changes - a rant

It's important to go into any relationship (romantic or otherwise) with the knowledge that you can't make other people change. I may have said this before, so I hope I'm not belaboring anything, but here I go. People do change, but it's never because you tell them to. At best, you can enact change in others by showing them a better way to do things, an alternative. At some point there's potential for it to dawn on people that their approach might not be as good as yours, and there's potential for things to be better. And they will subtlely change their life to be more like yours. We see this in fashion, advertising, but it also applies to domestic and interpersonal issues. It applies to everything. This is why you should live the life you preach; it's the only way to truly enact positive change in the world.
It's worth being careful around other people when they say that they've changed. Because even if you want to change, if you perceive a desire within yourself to be different, there's still a period of time before that desire is made manifest. You can want to change and remain the same. Or you can think that you've changed when nothing's different. I'm always leery when people say, "I've changed." That's usually an indicator that everything remains the same. The true change happens more subtlely; it usually it made apparent when somebody else tells you that something's different about you.
This applies to relationships, of course, because so many people do this cycle of breaking up and getting back together, on the premise that things are different now, that he or she or life or the world or your perception of it has changed for the better and that everything will magically work. We're getting better culturally at seeing that this isn't the case, for example, in the case of physical or sexual or verbal abuse. But not emotionally damaging situations. We're still stuck, culturally, on the idea that if all that happened was that somebody broke your heart or drove you crazy, without actually hurting you physically, you've still got a chance of making it together. I think it's worth possibly re-examining this notion. However, in the grand canon of notions that ought to be re-examined, this one takes a low spot on the list.