Personality: does it change? And what does that mean for romance and career?
It’s been a truism at weddings and marriage/dating/love conferences and messages:
The person you marry will not be the person you are married to.
My wife’s been married to five different people, and all of them have been me.
The idea seems intuitive. Of course, people change. Don’t they?
Well, they do and they don’t. And it matters, both in your romantic choice and otherwise, that you know how personality changes as well as how it doesn’t.
For our purposes, we’ll consider personality from a Five-Factor Model perspective, since that’s how we’ve been addressing personality traits on this blog.
As it turns out, these 5 observed traits and their underlying biology do change… a little bit.
Scientific Trends of Personality Change With Age
Daniel Levitin in his book Successful Aging notes the key ways that in fact, the five central personality measures tend to change across the lifespan. They are, summarily, as follows:
Agreeableness typically increases with age.
Conscientiousness increases with age until the 50’s or 60’s, at which point it decreases with age slightly.
Openness decreases with age after one’s 50’s. People become more traditional and content with what they know.
Neuroticism decreases with age, though may increase slightly after 80. People become more emotionally stable and less anxious and prone to negative emotion.
Finally, Extraversion decreases slightly after mid-life.
Like anything, there are exceptions and some debate despite the observations. But numerous studies more or less confirm these trends (like this one).
So there you have it! Personality changes and all the marriage truisms above are true.
Or are they?
As I said, it’s not that simple.
First off, the actual changes aren’t typically huge.
Furthermore, while the basic five traits undergo these slight changes, how a person works with their personality and develops themselves is an entirely different matter. Just because there are tendencies over the lifespan (perhaps biological or social, likely both), this doesn’t mean we have no influence over ourselves, or that life events don’t impact us at a deep level.
Besides this, your underlying temperament is only part of your whole person. It’s a significant part, to be sure. But it’s not the whole story.
Personality is not destiny.
Because every human psyche has so much similar underlying structure – such as the Big Five traits – there appear to be archetypes that we all understand in a deep way. These archetypes manifest in the stories we tell, which also (often) follow those general structures.
These archetypal stories give us hints as to how people can and do transform over the lifespan.
The classic one is called “The Hero’s Journey.” It’s essentially as follows:
- Hero leaves home, often by necessity or calling.
- Hero fights dragon, villain, or achieves a feat of some kind.
- As a result, Hero saves damsel, obtains vital information, undergoes transformation, etc.
- Hero brings new value back to his home.
- Hero is transformed and evolved, as are the people around him.
The Everyday Hero
Whether or not any of us fight a dragon (or even leave our homes) we’re all familiar with leaving our comfort zones to stretch ourselves and become better. While life may come at us with various Hero journeys, we experience almost daily journeys and challenges where we can improve ourselves with effort, remain stagnant or, worse, give up and backslide.
This is the question for every person, every day. Will you grow? Or will you stagnate and backslide, perhaps slipping into a devastating failure, unable to meet the demands of life?
Another way to think about the Hero’s Journey and other archetypes of transformation is a movement towards wholeness.
You’ve heard this called other buzzwords: individuation, self-actualization, manifestation, integration. They all essentially mean the same thing, and I think that one of the major aspects of becoming whole is a kind of “personality balancing.”
RELATED: Use this series to figure out how to develop yourself and your personality.
That brings us back to the Big Five.
We all know the type who doesn’t grow towards this wholeness. Neurotic types who never learn to control their negativity. Open types who just can’t anchor down. Low-conscientious people who never bother with a schedule.
Others, by contrast, are proactive.
They double down on the conscientiousness that comes naturally with age and become far more reliable. Perhaps they open their minds and force themselves to remain explorative, fending off the tendency to become more simple-minded with age.
Point is, you have some control over how things go. You can integrate, optimize and compensate, even if you won’t totally reverse your underlying proclivities. This is what it means to move towards wholeness, making the most of your strengths and developing your weaknesses.
This is part of what it means to “grow up.” Children are black and white, too immature to adapt and be flexible when they don’t feel like it. True, developed adults (archetypally, anyways) adjust to the world and move beyond the simplistic adaptations that childhood may have pigeon-holed them into.
The types who never evolve, who never settle down, or who remain lazy forever fall into the Peter Pan archetype. They remain in Neverland, avoiding adulthood at all costs.
Life’s Big Choices
Let’s bring this full circle. I started this article talking about romantic relationships. Understanding how personality changes can help you make a more informed decision about romance as well as career.
While we have freedom to develop and grow ourselves, the fact seems to remain that the five factors are relatively stable over time. Moreover, personality can tend to create needs and not just tendencies.
That’s why introverts don’t just prefer alone time. They actually do need alone time. They’ll become drained and exhausted if they’re always surrounded by people.
Remember those supposed truisms I started the post with? “My wife has been married to five people, and each one of them was me!” for example.
That’s both true and not true.
Life no doubt brought out different parts of this man, and his personality and behaviours grew and manifested in different ways.
Chronically stressed husband is different than relaxed and on-vacation husband. Spouse who achieved some major life goals is happier and less anxious now than they were when you met. And so on.
That said, her husband is more or less the same dude he was decades ago, because his underlying personality didn’t change a whole lot.
One of the reasons I bring this up is because people often use the “oh but they’ll change” excuse when they’re marrying a person. But the fact is, they won’t. The altar won’t change it, and life is far from guaranteed to change a personality in major ways.
That’s good to know.
Is your partner the more spontaneous type, but can struggle with laziness? He’ll likely tighten up, but it’s doubtful he’ll do the reversal. Is she less open-minded and likes to keep things simple? It’s unlikely she’ll be stoked to join you at Anime North after 10 years of marriage.
Knowing the general trends of the Five Traits is helpful for romance because you can have a good idea of who your partner is and who they will become. You should like whoever they are and be okay with the general trend that they are on. You can have hope that they’ll grow up and become more “whole,” but that their natural inclinations won’t completely reverse.
Finally, knowing how personality changes can be informative for selecting a life or career path.
Do you doubt your ability to be conscientious? Age will assist you, if you let it.
But it may be wise for you to reconsider a job that requires heavy work hours and lots of responsibility, since your more spontaneous personality isn’t going to reverse. That will affect job performance and satisfaction, at the very least.
All that to say, give some thought to who you are as you consider what you are going to do.
People make excuses like “people change” all the time in order to justify romance. Many others make career and life choices without considering who they are and what is best for them and their temperament.
Don’t be fooled; personality remains relatively stable throughout the lifespan.
Doesn’t mean we (or they) can’t grow or develop. It does mean that it’ll be an uphill battle in some cases, and that’s important to know.
