I've got my cool life and you're going to come in and you're going to try and change it up and make me make the bed and do things and turn my music down.

Welcome everybody to the Love Life podcast. I am Matthew Hussie and I believe today's episode is really going to help you accelerate your love life today.

Check it out and I'll speak to you at the end of the episode.

Jonathan says, I would say I'm afraid of being changed to be told that in order to be with someone, I must change who I am.

Thoughts?

Well, you will be changed on some level by someone. I think that's the nature of things. You meet someone and you're in some way changed by them.

That's actually one of the best parts of a relationship I should add. I would actually like to change the narrative around it a little bit because that, anytime, I think that you can mark your life by the moments that someone who changed it came into your life.

There are people throughout our life, friends, colleagues, bosses, people that we fall in love with, that change us in some way that we're really grateful for.

So let's be clear, there are relationships where one plus one equals three and you're happy for the changes.

What Jonathan is talking about is the kind of change that happens when someone starts to strip us of the things that we feel are fundamentally us and crucial to who we are and what we like to do and how we like to live.

I think that we're all a little afraid of that. Usually we come to a relationship with a little bit of trauma from having been in a relationship before where someone did feel like someone robbed us of something that felt like it was fundamentally us and we found ourselves treading on eggshells with our own personality and having to sort of amputate crucial parts of ourselves in order to make this other person happy.

And then when the relationship ended, we feel less of ourselves and we feel like we're having to find ourselves again in the process of rebuilding.

And the truth is also it is very difficult to change. So often if somebody is feeling that pressure like you need to change, it's not like, oh I'm afraid I'm going to just change and I'm going to be so different and lose myself sometimes it's just like, I'm afraid this person is just going to sit there constantly resenting me because you know they're just always thinking of these ways that I should be able to change.

I think that I should change and I'm not going to completely change. Like I think of that scene in before midnight where Ethan Hawks character is walking with Julie Deppley and Julie Deppley asked the question, if you could change anything about me, what would it be?

And Ethan Hawks character kind of knows what she's getting at and he's just like, I think I would change the fact that you want to change me all the time.

There's something like that where it's like he knows that she's sitting there sort of ruminating on like these little habits he has and all these things and he's just kind of feeling that resentment.

Yeah, because it really does feel, I mean it is the antithesis of being accepted and of being accepted is what we really want.

So yeah, I think that that's an interesting one by Jonathan, I get it.

You know, I feel like it's more about being afraid of being judged than being changed.

Like I'm going to get judged for my choices or the things I like to do with my time, my lifestyle, like my habits.

Don't you think that being judged is a disguised fear of not being accepted and if I'm not accepted then I don't feel worthy.

So what I'm really afraid of when I don't want to be judged is I'm afraid that the things that make me me, my idiosyncrasies and eccentricities and the little things that I enjoy doing are going to be seen as weird or stupid or just not normal.

...