Things I changed my mind about because I grew up, educated myself or just changed my mind because we are allowed to do that.
Why do people think that when you’ve made a decision about something you then have to stick to that for the rest of your life. Can you imagine if we did that collectively across the globe, throughout time?
“I’ve decided I’m going to travel everywhere on my horse.”
Then someone invented a bike or the car, or buses and trains, aeroplanes.
“No thank you, I’m quite happy sticking to my horse”
or
“Oh no I’ve cut my finger, I’ll rub some tree sap and liquorice root on it, that worked last time.”
“Oh but we’ve discovered penicillin now and antiseptic ointments that work quicker and are safer”
“No thanks, I like gangrene”
“Well another day another baby to sacrifice to the fertility gods”
“Oh no, we don’t do that anymore, it’s immoral and pointless. You can stop”
“No thanks, I made this decision long ago and I MUST stick to it. I can’t go changing my mind otherwise my entire life will fall apart and people will make me out to be a liar because I learnt something new and changed my values to become a better person.”
It’s such a weird concept that we have in our heads. And, for some reason other people LOVE to tell you when you’re doing something different, which is weird because you’ll already know you’re doing something different because you’re the one who is doing the thing differently!
For example: I used to hate rats, I was terrified of them, I thought they were dirty, disgusting, flea ridden, well, rats! That was until Chris wore me down, he would send me cute little pictures of them cuddling tiny teddies, and tell me how wonderful and intelligent they are. And now, I love them! In fact we’ve had 5 of them as pets, and they really are adorable and potentially the most stupid intelligent things I’ve ever know.
You are perfectly, well within your rights to change your mind about things. This isn’t lying, this is simply you changing as a person. You can change your mind, your opinion even your beliefs.
With that in mind I bring you to my entire reason for this post…
I’d always been quite “traditional” when it comes to relationships, I use the word traditional, loosely because it can often be a generational thing that deems the rules of certain parts of our lives.
However, what I mean is, I always had ideas of the roles of men and women. If you know me now you’ll probably not believe this because I’m a fairly liberal, feministic, laid back human. I think the shift in me came from being completely honest about my sexuality, I would describe myself as pansexual.
This then started a process of thinking about gender roles in same sex relationships. This is turn throws out ALL of the rules!
And being part of the LGBTQ+ community, who was I to argue?
However, I’m getting off track. I firmly believed (believed past tense) that you should never sleep with someone unless you were in love with them (a rule I had throughout my teen years, and if you have this rule, that’s great, you do you), that men should ALWAYS make the first move, men should ask out the woman, etc, etc. (I was okay with bill splitting, the equality was fighting its way through.) And the pièce de résistance; women should never, ever, under any circumstances, ask their male partner to marry them. Absurdity. The men do the proposing, not the women….
And please take a moment to read this little snippet I wrote all that time ago…
‘Should Women Propose?’ – words from a woman who no longer exists!
I read this back to myself and cringe, who was that person who believed those things? Why did she believe them? Where did those ideas come from. I can make an educated guess where they came from… movies! Bloody Hollywood, ruining perfectly good female to male chat up lines since the 1900s! I don’t regret what I said, believed, wrote, etc. I think we go through things to become who we are, we learn from it, that’s how we change. But I do feel fully embarrassed for my past self. We shall pity her.
Well if you’ve read this far, thank you. And if you follow my social media you’ll have seen that I went against my strictest beliefs and, after nearly 10 years of being together I asked my boyfriend to marry me, and he said yes!
So yes, we are allowed to change our minds, our opinions and our beliefs. Don’t let people think you’ve done something wrong just by becoming a different person. Like I said at the top of the post, the world would be a very different place if we never learnt, developed and grew. I think stubbornness can play a part here too, you probably think that if you change then you’re previous opinion was wrong, it wasn’t wrong, it was just what suited you at the time. There are no actual hard and fast rules for this sort of thing. For the last 20 years I’ve loved scoffing bacon sandwiches and dairy milk in my gob, and for most of that 20 years I believed only men should propose; now I’m a pescatarian, I no longer eat chocolate and I’ve asked my boyfriend to marry me!
Don’t be afraid of change, embrace it, learn from it. Be honest with your values and with yourself. It’s liberating to sit and look at what you hold to be true and just openly being yourself.
I’m getting married!!
Made A Hames 
Proposing, hand on heart and on one knee, is old fashioned. These days it’s a mutual discussion and decision between equals.
Absolutely! Marriage and children should be something discussed early on in a relationship, and it shouldn’t be seen as being over keen, or “bunny boiler”, as it sadly often is. If you’re going to commit yourself to someone but you know you don’t want to get married then you need to know what your partner also wants.