When one partner grows and the other doesn't

The Short Version

When one partner starts growing and the other doesn't, the experts here agree on a few things. You can't force the other person to change, pressure backfires, and the best thing you can do is keep growing yourself and let your example speak [1][2]. Where they split is on what comes next. Mel and Chris Robbins say to have an honest conversation, stop pushing, and later ask whether the gap has become a real deal breaker [1]. Joe Dispenza says not to work on the relationship at all: stay elevated, and if your partner pulls away, let them go [2]. Esther Perel frames the moment as a normal part of long love: many adults will have two or three marriages in their lives, "And some of us will do it with the same person but the relationship has to change" [3]. Put together, the most hopeful reading is that growth doesn't have to end a relationship if both people treat it as the start of a new chapter they renegotiate together instead of a verdict on who's better.

Table of contents

What They Said

Mel and Chris Robbins: grow yourself, have the conversation, then back off

In a listener Q&A, Mel Robbins and her husband Chris, together for 30 years with three adult children, took this question first. A listener named Rachel wrote that she was working on herself but her partner wasn't as focused on personal growth [1]. Chris called it "the million dollar question" because "it points to a potential fork in the road where somebody is growing and somebody has outwardly chosen not to" [1].

You can't make someone happy, and you can't make them grow. Mel started with a line she once heard: "the secret to a happy marriage is to marry someone who's happy." She went on: "you cannot make another human being happy. You can make them a cup of coffee. You can make some reservations. You can make the bed that you both sleep in, but you cannot make someone else happy. You can also not change somebody or force someone to grow" [1]. So her first piece of advice points inward: "stop focusing on what your partner is doing and focus on taking the actions that make you a better person, that make you a happier person, invest in your own growth. Because when you do that, you naturally bring it back to the relationship" [1].

Pressure creates resistance. Mel's The Let Them Theory has a whole section on this, built on what she calls a fundamental fact about human behavior: "People only change when they feel like it. And when you pressure another person to change or to grow in the ways that you are, your pressure doesn't create change. It creates resistance to change" [1]. She warns that if you grow and your partner doesn't, you're likely to start resenting or judging them for not doing the work you're doing [1].

The question shifts from commitment to compatibility. Mel describes where this can lead: "As you grow, if your partner isn't, there will come a time where you're not going to question your commitment, you're going to question your compatibility." You start to ask, "can I be in a relationship with someone who is exactly as they are and not willing to lean into life and grow?" [1]. Chris pushed back gently. He didn't see much difference: if your visible growth isn't inspiring your partner, that already points to a lack of compatibility [1]. Mel's answer was that you have to talk first, framed around how their lack of interest in growth affects you emotionally, whether you feel unsupported, or whether you're worried about them [1].

Growth is frightening to the partner watching it. Mel's second point is the one most people miss: "when a person in a relationship starts to change and grow, it is extraordinarily confronting and scary to their partner" [1]. She told a story against herself. A couple of years ago, Chris decided to stop drinking. She was supportive at first, and he "never, ever shamed me or made a request of me to stop drinking. You chose to do that for your growth" [1]. But around the fourth day, while she was cooking dinner with a glass of wine, she offered him one, joked that it was "kind of just like juice," and kept pushing [1]. She now admits she was undermining the change he was trying to make [1]. Chris doesn't remember what he said, but Mel says it changed her life: "Mel, no one cares what's in your glass, but you stop asking me if I want to have a drink." When she said she felt weird drinking alone, he told her that if she was self-conscious about what was in her glass, she should look in the mirror and ask herself why [1].

The lesson, Mel says, is that you understand intellectually that a loved one's growth is good, but watching it forces you to look at your own behavior [1]. Chris didn't argue or preach. He kept focusing on his own change, and that quiet example influenced her. You can't force someone to change, she says, but you can influence them: every time Chris gets up an hour and a half before her or takes the dogs on a loop, she thinks she should do that too [1].

A word to the partner who feels left behind. Chris spoke to the other side. When your partner takes off, it's easy to throw up your arms and decide you can't catch up, but "there is always a perfect time to make that choice regardless of what you're you're significant other, may or may not have done" [1]. He also said that "people also tend to change when they're given the space to come to their own conclusions and feel like this was their decision, not their partner's decision," and suggested sending the episode to a partner as a way to open the conversation [1].

