Can People Actually Change? Here’s How It’s Done, According To A Couples Therapist

No relationship is perfect. Whether your person is just not meeting your sexual needs or doesn’t really show you they love you much anymore, it’s normal for life to sometimes make it hard to be the best partner you can. Maybe there have even been affairs or ultimatums thrown into the mix. But when it comes to hard conversations about what we need, is it even worth it? Can people actually change, or are you doomed to be the only person pulling your weight around the house ‘til death do you part?

Can people actually change?

We all tend to have some beliefs about change — that only people who want to can, or that no one can ever really change at all. It all depends on our past experiences. But yes, people really can change according to Kathryn Ford, M.D., psychiatrist, couples therapist, and author of the new book THE APERTURE EFFECT: A Radically Simple Approach to Finding Joy and Connection in Your Relationship.

“Our brains are very well-equipped to do two things. One is to maintain stability, and two is to change. The brain is constantly learning and remaking itself, so we're very well-equipped to do that. On the other hand, there are a lot of things that get in the way, and that has to do with the stability part of the brain. Our brains learn to mitigate danger by predicting the future from the past. Very useful, except that in relationships when the past has been not so great, you've been fighting, you've been at each other, predicting that that's what's going to happen next is like a self-fulfilling prophecy. It really gets in the way,” she says.

What we should really be asking, she argues, is how do people change. “How people change in a relationship is by, first of all, knowing that change is completely possible. Then it's a matter of knowing what the right conditions are and how to set them up. Couples get very discouraged because they try to do what they know how to do, and then they try to do it again and again. And then they try to do it harder, and louder. And often we don't know what to do,” she explains.

How to make changes in your relationship

Let’s say your partner is not pulling their weight around the house, and it feels like even though you both work, the household chores and mental load fall squarely on your shoulders.

1. Have a conversation about it — the right way.

Don’t try to talk about changing the chore chart while you’re feeling angry or resentful. Make sure you’re both feeling open to listening and able to speak to each other lovingly, Ford says. If either of you has a hard time talking about issues in your relationship, or you’re both feeling shut down after fighting the same fight yet again, maybe bring down the stakes at the start.

“‘Look, we’re just going to talk about this. We’re not going to make any decisions. I just want to hear how you’re feeling about it, and I want to tell you how I’m feeling about it,’” Ford says. “Things like that help people take the tension level down a little bit, and then they can talk better.”

Ford says you should basically treat this like you’re interviewing each other. That means keeping your emotions in check when one person hits what Ford calls a doorbell comment: “We have to talk about the dishes.”

“Ding dong, uh-oh, there’s a problem. And then everybody takes a breath. And then the person that heard the doorbell says, ‘Oh, come in and tell me what you have on your mind.’ And then you say, ‘Well, here’s what I really want.’ And then you get the story, but you never assume that the first statement is the story. It isn’t.”

2. Focus less on fairness and more on what benefits the relationship.

Hold on — that doesn’t mean just shouldering all the work to smooth things over. It just means that a 50/50 perfectly even division of labor isn’t right for everyone. “The question is not, ‘How do we make it 50/50, or how do we make it fair?’ What you're looking for is the answer to the question, ‘What’s going to be best for our relationship? What’s going to make both of us feel fairly treated, loved, and like we’re a team?’” Ford says. The answer to what that is is very individual; every couple works that out for themselves. But they work it out best, based on this guideline of, ‘What’s going to make us feel the most happy with this relationship? The most loved, the most cared about, the most treated fairly?’”

You should also try to get clear about what your partner’s help might mean for you. “You washing the dishes at night means I have a clean kitchen and pans so I can make breakfast for the kids before school” is much more impactful than, say, “you never do the dishes in the evenings.”

3. Expect the change to start slowly.

“You have to do 80% of the work to get the first 2% of the change. You have to effort and effort and effort, to just kind of turn the corner. Think of it like this: if you're in a downward spiral, the effort to reverse direction is 80% of the effort. Once you've got the direction reversed, you're kind of home free. Now, you're on the straightaway, and you still have to pedal, but it's not like climbing the hill.”

This early part is where people tend to get discouraged — we just talked about you doing the dishes in the evenings and you made it what, two nights?! “But if it was two, after zero, that is actually the most important thing,” says Ford. “You’re looking at what they changed and you’re thinking, ‘This is just a puny little thing. This isn’t what I wanted.’ But what’s not puny is the effort it may have taken to do that.”

She says the partner asking for change needs to rein in the criticism and praise the hell out of their person when they do the thing. “You say, ‘Oh, wow, it was really cool when I got up on Thursday and kids’ lunchboxes were sitting there sparkling clean. I love that. Thank you so much. I get that you’re trying.’ And then he might say, ‘Yeah, I’m really sorry about the other days. I’m just having trouble adjusting to this idea of the lunchbox as important.’” And you say, ‘Don’t worry about it. We’re on a good track. Let’s see what happens next week.”

4. Schedule some check-ins.

Deadlines are important, as we all know. “‘In two weeks, let’s talk about this again. And if it’s not solved, let’s try to figure out why not,’” Ford says. “For some things, it could be two weeks. For other things, it could be two months. But you kind of agree to look at it as a series of experiments. And after you do your experiment, you’re going to get back together, and review the results.”

What if you don’t see any change?

All Ford’s advice up to this point assumes that both partners actually want to change and be good to one another. If your partner isn’t changing, does that mean they just don’t care about you?

“The hard question is, is this somebody who basically is a good person, who is well-intentioned, who is trying to do right in life? That’s not true of everybody, but it’s true of almost everybody,” Ford says. If you genuinely think you’ve married one of those rare, legitimately bad people, Ford says “it’s time to find the door.” But in most cases, you may be with a good and well-intentioned person who just needs to work on how they show up in the relationship.

“They may know very little about how to have a conversation, how to apologize when things go off track, how to negotiate who’s going to clean. They may have very, very rudimentary skills, and your skills may be different,” she says. Here she acknowledges that men and women are socialized differently in our society, and women tend to be better at identifying and talking about feelings. Men can certainly learn, but don’t think your partner — no matter their gender — will automatically have the same emotional and relational skills as you.

“Assume that if this is a person who means to do well by you and by everybody else in life, there is the potential for learning. And you have to turn the corner towards realizing, it's all about learning, and we have to help each other learn as we go along...by being patient, by being curious, by having great conversations.”

Lastly, Ford says to talk about a shared vision of what your relationship looks and feels like. Don’t beat each other up for not being there, but partner together to work to get there. You’re not trying to return to how things used to be, she says, but aspiring to a new and better version of your relationship.