development is an expression to ourselves revealing aspects that other people were unaware we had.  Many times, we do not know either!  Have you ever discovered a new passion or activity and think, “How did I not realize that I was born to do this?”

If your partner loves you, he or she should be happy for you and help you grow.  You probably did change a little bit during this process.  Maybe you are prioritizing differently, including spending time with your partner, or spent more time with new friends or at a new hobby, but you are still the same person your partner fell in love with for the most part.

If your partner’s feelings change, why?  Let’s say for instance that your partner loved superficial things about you.  You met and bonded with your partner after you realized your common love for pop music, then your taste of music changed.  If this made your partner feel differently about you, then he or she never loved you for anything like your character, personality or values, which are all the main elements of yourself.  These foundational elements are likely to never change during growth and development.

Sometimes, however, maybe you did change some of those main aspects of yourself.  While the core of character, values and personality stay the same while finding a new career path, they can eventually over time change as small decisions build on each other.  Your partner might not see them as beneficial, while maybe you do.  If the fundamental aspects of yourself changes over the years, your partner might not see you as the same person he or she fell in love with and it may make it difficult to maintain the same feelings towards you.

Furthermore, you choices are affected naturally by your relationship if you are involved with someone during your transformation.  For example, if you were offered a job across the country, you are automatically torn between your career and your relationship.  You have spent many years to develop and nurture the career, however, you have worked just as hard on the relationship.  It is a sense of who you are and it often a very difficult and hard wrenching decision to choose between them. 

We like to believe that in the romantic ideal, partners love and appreciate the most fundamental selves of each other.  Through mutual change and growth, they continue to love each other on profound devotion to who we truly are.  As partners grow, they make choices that will enable changes within the relationship and each other, and with every change makes it stronger.  But it is hard to really know someone (and sometimes even yourself) that perfectly, and we can change because your self is what you make of it.  While we do hope that our partners continue to appreciate and love us while we change, we must acknowledge and understand that if we fundamentally change enough, it can cause our partners to wonder who we are.  Our partners can legitimately be surprised when the person he or she is in love with seems to be replaced by another person or slipping away from the person that looks the same but acts and behaves much differently.  This can often be very tragic, but in the end it might lead to two people, who at one point were wonderfully fit for one another, to find different partners who are better for who they are now. 

If you do not have a partner who is with you all the way during you want and need to transform yourself into a better “you”, then maybe your partner truly isn’t the one for you.  It can be a difficult fact to realize, but in the end it can be rewarding how you have grown and developed.  

- Erin