Changes.

I was chatting with some people the other night and the subject of loosing contact with old friends came up. For some people it seems they can't keep in touch if they aren't able to see the person fairly often, for others it's distance that seems to come between them and their old friends. But I think the saddest of all reasons for loosing contact with friends is because they changed when they found a new relationship (Boyfriend/girlfriend). For instance one of us had a friend we had known since high school, nearly 20 years. This friend embraced different cultures, enjoyed learning languages, talked of travel to some Spanish speaking countries in order to use her Spanish language skills, and never spoke a racist word. That is until she fell in love with a racist man. He wasn't very vocal about his racism at first, but slowly things came out. Some times what he had to say sounded okay, until you actually thought about them. So this friend slowly developed into a racist. Getting up set about things that once brought her joy, such as Cinco De Mayo celebrations, and black history month. Maybe it was a good thing when she and her racist husband moved over one thousand miles away, and communication stopped between her and her old friend, because there were no arguments or angry feelings. Just sadness.

That's was the extreme among the people I was talking to, but there were stories of people who gave up things they once enjoyed, and then stated that they had never liked them. Or people who started to watch sports when before their relationship they avoided watching them. I think the strangest part about that is that they all seem to think that they always liked or disliked what ever it was, or they always believed such and such when in fact they didn't before getting involved with their newest boyfriend/girlfriend.

Maybe we all make little changes to our attitude, our outlook on life, and our likes and dislikes in order to suit our new love. I hope that those changes aren't enough to cause friends to give up on me/ you/ us.

On the topic of relationships, what do you think of someone who encourages their lover to behave in a certain fashion but then turns their back on them because it no longer fulfills their needs? How much time should you give someone to ... become more responsible with money for instance, before you decide they aren't going to change enough for you to work it out? And how much responsibility should you take yourself if you used to encourage spending money rather than saving it, for long enough that it became habit in your lover? Are we even responsible for the changes we encouraged in our lovers?

As you can see, I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I've tried to look at my past relationships and see if I changed for them, or if they changed for me or both. It's not easy to see those changes from the inside. I know that I can't say what, if anything, I changed about myself in my relationships, but I can see some changes in some of my friends and family brought on by their relationships.