Mel's closing recipe for this question: have the conversation, affirm that you love and accept them, apologize for pressuring them, ask for the support you need, and then back off [1].

How to tell if it's a deal breaker. Mel accepts Chris's point that it can eventually become a compatibility issue. If you get sober and your partner doesn't, "It's a deal breaker to be with somebody who drinks. That's okay" [1]. Her test: "If the person never changes, they keep drinking, they never take care of their health, they never address the depression, they never speak you kindly. Can you continue to choose them and love them as they are?" The only way to answer is to ask whether you can stop complaining about it: "If you can't end your complaining, this is a deal breaker" [1]. Based on the research in her book, she defines deal breakers as "things that make you give up on your dreams and your values," and says most of what frustrates couples isn't that at all: "They're just differences in what people prioritize in their life" [1].

Related answers from the same episode. Several other listener questions touch the same theme:

• Outside pressure. Chris quoted "A house divided cannot stand": pressure from outside can't tear a couple apart, "It's the cracks from within your relationship that do that." The fix is to sit down, however long you've been together, and agree on your values, your parenting style and why [1].
• Drifting apart after a big change. For a couple who felt distant after kids and a move, Chris said to "Carve out a dedicated moment in the week to do something either familiar or totally new" [1]. Mel described the weekly couples therapy they had for a couple of years. The best part, she said, was a protected 40 minutes once a week to talk about how they were doing: no phones, no children, no pets, and not a date night [1]. After moving from outside Boston to a small Vermont town, they made a point of exploring something new once a week [1].
• Losing yourself. To a listener who felt she was losing herself in her marriage, Mel said it wasn't a marriage problem but a personal one: "There is no reason why you should lose your identity to your marriage" [1]. Her advice was to make growing yourself your purpose for the next six months, because "you were not put on this planet to just be somebody's spouse," and without your own purpose you'll blame your marriage for its absence [1]. Chris, who runs a men's retreat, said many of the men haven't even found a hobby that fuels them [1].
• Unspoken needs. "Never expect your partner to read your mind," Mel says, and "Nobody can meet your expectations if they don't know what they are" [1]. Unspoken expectations turn into a resentful tone that kills relationships through "death by a thousand cuts" [1].
• Different backgrounds. After a clash over whether to send an Uber for a child flying home from college, they realized each was acting from how they'd been raised. Mel's conclusion: the point of a relationship isn't to turn each other into each other but to co-create it by understanding where the other person comes from [1].
• A live epiphany. Arguing about whether their son should have a car at college, Mel realized she decides fast because the unknown feels scary, while Chris stops to think: So I step the gas, you tap the brakes. Taking two or three minutes to discuss why one of them is a yes and the other a no revealed something larger. It's the kind of discovery about each other that 30 years together hadn't produced [1].

Mel ended the episode with a line she'd recently heard: "second marriages are amazing, especially when they're with the same person." In her view, every morning is a chance to create a new marriage with the same partner [1]. She described marriage as "this organic thing that grows over time as you both grow," and said there is always something to learn "if you're willing to not lean away from each other, but to lean into each other" [1].

Joe Dispenza: become the example, and don't drag anyone

In his conversation with Lewis Howes, Joe Dispenza treats love as something you generate inside yourself, not something you find or get from a partner [2]. He asks people to write down everything they want in a partner and then become it themselves, and he poses the question "Would you go out with you?" [2]. In his framework, neediness pushes love away because it comes from lack. "When you feel so whole that it's impossible to want—you no longer draw from the field. You give to it" [2].

He's blunt about relationships: "I will never work on a relationship" [2]. His reasoning is that when two people bring their best selves, the union creates what he calls constructive interference: more energy, expansion and mutual celebration. If one partner is reactive or in emotional survival mode, the answer isn't to fix the relationship but to return to a state of inner coherence. Take space, reground, and then re-engage from love rather than defensiveness [2].

