If He Loves You, He Won’t Try To Change You

If he loves you, he won’t notice all the little things about you that aren’t like him. He won’t point them out to you over morning coffee, during happy hour drinks at sunset, in the middle of dinner as you absentmindedly push food around your plate.

If he really loves you, he won’t talk about the ex-girlfriend you remind him of, or the fight he got into with a woman one time because the two of them didn’t agree about the same topic he’s bringing up right now.

If he really loves you, he won’t try to convince you that what he thinks is ‘right,’ is ‘better,’ is the ‘smart’ choice. He won’t try to rationalize his decisions against yours, or argue with you until you give in.

If he really loves you, the ways you are different will be like folds in a blanket, easily smoothed while still creating the same warmth. Because falling in love doesn’t mean you become exactly like another person. Falling in love doesn’t mean changing all the parts of yourself to fit someone else’s mold.

So often we love people who are different than us. That old saying, ‘opposites attract,’ is in fact very true. We’re unconsciously drawn to what we don’t understand, to the ways we don’t actually live, to pieces of us that we see in another but cannot quite embody in ourselves.

And so we fall into people who are vastly different, yet somehow completely compatible. Because they are the loud to our soft, the tender to our tough, the calm to our wild, the jagged edges to our round ones.

And though we don’t always fit, we learn to compromise—And isn’t that what love truly is? A little give, a little take?

But love is not trying to desperately to make someone change. To take all the parts that make them unique, and squeezing them into a little bottle, keeping them contained. Love is not wishing thoughts into another person’s head. It is not forcing someone to be, to feel, to become what they are inherently not.

Love is finding a middle ground. Love is learning. Love is balance and making concessions and trading off and learning to agree, or to agree-to-disagree.

Love is loving him enough to do the things that he wants to do, even if they don’t always coincide with your deepest desires. But love is when he does the same in return.

Love is fighting for your side, but settling sometimes—settling for a compromise, settling for not always having your way, settling for happiness over personal pride.

Love is not asking someone to be who they are not. It is not demanding. It is not spending all of your days wishing your partner was someone else—a little more, a little less.

Love is when he listens, when he understands, when he wants, so much, to see a smile across your face that he will do anything to find a happy medium between you two. And you will do the same.

Love is not when he looks down on you, judges you, treats you as if the way you live and love is wrong. Love is not when he asks you to change, to be what he wants and needs you to be.

So please don’t mold yourself to fit his image. Don’t twist and squeeze and shape yourself to be this ‘ideal’ he has in his mind. Don’t spend your days wishing away your own desires, your own happiness, your own uniqueness, just to live up to his expectations.

Because any many that treats you as if who you are is not enough does not deserve the love you give.

You are more than enough. For the right person. For yourself. For the love that will one day cross paths with you, and show you all that you are missing.

Asking someone to be something else is not love. Demanding that someone be different out of selfishness is not love. Wishing you were anything other than who you are is not love.

Please remember that.
And find the strength to walk away.

Marisa Donnelly is a poet and author of the book, Somewhere on a Highway, available here.