This is from years of experience Megan and why I think 50% of marriages fail in the U.S.
AlmightyJim says, "The best quality in a relationship is for someone to accept someone for who they are and to not try to CHANGE THEM into the person that they think they should be."
Here is an excerpt from Please Understand Me II
http://keirsey.com/pumII.html
If I do not want what you want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong. Or if I believe other than you, at least pause before you correct my view.
If my emotion is less than yours, or more, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel more strongly or weakly. Or yet if I act, or fail to act, in the manner of your design for action, let me be.
I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me. That will come only when you are willing to give up trying to change me or changing me into a copy of you.
I may be your spouse, your parent, your offspring, your friend, or your colleague. If you will allow me any of my own wants, or emotions, or beliefs, or actions, then you open yourself, so that some day these ways of mine might not seem so wrong, and might finally appear to you as right -- for me.
To put up with me is the first step to understanding me. Not that you embrace my ways as right for you, but that you are no longer irritated or disappointed with me for my seeming waywardness. And in understanding me you might come to prize my differences from you, and, far from seeking to change me, preserve and even nurture those differences. Copyright ? 1998 by David Keirsey
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My wife and I fought like crazy for the first ten years we were married and most of the time when the dust settled after an argument I started to realize that almost every disagreement we had related to "How we thought each other should think, act or be" without realizing neither of us was going to change. The result was the same damn argument over and over.
Finally I realized that I am who I am and she is who she is and that's the way it is!
By looking at the relationship a little differently I think I found the secret to a long lasting relationship... I have my life and my personal time as does she and then we have "Our Time". It's the "Our Time" that brought us together initially when we first met and all we had on our minds was spending time together and enjoying everything life had to offer us.
Then "Reality" sets in and things begin to become more routine and uneventful. Now rather than keep the fire burning and finding ways to keep the relationship fresh, time and effort turns more to "If I could only get him/her to think my way or act the way I do". Once the relationship heads down this path it could signal the beginning of the end!
If it gets to this point then it's probably time to go back and re-evaluate the qualities and reasons that attracted you to your significant other in the first place. If you can't identify these or they have drastically changed then maybe it is time to find another.
Bottom line - Enjoy people for who they are, don't try to change them and if you just can't put up with them any more then let them go.
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