On a partner who doesn't grow, his answer is clear. Don't preach, don't drag them along and don't force the journey. Instead, be the living example. Stay elevated and joyful. If your partner meets you there, wonderful. If they resist or regress, stay happy anyway, and if they pull away, let them. Your happiness doesn't depend on their growth. And if the relationship ends, he says, it wasn't love you lost; it was an energetic agreement that had expired [2].

Dispenza also describes what keeps people from moving forward. In his view, people get emotionally addicted to the past. Every thought releases chemicals, so dwelling on an ex or an old hurt reproduces the same chemical state as the original event, and resentment, fear and shame become part of your identity [2]. He says the heart, opened through gratitude, compassion and love, produces a magnetic field that can reach up to three meters beyond the body, and that a coherent heart sends signals to the brain that create gamma waves associated with bliss and creativity [2]. These are his claims and his framework, presented in the conversation without studies. Readers should weigh them as his model of how change works, not as established findings.

Esther Perel: several marriages, sometimes with the same person

Psychotherapist Esther Perel, speaking with Andrew Huberman after almost 40 years as a couples therapist, gives the widest frame [3]. Relationships, she says, both confirm who we are and change us: "We meet another in order to find ourselves," and also to be surprised by parts of ourselves we don't yet know [3]. Everyone has two sets of needs, for security and for freedom and adventure, for togetherness and for separateness, so relationships involve a constant pull between identifying with a partner and differentiating from them [3].

Several marriages in one life. Perel thinks many people in the West will have two or three relationships or marriages as adults. Sometimes, "in order to become adults it may need to happen with a different partner." But "some of us will do it with the same person but the relationship has to change. It's like the person changes the relationship but the relationship makes room for the person to change this is dynamic" [3]. Huberman agreed, drawing on his field: "all of life is one big development," and he cited Erik Erikson's stages and how different we are in our twenties, forties and sixties [3].

Perel stresses that this is a creative process more than problem-solving. When a couple reinvents their relationship, they redefine the power dynamic, their interdependence, their erotic charge and their connection to the world. "I am not there to help people survive," she says; she wants to help them feel alive [3]. Modern freedom to reinvent relationships, careers and where we live is rich, but it brings anxiety and demands maturity [3].

Cornerstone and capstone relationships. Perel separates cornerstone relationships, formed in the early twenties when a couple builds its foundation together (first money, first home), from capstone relationships, formed a decade or more later when each person already has a defined identity and wants a partner who recognizes it [3]. Young couples often pour their energy into building the unit and later face a crisis about whether two individuals can emerge within it [3]. That's the situation many couples are in when one partner starts growing.

What attracted you can become what you fight. Perel adds an important pattern. We're often drawn to partners because they have something we'd like more of in ourselves. Her example: you're attracted to someone stable, grounded and punctual because you'd like to be more that way, but later you experience them as rigid and start fighting their rigidity instead of growing toward what drew you to them [3]. Every system, she notes, straddles stability and change and struggles for balance [3].

The intimacy dilemma. Perel defines the core task of intimacy as "how do I get close to you without losing me? And how do I hold on to me without losing you?" [3]. Couples often pair one person more afraid of abandonment with one more afraid of suffocation [3]. She asks people who fear losing themselves how often they don't say what they think in order to keep the peace, and notes that intense rigidity over small things is often really a fight for self-preservation [3]. In her view, even affairs in happy relationships are often about growth: people tell her "it's not that I wanted to find another person. It's that I wanted to find another self" [3].

Curiosity instead of reactivity. Perel calls curiosity one of her most important words because it's the opposite of reactivity, which drives rapid cycles of escalation, defense, attack and blame; "curiosity is an active engagement with the unknown" [3]. Much of what couples say is "pseudo factual talk" about what happened, when it's really each person's subjective version [3]. She describes three patterns of conflict: both partners attacking, both withdrawing into silence, or one pursuing while the other distances [3]. Often the past takes over. In one of her examples, one partner's silence recreates a childhood feeling of neglect for the other, while the partner being pursued relives being overwhelmed in a chaotic childhood home: "their younger selves have completely taken over" [3].

