Uncovering a Bad Relationship Through Personal Growth

Say you set out to remake yourself through personal growth. How do you know the partner you have now will still love the version of you who comes out the other side? Can a person change so much that they become unrecognizable to the one who loves them? And if the thing your partner first fell for is exactly what you end up outgrowing, is that a reason to hold back? Start with a plain fact: we almost never change all at once. A brain injury can rewrite someone in a single moment. Ordinary change does not work that way. It creeps.

You go back to school. You switch careers, pick up a hobby, trade in old dreams for new ones. Some of those moves matter more than others, but your underlying character and personality tend to hold their shape. More to the point, those choices grow out of a self that was already there, a self built from every decision you made before, each of them rooted in who you are. So personal growth is less about becoming someone new and more about showing yourself parts of you that other people never noticed. Often you had not noticed them either. Ever stumbled into a new passion and thought, how did I go this long without knowing I was made for this?

A partner who loves you should want to see that happen and should help it along. You did probably shift a little in the process. Maybe your priorities rearranged themselves, so the hours you used to hand over automatically now get split with new friends or a new pursuit. For the most part, though, you are still the person your partner chose.

So when a partner's feelings cool, the real question is why. Picture a couple who bonded over a shared love of pop music. Then one person's taste drifts somewhere else. If that small change is enough to turn the other person's heart, then what they loved was never your character, your values, your personality. Those are the parts that make you yourself, and those are the parts least likely to budge when you grow.

Sometimes, though, you really do move one of the big pieces. Character and values and personality can sit still through a career change and then, years later, shift anyway, because small decisions stack up and eventually add to something large. Your partner may not read those shifts as improvements even when you do. And if the foundation of who you are has genuinely changed over time, the person across from you might no longer recognize the one they fell for, which makes holding onto the old feeling hard.

There is also the plain pull of the relationship on your choices. When you are with someone during a stretch of personal change, your decisions stop being purely yours. Get offered a job across the country and you are split in two instantly, career on one side, relationship on the other. You poured years into building that career. You poured just as much into the person at home. Both feel like pieces of who you are, and picking one over the other can be wrenching.

The romantic ideal says partners love each other's deepest selves, that through growing together they keep choosing each other out of real devotion to who each truly is. Every change, in that picture, binds them tighter. But knowing another person that completely is hard, and knowing yourself that completely is harder, because the self is something you keep making. We want our partners to stay in love with us as we change, and we also have to admit that if the change runs deep enough, it can leave them genuinely confused about who they are now looking at.

A partner can be fairly caught off guard when the person they loved seems swapped out for someone else, or seems to be quietly dissolving, same face, different behavior. That is often a sad thing to watch. It can also end with two people who once fit each other beautifully finding other people who fit the person each has become.

If your partner will not walk the whole way with you while you work at becoming a better you, then maybe this was never the right person. That is a bitter thing to see clearly. The growth itself, though, can be worth every bit of it. - Erin

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