“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished,” the Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert said in a 2014 TED talk called “The Psychology of Your Future Self.” He described research<br />that he and his colleagues had done in 2013: Study subjects (ranging from 18 to 68 years old) reported changing much more over a decade than they expected to.<br />When I told Neal about this years later, he said, “Maybe you found it ridiculous because you’d already done it.”<br />It’s true that from ages 16 to 19 I had a lot of boyfriends.<br />That one fling of a bowl probably bought us another five years of marriage.<br />In doing research, I listened to one person after another claim<br />that the street was a shadow of its former self, that all the good businesses had closed and all the good people had left.<br />On the rare occasions when we discussed our future, he said he wasn’t ready to settle down<br />because one day, he claimed, he would probably need to “sow” his “wild oats” — a saying I found tacky and a concept I found ridiculous.<br />When we met in our 20s, Neal wasn’t a man who would delight in lawn care, and I wasn’t a woman who would find such a man appealing.<br />And what is the key to caring less about change as a marriage evolves — things<br />like how much sex we’re having and whether or not it’s the best sex possible?