Nobody is fully ready. When asked who is ready for a relationship, Perel says "nobody's ready as in I'm prepared I'm perfect I'm fully baked." Instead, "everyone has relationship issues they're going to have to address at some point in their life the only question is with whom." She adds that "we're all works in progress" and that "many relationship problems are not problems that you solve their paradoxes that you have to learn to manage" [3]. She often asks clients, "knowing yourself as well as you do what you think makes it hard to live with you" [3]. She also notes that couples often come to her with deep insight into their partner's flaws and little sense of being part of a system, treating her like a drop-off center for the partner's problems [3].

Renewal after a rupture. Perel's model of repair after hurt or betrayal ends with a stage she calls erotic recovery, which applies well to any couple starting a new chapter: "erotic recovery is not about comfortable and familiar and the return to the status quo erotic recovery is about new risky curious playful unknown," so that the couple can "see ourselves a new as who we are and how and who we are together" [3]. Before that comes acknowledging the other person's hurt and showing that you value them. She warns that "it's sometimes easier to stand in front of someone else's anger than someone else's hurt" [3].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

All three agree that you can't force a partner to grow. Mel Robbins: "your pressure doesn't create change. It creates resistance to change" [1]. Dispenza: don't preach, don't drag them, don't force the journey [2]. Perel's work is built on each person owning their part rather than diagnosing the other's flaws [3].

They agree that your own growth is the best lever. Robbins says your growth naturally flows back into the relationship, and Chris's quiet sobriety influenced Mel more than any lecture could have [1]. Dispenza says to be the living example [2]. Perel's picture of a relationship that "makes room for the person to change" assumes individual growth is healthy and expected [3].

They agree that change is normal, not a failure. Perel sees several "marriages across one adult life as normal [3]. Mel describes marriage as this organic thing that grows over time as you both grow" and quotes the idea that second marriages can be with the same person [1]. Dispenza expects change too, but he's quicker to accept that it may end the relationship [2].

The biggest disagreement: work on the relationship, or only on yourself? Dispenza says, "I will never work on a relationship." In his view, the fix is always inner coherence, and a partner who pulls away should be let go [2]. The Robbinses do work on the relationship: they talk about how growth feels to each partner, spend protected weekly time together, went to couples therapy, and take a few minutes to understand why they disagree [1]. Perel is a couples therapist whose whole method treats the relationship as a system two people co-create; she notes that the couples who struggle most are those who see only their partner's flaws and not the system they're both part of [3]. The reason for the split is how each defines love. For Dispenza, love is a state you generate yourself, so a relationship is a meeting of two whole people and an ending is just an energetic agreement that has expired [2]. For Perel and the Robbinses, love is also a shared structure that has to be renegotiated as the people inside it change [1][3].

A smaller disagreement: when does it become incompatibility? Chris Robbins suggests that if your visible growth doesn't inspire your partner, that already says something about compatibility [1]. Mel slows it down. First comes a conversation, an apology for pressuring and time; only later does the question become whether you can accept them as they are and stop complaining [1]. Perel doesn't set a threshold, but she accepts that sometimes growing up "may need to happen with a different partner" [3]. Dispenza puts the threshold in the partner's response: if they pull away, let them [2].

How they see the partner who isn't changing. Mel stresses how scary a partner's growth is to watch, and her own wine story shows the non-changing partner acting out of self-consciousness, not malice [1]. Perel would likely see this in terms of each person's history and how the past can take over the present [3]. Dispenza's framing is less sympathetic: he describes people addicted to old emotions and identities [2].

Why It Works

Pressure creates resistance; space leads to change. Mel's "People only change when they feel like it" is backed by her book's research, she says [1]. Chris adds that people change more readily when they feel the decision was theirs and not their partner's [1]. That's why modeling works where preaching fails.

Growth threatens the other person's identity. Mel's wine story shows the mechanism: watching someone you love change makes you look at your own behavior, which can feel threatening even when you support the change [1]. Perel's account of attraction explains why: we often choose partners for qualities we'd like more of, and later fight those qualities instead of growing toward them [3]. Her intimacy dilemma, staying close without losing yourself, explains why one person's growth can feel like abandonment to the other, or like suffocation to the one growing [3].

