Six Things I Learned from Changing Myself for my Partners
By: Shoshana Kaufman
Tags: Relationships, Psychology, Self-awareness, Life Lessons

Six Things I Learned from Changing Myself for my Partners

Number six: sometimes it’s worth it.

Photo by Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash

Call it chameleon syndrome.

When people fall in love, they often try to be exactly what they think their new partner wants. We are great role-players at the start of a new relationship. We are better groomed, better dressed, and more agreeable than we were before we met this fantastic new person who will surely be “the one” and will transform our lives accordingly.

Of course, a lot of this behavior is a performance for the person we want to impress. It might be conscious, or it might be an unconscious attempt to force someone to fit our fantasies.

I think that everyone does this to some extent. Ideally, the more attached we become to our partners and the more they become attached to us, the more both parties are willing to accept less than perfect behaviours and appearances. If we are healthy and in a healthy relationship, we can just let the person “be” whomever they are without feeling threatened. Or we can let them go with minimal drama.

But sometimes we try to morph into the kind of person we think the other wants. Chameleon-like we change our colours until we appear like the ideal person we think he or she wants. We camoflauge our true selves for an idealized, unreal image of whatever definition of perfection we think will make us acceptable.

Being a chameleon is ultimately self-defeating.

As a newly-minted sixty-year-old who is ten years into a healthy and fulfilling relationship, I think I can speak to some of these common tendencies. I met my husband at age fifty, and it took me that long before I was ready for a truly equal romantic relationship. It involved a lot of soul searching, therapy, and a number of spectacular mistakes that I vowed never to make again.

One: If someone has a controlling personality, don’t hesitate to press the abort button.

An excessive need for control is a major red flag. This was a problem with my first two husbands. I should have noticed something was wrong when my first husband didn’t want me to learn to drive. He loved having control over my comings and goings. I couldn’t go grocery shopping by myself, so he got to control all of the food we bought. He was rigid in his food choices, so he decided what all of our meals would consist of. Dinner had to be one of four or five Persian dishes his mother had made when he was growing up in Iran. And it had to be exactly the way that his mother had made it. Which meant I couldn’t make them; if I tried, something was always wrong with the taste. I loved cooking, but if I made anything outside of his dictates, he would refuse to even try what I had made. If I insisted, he would pretend to gag just from the smell of the innocent stir fry I had made.

Needless to say, our marriage was not a happy one.

Ironically, I had the same problem in reverse with my second husband. Instead of making it too difficult for me to learn to drive, he insisted that I learn to drive and that I do most of the driving. This was good, because I really wanted to drive, but he insisted that I learn to drive a stick shift so that I could drive a small truck he owned and save money on gas.

I was hopeless at stick shift. I found it hard enough to drive a car with automatic gears. If he had let me get comfortable with regular driving before introducing a more complicated way involving a clutch, I might have succeeded. But he was impatient and controlling. I had to be forced to drive manual immediately on his command. He dismissed all my fears about driving a vehicle that I couldn’t control when stopped on a hill. One time I actually rolled backwards and hit another car. The woman was pretty angry about the dent in her new SUV. It took an accident to get him to let up on the pressure for me to learn to drive that truck to save a few cents on gas.

Two: If someone is just wrong for you, accept it and get out.

I tried to leave my abusive first husband many times. I always went back. My friends told me to leave him. My therapist told me to leave him. If I tried to leave he would threaten to leave the country and never pay me child support and never see our daughter again. I let him manipulate me like this over and over again. We would separate for a time and he would refuse to give me any money for our daughter. And I would take him back out of insecurity and an inability to make ends meet.

Three: don’t give up something you love just to please your partner.

My second husband came of age in the 1960s. For him the ideal of everything in life, including female beauty, was the hippy era. This included a specific formula for my appearance: long hair, no makeup, casual jeans and t-shirts. When I met him I had short, stylish hair, blonde highlights, and a face enhanced with the latest high-end makeup. My clothes were not retro in any way. This was the way I liked to look from adolescence onwards. Even as a child, I wanted to wear pink, frilly dresses more or less full time. It was a big part of who I was.

