He/she said she/he’s changed but he/she’s still hurting me/treating me badly/is still the person with the bad habit/attitude. I thought things will be different this time.
…And that’s how people are sucked back into bad relationships, bad business…bad everything. Just like how people can overestimate their interest in/for a relationship, the desire or faking to change can also be overestimated. Sometimes they’ve been pretending the possibility of changing over and over again down the years to family, colleagues, friends, and exes – you just don’t know it.
You’re just someone else believing in them and buying into their deceit and waiting tirelessly for the ‘never coming change’. When you ask some people why they give up their relationships and marry someone else, the first answer they give is ‘I thought he/she will change or I thought with time he/she will change’. That’s when you see people staying in boyfriend/girlfriend relationships for 5+ years with the lady (usually) mounting pressure on the man.
Not to say people don’t change (the real change), they do and they really change not necessarily because they want people to accept them but they do so to help themselves and they motivate themselves to change. In short, they change regardless. In some cases, they have little or no interest to pursue someone they’d once been with, except maybe to apologize and move on and start afresh with someone else. Everyone else stumbles around blindly, repeating the same mistakes but when it becomes a cycle, that’s a problem.