by Victoria Tiegert

Created on: February 05, 2009

It happens so often in relationships. We meet, we fall in love, we enter into a meaningful relationship and spend the rest of our time together trying to change each other. It is really quite an interesting phenomenon. It is also an exercise in futility as we really can't change another person. If it seems like we have indeed succeeded in our quest to create a new person out of the one that we chose in the first place, we are really just seeing the facade that they are putting on so that we will leave them alone and in peace.

Taking that into consideration, why do we still continue this manner of relationship? Why not just find someone who holds all the traits we are looking for from the start? There are six key reasons that people who fall in love with a person, supposedly for who they are, only to change them into someone that they didn't fall in love with in the beginning.

1)One reason that many people are attracted to men or women that they want only to change is that they are "saviors". They find their value in saving the world, one person at a time. If they met and entered a relationship with someone that they didn't need to change, what would their purpose in the relationship be? Women are especially prone to this shortfall in relationships. This is quite possibly because of their natural instincts to mother and protect, to create and shape lives. It is a great way to relate to your children, but not to your adult partner.

2)There are times that two people enter a relationship before they have fully matured, such as high school sweethearts who marry young. One of them may grow up faster than the other and struggle to bring their spouse along with them into the adult world that they have entered. There are also other changes that a person can go through in life, which will make them less ideally suited to the person they have committed to be with. It will be their natural instinct to try and bridge the gap that has developed between them.

3)Jumping into a long-term relationship too quickly often means that you end up with someone who won't have the qualities you were looking for. You may have thought they did, based solely upon the way they acted on those first few "best behavior" meetings, but you never saw them on anything but that. When you do, your dreams of the perfect partner has come to an abrupt halt. Time for a change and you think that you are just the person to make it happen.

4)Men and women with low self-esteem may know what they want in another

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