There emerged a pattern: I would separate from David, get my strength and confidence back, and then his passion for me would rekindle. Reunited with fresh hopes, we’d share a few deliriously happy days together, or sometimes even weeks. But eventually David would retreat from me once more and I would cling to him (or I would cling to him and he would retreat—we never could figure out how it get triggered) I’d end up destroyed all over again----Eat, pray, love.

Sound familiar? The similar stories might happy at any time, at any place. The relationship between David and Gilbert always ends up in a tragedy. To fix the problem, it seems to be easy. David is always attracted by Gilbert’s confidence and strengths. If Gilbert really wants to keep this relationship, all she only needs to do is to be the independent and confident self. Vice visa, if David wants Gilbert to always be the woman he fells in love with, he should stop withdrawing and show his love and care. Gilbert has just gone through from an ugly divorce, and she really needs to feel being valued, cared and loved. As long as she feels safe in this relationship, she could stop becoming clingy and return back to her old self: confident and independent.

However, in most cases it never works. In a relationship, we tend to mold the others into what we want. We could be persuasive, touching, and hortatory, admonitory and expostulating, if need be vituperative even, indignant and sarcastic. However, the harder we’ve tried, the worse we’ve got. In the end, we might be just like Gilbert, ended up getting hurt or being destroyed all over again.

We could be so stubborn, especially in love.

The better way, perhaps the only way, if you want to change someone, is to start from changing ourselves. If you want to have an ideal partner, don’t try to change your man because you won’t stand a chance. Instead, you should better yourself with strength, courage, confidence, love and kindness, and then your man would realize that he also needs to change to catch up with you. What if he didn’t? Never mind! Now that you’ve got a special appeal and capabilities to embrace the differences, or find your true love, or just to be happy on your own.