We Don't Change. We Get Rewritten
Published in Illumination
The self you swear is really you is just whichever draft you’re on now.
Life is made up of unpredictable chapters, each one leaving its mark on the main character — you. The same way we get pulled into a good storyline, the different stages of our lives have a way of reshaping who we are; adding depth, complexity, and intrigue to our personalities. Do these chapters make us better? Stronger? Do they break us?
Long-term studies tracking shifts in subjects’ “Big Five” personality traits changed the way psychologists think about identity. As people aged, these traits didn’t stay static. They shifted.
The Big Five traits are —
1. Conscientiousness - how impulsive, organized, and disciplined someone is.
2. Agreeableness - how modest, trusting, and caring they are.
3. Extraversion - whether a person seeks excitement and social interaction.
4. Openness to experience - someone’s curiosity and penchant for routine.
5. Neuroticism - a person’s overall emotional stability.
Over the last three decades, dozens of published studies have measured how major family, career, and relationship events reshape these traits. A group of researchers from Germany and Switzerland ran a meta-analysis to find the overarching patterns. In their research paper, published in the European Journal of Personality, they identified which life events are most likely to trigger personality change. Individually, the effects were relatively small, but the researchers suggest that stacked over a lifetime, these small shifts can add up to something substantial.
When it comes to relationships, we never stay the same. These are the chapters that alter who we are…or were.
#1. New Romantic Relationships
Falling into a new relationship tends to increase conscientiousness. We go through a growth spurt of self-concept—suddenly hyper-aware of our partner’s needs, likes and dislikes. Call it the ‘learning phase’, where we’re trying to soak up as much information as we can to relate to then, and let’s be honest, make them like us.
Psychologists say this ‘available’ version of ourselves is really just a modified version of our existing tendencies; one we can only maintain for so long before we revert back to our true self. I guess that’s why my mother would always say, “give it 3 months and you’ll know who they really are.” Don’t ask where she got that timeframe from. She’s never been wrong.
#2. Getting Married
Once the ring goes on, couples tend to become less open to new things. Maybe it’s comfort. Maybe it’s routine. Either way, that 'let’s try new things and get out of our comfort zone’ energy begins to fade once marriage sets in.
Psychologists point to the fact that people often marry those similar to themselves, then settle into habitual routines that favor tradition over spontaneity. The result: more predictability and less appetite for change.
#3. When You Have Kids
Becoming a parent lowers extraversion — probably because parents stop clocking that it’s Friday night and start redirecting their focus inward, toward their new responsibilities. Single people high in extraversion tend to cope with stress by seeking others out; going out, being social, distracting themselves. Parents, now lower in extraversion, cope by wanting to be left alone in their own space.
#4. Divorce
Divorce interestingly, increases conscientiousness. The end of a bad marriage seems to have favorable effects on personality. Conscientiousness being marked by reliability, dependability, and concern for others. Maybe divorce nudges new patterns into place: happiness, freedom or just the relief of a weight finally lifted.
5. Unemployment
Losing a job doesn't just hit the bank account. It’s a domino effect of spiraling emotions if you don’t know how to handle it. Research on unemployment has linked it to shifts in life satisfaction that outlast the job search itself. It makes sense: our sense of identity is often tangled up with what we do, so when that's stripped away, the self underneath has to renegotiate its terms.
6. Loss
We know grief changes people, and researchers have specifically studied widows as one of the more powerful personality-altering events, alongside divorce and separation. Loss-based events, unlike the "gain" of a new relationship or job, take something away rather than add something, and that absence tends to reshape how people relate to others and to themselves, sometimes for years.
7. Moving Abroad / Starting Over Somewhere New
This one isn't necessarily tied to Big Five research, but it deserves its own chapter. Uprooting yourself to a new country with a new language, new rules for how to adjust to your surroundings, doesn't just test resilience, it literally builds an entire new version of you. You become fluent in reading rooms while you learn which parts of yourself are accepted and which aren’t.
I grew up in Greece, then New York, then eventually landed in South Florida, and each move didn't just change my zip code, it changed my defaults. Greece gave me a sense of my roots. New York gave me quicker instincts, thicker skin, and less patience for people wasting my time. Florida, somehow, asked for both at once. You absorb the rhythm of a place, and it becomes part of how you move through everything after.
Maybe that's the real thesis here: we don't have one personality so much as a collection of them, each one shaped by wherever and whoever we were standing near at the time.
We keep asking which version of us is real; the one before the marriage, the one after the kid, the one who existed before grief moved in and rearranged the furniture. Personality was never meant to be fixed. Every place we lived shapes how we live in the next one.
The data backs this up, even if the effect sizes are modest: event-related changes in the Big Five personality traits were small, with effect sizes similar to changes in self-esteem. Small, but not nothing. Stack enough of them up; a relationship, a move, a loss, a layoff, and eventually you're looking at someone who thinks, reacts, and loves differently than the person who started this whole story.
That's the part psychology can't fully measure: it's not that these events alone change us. It's that we let them change us. We don’t just end a chapter and that’s it. We continue to show up for the next one.
So no, you're probably not the same person you were five years ago. The version of you who never changed would've made a pretty boring main character.
Which chapter changed you the most? I'd genuinely love to hear it in the comments.
Notes and References
The authors focused on ten life events: (1) entering a new relationship, (2) marriage, (3) birth of a child, (4) separation, (5) divorce, (6) widowhood, (7) graduation, (8) entering one’s first job, (9) unemployment, and (10) retirement. They found 44 studies that tracked subjects’ big five personality traits before and after these events, and the studies included 121,187 participants in total, almost all from Western countries.
Two clear limitations of the analysis were the use of self-reported data, a regrettable but often necessary hallmark of many social science studies, and the use of subjects almost entirely from Western countries, which mean the study’s findings are unlikely to be universally applicable.
Bühler, J. L., Orth, U., Bleidorn, W., Weber, E., Kretzschmar, A., Scheling, L., & Hopwood, C. J. (2023). Life events and personality change: A systematic review and meta-analysis. European Journal of Personality, 08902070231190219.
Neyer, F. J., Mund, M., Zimmermann, J., & Wrzus, C. (2014). Personality‐relationship transactions revisited. Journal of personality, 82(6), 539–550.