Past patterns take over the present. Perel says the hardest part of couples work is that people don't realize they're reacting from their past [3]. Huberman adds that brain imaging work by Allan Schore and others shows the circuits that support infant-caretaker attachment are later repurposed for romantic attachment, which may explain why partners stir up our earliest needs [3]. He also quotes a line he attributes to Paul Conti: "you didn't have six hard relationships. You had one hard relationship six times" [3]. Dispenza gives his own explanation: repeated emotional memories keep the body in the chemistry of the past [2].

Curiosity breaks the cycle. Perel's argument is that reactivity narrows people into attack and defense, while curiosity opens up the unknown [3]. That's the stance a couple needs when one partner has changed and the other doesn't yet understand what the change means.

Novelty renews the relationship. Chris's suggestion to try something familiar or totally new each week [1] and Perel's description of recovery as "new risky curious playful unknown" [3] rest on the same idea: a couple sees each other freshly by doing new things together, not by returning to the old status quo.

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

The advice fits the common situation the sources describe: a basically loving relationship where one person has started exercising, getting sober, pursuing therapy or a new purpose, and the other hasn't [1][2]. It also fits couples who drift after big changes like children or a move [1], and couples who met young and built everything together before either had fully formed as an individual [3].

Some limits:

• Some differences are real deal breakers. Mel is clear that if staying means giving up your dreams or values, such as living with active drinking after you've gotten sober, it's okay to decide it doesn't work [1].
• Most differences are not deal breakers. Mel's test is whether you can accept the person as they are and stop complaining about it; many frustrations are just different priorities [1]. Perel adds that many relationship problems are paradoxes to manage, not problems to solve [3].
• Just leave if they don't keep up is Dispenza's view, not a shared one. His framework is more individualistic than the others', and his claims about magnetic fields and energetic agreements aren't supported by evidence in the conversation [2]. The Robbinses and Perel put much more weight on talking and renegotiating [1][3].
• Growing yourself isn't the same as disappearing. Mel says reclaiming your identity doesn't mean packing your golf clubs and vanishing. It means telling your partner you've lost yourself, explaining why you want to grow, and asking how to make it work [1].
• Some situations need a professional. The Robbinses credit weekly couples therapy for a protected time to talk [1], and Perel describes how old childhood patterns can take over a couple's conflicts [3]. If growth is bringing up addiction, depression or deep conflict, a licensed couples therapist or counselor is worth the investment.

What To Do With It

1. Invest in your own growth first. Focus on what makes you healthier and happier instead of monitoring your partner's progress [1][2].
2. Stop pressuring, and apologize if you have been. Pressure creates resistance [1]. Mel's recipe: have the conversation, affirm your love and acceptance, apologize for pushing, ask for the support you need, then back off [1].
3. Frame the conversation around your feelings, not their shortcomings. Say how the gap affects you emotionally, whether you feel unsupported or worried about them [1].
4. Expect your growth to feel threatening to them, and watch for it in yourself. Remember the wine story: support can quietly turn into undermining when someone else's change makes you uncomfortable [1].
5. If you're the one who feels left behind, start anyway. "There is always a perfect time to make that choice," whatever your partner has done [1].
6. Protect a weekly time to talk, and try something new together. Keep 40 phone-free, child-free minutes to check in, and plan something familiar or totally new each week [1][3].
7. Replace reactivity with curiosity. Treat your version of events as a story, not a fact, and ask what's really going on for your partner [3]. Ask yourself Perel's question: "knowing yourself as well as you do what you think makes it hard to live with you" [3].
8. Renegotiate the relationship out loud. Treat this as a new chapter: revisit your shared values, roles and how you spend time together, the way the Robbinses sat down to agree on values [1] and the way Perel's couples redefine their power dynamic and connection [3].
9. Apply the deal-breaker test honestly, and only after trying. Can you choose and love them as they are and stop complaining? If not, and the gap costs you your dreams or values, it may be a real fork in the road [1].
10. Treat every morning as a fresh start. Think of "second marriages" with the same person: lean into each other rather than away [1][3].

Sources

1. The Best Relationship Advice No One Ever Told You · The Mel Robbins Podcast
2. Dr. Joe Dispenza: Transform Your Mind for Lasting Love (Part 1) · The School of Greatness
3. Esther Perel How To Find Build Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships · Huberman Lab