Changing Personality in Marriage

What’s personality?

Personality comes from within. Personality traits are the characteristic patterns of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that uniquely define who you are. Some of the most common personality traits are:

Conscientiousness is the looking forward or the planning ahead to do the right things. This personality usually begins in the 20s of an individual and then slows down in the 30s and 40s.

Agreeableness is the showing of warmth, kindness, generosity, and helpfulness to others. This personality accelerates usually in the 30s and 40s in a person’s life.

Companionableness is the being of sociable and energetic, always knowing what to say and how to say it.

Distressfulness is the frequent displaying of worrisome and temperamental behaviors by an individual.

First and foremost, you must be aware of your own personality, and then make some change to adapt your personality to that of your marriage partner, as well as to adjust it to all the changes in the new life of “two becoming one.”

If you don’t like some of your personality traits or those of your marriage partner, can you still change them?

Yes, you can, but it’s not that easy.

According to Sigmund Freud, the Austrian psychoanalyst, some of the personality traits of an individual are already set in stone by the age of five of that individual.

So, how to change the personality traits of an individual?

Show and express the desire and the determination to change the personality. 

Change the habits and behaviors related to that personality trait by doing the opposite. For example, if you’re shy and reclusive, then join a crowd and start talking profusely.

Focus on the effort or the doing, rather than on the thought or the thinking. For example, say “I was successful because I worked hard on it” instead of “I was successful because I was smart and talented.”

Set goals to change your self-beliefs through repeated self-affirmations.

The reality

Your happiness has much to do with your personality development throughout your life. In other words, your life experiences and your own perceptions of those experiences not only define but also shape your personalities, which are uniquely yours.

So, it’s impossible to say why some people are happy, and why others aren’t. Just as Leo Tolstoy, the famous Russian author, said in the beginning of his novel “Anna Karenina”: “Happy families are alike; unhappy families are unhappy in their own ways.”

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

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