When you are planning for future, you would like to get your partner or spouse onboard. Your adviser would say “start with yourself”. When you are talking or even complaining about your family, your work, your colleagues, people would say “change yourself first”.
You started.
You’ve found the solution to a problem.
You’d feel better as if you’d hit a home run. Then what?
It is often the case with me that I cannot really transform myself to new-me because of my partner’s flipping attitude towards new me. His punchline is always “you think you are better than me”.
When I become new-me, I need to draw a new boundary. It is as simple as that. Should we argue, we’d better for the sake of my new found self-assertiveness. New-me would handle the argument better than old me anyways. I may not even have to argue for that matter (which was not the case this time, I might add).
Not only need I change but also he needs to change like everyone for the sake of the self-assertiveness. When my partner changed, I may or may not resist his new boundary.
We just take it one day at a time.
