I’ve always thought that listening with empathy to the other’s opinions is incredibly valuable, especially if the opinion is different from yours. I don’t hide that keeping this idea was really hard after listening one show on Netflix…

Few days ago a friend of mine invited me to his place for a dinner, and we listened one speech of Daniel Sloss, a comedian that - among all the things is doing - is having his main shows available on Netflix.

After the first laughing against the vegans, he started his “sad bid” where he explains that having a relationship should be natural and easy; that it is common that people become sad trying to change themself for a relationship they don’t even really want. The sentence that summarizes the bid is the following: Fuck off, there are 7.5 bilions of people. I will find someone that will love me for who I am 100%.

And this was basically the opposite of what I thought.

Then, my Instagram algorithm started to showing me sentences like “People should accept me for who I am”, “Change the sentence ‘I can work on it’ to ‘accept who I am’”, and so on.

Curious, isn’t it? But I tried to be open-minded…

It is in fact true that there are 7.5 bilion of people available for us - 50.4% male and 49.6% female to be precise - and we can find someone else if we don’t like our relationship. However, it is also true that every person is unique and find 100% of compatibility is impossible.

In other words, for a fully compatibility a change is needed. Change is actually inevitable. When we think about ourself, we can easily realize that we are constantly changing and the concept of ‘who I am now’ sounds a bit fragile.

Do you know what is the thing that is most influencing me in my process of change? Relationships. Not only love relationships, but also friendships and relatives: they influence a lot who we are.

For example, if you want to start to read, you should consider to sourround yourself with people who read: that would semplify a lot the process. Or, if you want to eat healthy, don’t stay with people who go for junk food every day. Or finally, one of the most important sentence we can find in ‘self development’ is: “we are the average of the 5 people we attend the most”.

Indeed, when we accept someone in our life (friend or partner), we accept that he/she will influence our lifestyle and somehow who we are.

Daniel was right about something though: we don’t have to change in one specific direction if we don’t want to. However, we should accept the change as part of our life, and part of the relationship.

We can actually think of a relationship as a direction for ourself. According to me, this helps to understand if one relationship is good for us. Instead of thinking “is this person accepting me for who I am?” - try to ask yourself: “is this relationship leading me to the person I want to become?” or “how will I be in 5 years if I continue this relationship? Is it the person I would like to become?”

It actually doesn’t matter how hard is the change you have to do. When you change, change it in the direction that you want. And when you decide the direction - especially if the change is significant - don’t give up in the hard moments during the transition: they are natural steps that are required for the change. And without working hard it is not possible to achieve important results for the person we would like to be.

I hope that you consider this thought useful for you.

Have good relationships!

Cheers