Trapped

I don't suppose, at my great age, it is any use giving advice to the young. Specifically I mean those who are still hoping to meet the one person they believe they want to spend their life with.
We do so want to believe, when we meet that 'someone', that they are what we have been looking for and we plunge in, wrapped in love, without giving thought to the changes we are expected to make in order to please the other. I know. I've been there.

Eventually, though, those changes one makes can become like an albatross around ones neck.

So many of us do it, don't we? With stars in our eyes we fall in love and then  close them to the faults of our beloved, and  only realise when  we are hip deep in mud, that it was a mistake and was far easier to get into that out of.

One does not realise it but at that moment of plunging into love, one often gives up ones true  inner self, and begin changing ones self  to suit the other.

I lived in South Africa years ago and it was clear then that some men, who married attractive women, persuaded them to stop caring about their looks and dress in black until they became drab creatures who no longer resembled the person they had once been.

We all try to change ourselves for our  partners and then our free spirit, which attracted them in the first place, becomes something entirely different.  Even worse, if ones partner is of a dominating or controlling nature, they squeeze the life out of their other half making their lives a misery.

It is so important to keep safe that spirit one had early on - for if you lose it to please someone else you are no longer yourself nor are you being true to yourself.

Yes, of course, we all have to make compromises in partnerships but not to the extent that we begin to lose ourselves or feel so trapped we find ourselves unable to escape.