The great question

The great question in life is not whether to be or not to be.
At least not in the world of relationships.
Rather, it's whether you can change a person or not.

This issue was discussed in SATC and it is usually discussed from a girl's point of view so it takes a more specific form of: can you change a man? But I'm sure there are boyfriends who are dying to change their girlfriends. So I write here in a gender neutral form.

But for the sake of the conversation -- and since I'm a woman -- let's say the person in question is male.

I'd never actually consciously felt the desire to change my past boyfriends. Not because I liked them just the way they were but because I saw no need to stay with them and try to change them. The thought of trying didn't even occur to me. Of course I was young. I wasn't afraid of commitment but I wasn't particularly interested in it either.

With my current boyfriend, I'm overpowered by the urge. I love him dearly but there are some things that just rub me the wrong way. He's not the type of guy I normally date (and my parents, at least my mom, disapprove of him explicitly) so maybe this is the natural course of the relationship. I get infatuated, fall in love, and since I see so many obstacles in the way I attempt to change him to fit into criteria more acceptable to my parents and thereby putting myself more at ease.

And I constantly ask myself whether this is an endeavour worth embarking upon. Is he just another guy with which I enjoy a transient love affair or can I seriously contemplate on a future with him? I've always been pessimistic about sustaining this relationship up to the point of marriage. So what am i to him? What makes me so important that he should try to change?

Since I cannot answer these questions my attempts have been passive-aggressive at best. Would I change for him? I cannot answer this either. It would be very hypocritical (not to mention selfish) of me to ask him to change while I myself am reluctant to do so.

My psychiatrist told me not to worry myself about the future. But how can I not? Robby Burns even wrote a poem about it and mused that mice are of the better fortune than humans because they need not worry about the future. I was raised and conditioned to think this way for the past 23 years of my life. How can I simply change that?

Sometimes I think that I should share these thoughts with my boyfriend.
And then I realize there are things that I should discuss with him and things that I shouldn't; this belongs to the latter.