That had to go. No problem. I was a chameleon. In exchange for affection, I was willing to become anything he wanted. I grew my hair out. I let him wipe off my makeup the first time I met him. I did not wear makeup the entire two-and-a-half years we were together. I wore a hippy skirt to our wedding.

When I met my current husband, I still had long hair with my natural colour. I had started wearing makeup again. I soon realized I could have blonde highlights if I wanted. He loved them. He loves me in makeup and fancy clothes. Finally my partner and I are on the same page.

Four: addiction is a deal breaker.

I once fell in love with an alcoholic. I didn’t see it as a problem. He was a binge drinker who stayed up all night getting drunk and obnoxious. Why did I put up with this? He could play the cello and he sometimes listened to classical music. I swore that my ultimate man would be a classical music fan. And play an instrument. My first husband had hated classical music, so that was good enough for me. Ironically, I never once heard him play the cello. He had sold his cello when he was 22 and used the money to backpack around Europe. That was thirty years before I met him and he had not played since. He kept threatening to get a cello and play for me, but that never happened.

In line with my chameleon tendencies, I started listening to music that he recommended. I convinced myself that I enjoyed listening to bands like Emmerson, Lake & Palmer. I would coo over Keith Emmerson’s interminable piano solos. I even read Greg Lake’s uber badly written autobiography, Lucky Man. All to please an unfortunate man who had little to offer me outside of a valuable lesson in what I didn’t want in a partner.

Five: do not give anyone control over your money.

Overall, money is always a potential problem in an intimate relationship. It is the number one cause of marital disagreement, along with sex, and can be used as a weapon of abuse for unbalanced personalities.

In my case, I gave far too much power to my first husband over money. He was a recent immigrant and was obsessed with getting ahead in a new country. He insisted on total control over our finances. He would buy things like real estate investments behind my back, houses that he would rent out. My input in decision making was not welcome. Later, when we owned our own house, he demanded a certain amount from me every month and he took care of all expenses. I was never allowed to see his bank balance and he would not tolerate having a joint bank account. When we decided to divorce, he reasoned that he should keep all of our assets, because I had contributed “nothing, except for a few mortgage payments.” Fortunately for me, Canadian law does not allow such rationalizations, and I got half the value of the house in the divorce settlement, much to his surprise and resentment.

Six: sometimes it’s worth it to change.

Sometimes your partner is truly an amazing person and sets a very high standard for you. I like to believe that I was always a good person, but my husband made me think more deeply about what that actually meant. He sets very high standards for his own behaviour and is incredibly disciplined. He is even-tempered and rational. I tend to be lazier, more hotheaded, and disorganized. Left to my own devices, I am a major procrastinator. He always has his taxes done a month before the final deadline. I am happy if I’m only a month late. I now get them done almost on time. He pays more attention to detail than I do and is much cleaner. He has really inspired me to up my game in several areas of life. For example, I can now tell that the carpet needs to be vacuumed before the pattern disappears under the dirt. Not that I go so far as to vacuum it. Luckily, he is happy just that I have noticed it. Then he cheerfully does the job himself.

Mostly, he makes me want to be better. Because of him I exercise, eat healthily, and cook at home every night instead of eating out. I have saved money for the first time in my life. I have become less impulsive. All to make the man who makes me happy, happier.

He has also changed for me in numerous ways. He listens to his gut more rather than hashing everything out logically. He does the lion’s share of cleaning our house; he accepts that it exhausts me more than it does him. He has learned to cook and appreciate fine food from me. He appreciates opera now and we enjoy going to performances several times a year. He introduced me to Eminem, and I actually like the music. I now get why people listen to rap. This list goes on and on. Basically, we enrich each other’s lives and grow spiritually in each other’s company.

Here’s the take.

Basically, don’t give up your identity to your partner. Be proudly who you are and let him or her deal with it. Know your uncrossable lines and your non-negotiable dealbreakers. Otherwise, you could end up in a longterm unsatisfying or even abusive relationship.

If you do feel inspired to change for your partner, it should go both ways. You should be able to mutually influence each other in a positive way.

Don’t settle for less than you deserve. Make sure your partner’s behaviour standards match yours or exceed them. You want to become the best version of yourself; you want to explore the sunny heights, not the murky, hellish depths of life with your significant other.