They always say time changes things, but you actu­ally have to change them yourself.

—Andy Warhol

Many of my rela­tion­ships, roman­tic or oth­er­wise, are often approached, at least par­tially, based on the hope that the other per­son will change. This change can take the form of some­thing as sim­ple as prompt­ness, as frus­trat­ing as tidi­ness, or as grand as self-centeredness.

Change, syn­ony­mous with improve­ment, has been the basis of my life. It takes a self-awareness of my faults, com­bined with a desire to change these faults, to improve. Assuming that oth­ers are the same way has been one of the biggest mis­takes I’ve ever made. When the veil is lifted, and I real­ize that some­one is stuck in their per­son­al­ity, I lose my faith in human­ity. For the frac­tion of peo­ple who are con­scious enough to know that they need to change, (and I mean this in an absolute sense, where almost any­one would agree that some­thing needs improve­ment, such as tem­per or closed-mindedness) only a frac­tion of those are actu­ally able to do so.

It’s not that some peo­ple have willpower and some don’t. It’s that some peo­ple are ready to change and oth­ers are not.

This means that when I meet some­one, I either have to accept or reject them for who they are, because that’s most likely who they’re going to be for the rest of their lives. I have to stop accept­ing some­one based on the hope that they will get better.

Acceptance, which has always been a dif­fi­cult thing for me, thus becomes the most impor­tant thing in my rela­tion­ships. It also remains one of the most hard­est things for me to change.

So should I learn to accept this about myself, the way I should learn to accept things of others?