The standard narrative around relationships is “don’t change.” Popular music is full of lyrics reminding us that we fall in love with someone and, from that point on, they must stay just the same. Forever.
It’s utterly unrealistic to commit to someone in your twenties and expect them to be the same person, with the same views, values, curiosities, and tolerances, thirty years later. At best, you can hope that you are both drawn to something so deeply intrinsic in each other that it remains recognisable, even as everything else evolves and changes. The simple reality is life is all about change. It’s learning, experiencing, stretching, failing, recalibrating until one day we look back and say ‘I’ve changed’.
Ch-ch-ch-changes
Some changes are subtle. Others arrive like a tectonic shift. We grow in ways we never imagined, for better or worse. Our desires, tastes, preferences, and interests shift just as dramatically as our bodies do. One season we’re playing hard sport and chasing adrenaline; another we’re quietly studying philosophy or longing for stillness. One moment loving wine, the next never touching it, instead preferring whiskey. Or tea. Or nothing at all.
When long-term relationships and marriages fail and couples say they’ve “drifted apart,” it’s often framed as a tragedy or a failure. But drifting apart is almost inevitable, because each person has changed over time. That isn’t a flaw. It’s a feature of living and growing. What kind of life is it if you haven’t grown through it? And if you’ve grown, you’ve almost certainly changed.
The honeymoon phase
Many relationships begin with common interests. It makes sense, shared activities create a connection and the basis for starting a relationship. But interests alone are rarely enough to sustain a relationship over decades. Hobbies fade, bodies age, passions and circumstances change. The things that once bonded us can lose relevance, or even become points of friction.
We’ve all heard the story arc: the “honeymoon phase” of intimacy, passion, and excitement, eventually replaced by resentment, routine, or the dreaded “ball and chain” feeling. Somewhere along the way, intimacy becomes transactional, or conditional, or something that lives on a to-do list rather than naturally fueled by desire.
The intimate side of relationships is often the first casualty of unacknowledged change. Sometimes desire is lost in one-half of a relationship first, leading to a feeling of rejection on the recipient’s side. This is so common its almost become the standard narrative for intimacy. The story is all around you played out by friends, colleagues, clients even strangers you pass in the supermarket.
Real intimacy requires more than attraction or shared history. It requires ongoing engagement, choosing to stay present with someone who is not the same person you first fell in love with, and allowing yourself the same freedom.
This is where many relationships quietly break down. One person grows while the other stays anchored to an old version of the partnership. Or both grow, but in different directions, without permission or courage to talk about it. Change becomes threatening, then destructive instead of collaborative.
There’s an unspoken expectation in many relationships that growth should happen together and at the same pace. But that’s not how humans work. We evolve in fits and starts. We are shaped by experiences the other person may never fully understand even if they witness them.
Regular meetings
Loving someone long-term isn’t about freezing them in time. It’s about meeting them again and again, as they are now then as they will be. That requires letting go of the fantasy that love means permanence of personality. It means replacing it with something more grounded: adaptability, respect, and, above all, honest communication; both giving and receiving.
Healthy relationships make room for reinvention. They allow space for periods when one person leads and the other recalibrates while observing. They tolerate discomfort without immediately interpreting it as danger. They create safety for change rather than punishing it.
The end is not always a failure
And sometimes, despite effort and care, two people grow into versions of themselves that no longer fit together. That doesn’t mean the relationship was a failure. It means it served its purpose for a time. At that point it is vital to learn the lessons of why it ended in preparation for the next relationship to avoid ‘rinse & repeat’.
We don’t question outgrowing jobs, homes, or belief systems. Yet we treat outgrowing relationships as moral shortcomings. Perhaps the problem isn’t the drifting, it’s our refusal to accept that change is inevitable. Love that lasts isn’t love that resists change. It’s love that learns how to embrace it.
And maybe the most radical relationship skill in all is this: allowing the people we love, and ourselves, to become who we’re meant to be, even when it’s uncomfortable, unfamiliar or different from what we once knew or expected. If we can’t do this we have to let them go, after all no one owns anyone.