Living amongst Relationship Chameleons

Are you familiar with the term, relationship chameleon? These two words represent those people who readily change themselves (for better or for worse!) while being in a relationship to suit the personality and lifestyle of their partners.
She used to even hate bushwalking, before she fell for him. She used to be the kind of girl who would enjoy doing something indoors like going for a play or to an art exhibition. But as he entered her life, suddenly she became someone completely different. They were trekking on the backwoods of New Zealand and they went on fishing trips and for camping adventures on the mountain tops. What is wrong if she started enjoying these escapades? Well, the problem was, that she had begun to ditch her friends whenever they would ask her to go see a popular play or an exhibition or an art gallery with them.
Soon, before she realized, there were no friends in her life. She had completely transformed as a person to suit her new partner’s needs and expectations. And in order to do so, she had wiped out all her old friends. Then one day, she woke up to fact that this wasn’t the first time all this had happened. Before the adventurer guy, she transformed herself for the artist guy and before the artist, for the scientist guy. She realized that she tries a little too hard to please people, blending into their surroundings. She was trying from ‘God knows how long’ to be someone else, someone she wasn’t.
She was trying to be someone she never wanted to be, in the first place. Then why was she doing that? The truth is, she has no idea what she really wants to be. She is a relationship chameleon, someone who changes the surface layer of their ‘self’ and tries to appear someone they are not. They do that in order to get the feeling of belonging. But in reality, they do not belong anywhere. They don’t fit in because they don’t know what they really want.
Relationship Chameleons easily get attracted to people with strong individualities. And not just to people, they also get attracted to strong social concepts like marriage. They assume that after getting married to someone, they will start to feel a sense of belonging to a community, to an idea. Sooner or later, the chameleon slips into a new avatar. But since now they are married and they are bounded by a social system, they feel all chocked up and trapped.
Now you must be thinking, is it really wrong to change your personality to suit your life partner’s expectations? No, not at all! In fact, most of the times our relationships make us better human beings. Our partners bring out those hidden talents of our personality which we never knew we had. There is nothing wrong in evolving your perspective towards aspects as you reach a new stage in your life. But if you are compromising your true identity in order to be someone else, you are doing something terrible to yourself.
A relationship chameleon needs to find his/her true identity. They need to seek what they really want, what are the things they like and what are the things they don’t like. If you do not have a sense of individuality, you can never succeed in a relationship. If you don’t know what you want, you will wake up one day feeling completely lost and unfocused in life. A healthy relationship requires two people, each one with a perception and individuality. If you have no individuality, soon you will have no relationship.