Keep the Change

I once read somewhere that...

Men get married hoping the woman will never change, 

and women get married hoping the man will change completely. 

That's very true, don't you think? I know in my current relationship that a frequent gripe from my better half is, "You've changed." Hell yea, I've changed, and I hope I change some more.

Change is pretty much the only thing you can be sure of in life. People will change right before your eyes if you're paying close enough attention. When you aren't evolving then you stagnate and nobody likes the smell of stagnation, especially curled up in bed next to them. Relationships change, and if they don't, they die. I never want to look back at my life or my relationships and realize that I've been in the same place, fighting the same battles and making the same mistakes for years on end.

If we get back to the quote, though, does it suggest that women are committed to evolution, while men favor stagnation? Maybe it's not entirely that black and white, but it sure seems like it sometimes. I think men find a cute, young, wide-eyed thing and want to put it under glass and keep it just so. Women want a fixer-upper that can continually be taken to the next level.  But the reality is that you're both going to change, together and independent of each other. And that's not a bad thing.

The struggles come when your evolution or lack thereof makes your significant other feel uncomfortable or unsupported. To be perfectly honest, in my personal life, we've been feeling a lot of this tension lately and I'm not sure what the end result will be. I'm looking forward to a lot of things that maybe my boyfriend isn't quite ready for but as long as we're honest with ourselves and each other, things will work out the way that they're supposed to. We'll evolve and survive or stagnate and die, but no matter what, I'm rooting for change.