Women Who Accept This Brutal Reality End Up Happier Than Everyone Around Them
Accepting the hard stuff can make us the happiest.
fauxels, StockSnap | Canva From many of my women clients, I regularly hear variations of one theme: they need their partner to change.
- “If it were me,” they say, “I would do it this way.”
- “If they loved me, they would do it the way I would do it.”
- “I have been telling them forever they are doing it wrong and it must be done this way.”
- “If I just love them enough, they will change.”
- “They promised me they would change because they want me to be happy but they didn’t”
And, every time, I tell them that, no matter how much they want someone to change, they just won’t change unless they want to change.
For many women, this is very frustrating and interferes with their happiness in a relationship. There is a brutal reality I tell my women clients to recognize and accept:
You can’t change someone, all you can do is change your reactions to them
What do I mean? I mean you can’t change how someone else does things or is with you but you can change your expectations and reactions around how they do those things. I will go through the quotes above to elucidate what I mean.
"If it were me, I would do it this way”
Your boyfriend isn’t you. Your boyfriend is himself, with all the quirks and peculiarities he developed throughout his lifetime. He is not you and he never will be you and he will (probably) never do things the way you do.
So, you must accept you should never expect him to do things the way you do — that way you won’t be disappointed.
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“If they loved me, they would do it the way I would do it”
I have a client whose husband was supposed to stop and look at some new windows for their renovation on the way home. He forgot, for whatever reason. She told me that if he loved her, he would have stopped. But the reality is he does love her — he just forgot.
So, stop expecting that because your person doesn’t do things the way you want them done, they don’t love you. They are human. They make mistakes. And, I am guessing that, when you let your guy down, you don’t do it because you don’t love them, right?
“I have been telling them forever they are doing it wrong and it must be done this way”
Again, your person is a person who does things their way. That being said, many men try very hard to do things the way that their women want them to, if only to keep the peace. That does not mean they will always do things how you want them to. Again, they are their own person and might believe another way works better for them.
I encourage my clients to accept this as a truth and be happy their partner has done what they have asked at all, instead of stressing about how it was done.
“If I just love them enough, they will change"
This is one phrase I hear a lot. Many, many women who are in relationships with men don’t love their man for who he is, but for who he could be, They believe that if they just love them enough, do more things for them, and make them see they can’t live without them, their man will change their behavior and be who they want them to be.
Unfortunately, no amount of love given by a woman to a man is enough to change them if they don’t want to be changed. So, I always encourage my clients to understand they must love someone for who they are right now and not who they hope they can be. If they can accept this as a truth, they will stop trying to make someone else change and they will feel much happier in their lives.
“They promised me they would change because they want me to be happy”
This is another thing that I hear from many of my women clients. They are in difficult relationships, ones they want to fix, and they tell their partners what they need from them. Their partners promise them they will change, and they do for a while, and then they stop. My clients are left devastated because they believed things would be different.
I encourage my clients to stop with magical thinking. Especially if they have asked their partners for the same things over and over and aren’t getting what they need. Instead of banging your head against the wall with frustration, it’s time to think about what you can live with.
If you ask him to change, and he agrees to do so only for you and then he doesn’t, do you want to stay? Instead of continuing to try to change him, what would your life look like if you accepted the reality of who his and decided to stay and deal with it or instead walk away?
I know it seems like a brutal reality, that you can’t change other people, but it is true and all you truly have control over is your reactions to their behaviors.
But it’s true, and it’s true everywhere. It’s true with relationships, family members, co-workers, and people you interact with on the street. People will be who they are and you can continue to try to change them, to no avail, or you can recognize they are who they are and then must consider if and how you interact with them.
If you can accept this, you will be much happier. You will not longer be trying to control the world around you, something that is impossible, and instead you can focus on yourself, your wants and needs, something that is, indeed, very possible!
Mitzi Bockmann is an NYC-based Certified Life Coach and mental health advocate who works exclusively with women to help them be all they want to be. Mitzi's bylines have appeared in The Good Men Project, MSN, PopSugar, Prevention, Huffington Post, and Psych Central, among many others.