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  Tell me that there is not a fine, FINE line between guiding, enhancing, ruling, complementing, building someone and what amounts to changing someone. 

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submissive profiles.  See how many state that they want someone to guide them, to own them, to make them theirs...and yet note how many of them also state that they will put up a fight.  Now see how many state that they want a dominant to guide them, enhance them, rule them. complement them, build them up but NOT change them.  (snipped)   I've been accused of trying to change someone.  It is a hard thing to deal with because no matter how you show some people that you are doing what they asked for and that it is their own bucking that is creating a problem, the pervasive feeling is that you are wrong.  Now add in that same person telling you, conversely, that if you just "knew" how to handle this better, it would all be right. 

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ORIGINAL: ChasingOblivion

My problem is that I rarely know how much is too much, or at least how much others would perceive as too much.

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ORIGINAL: SteelofUtah

... I had to end it because it wasn't healthy for me and as such I did not like the person I was becoming.

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ORIGINAL: TreasureKY

... I am a very adaptable person.  I am just as comfortable wearing blue jeans and wielding a hammer to build a house as I am in wearing a cocktail dress and wielding a glass of wine to build business relationships.  I enjoy a great variety of things in life and a great variety of situations.  I don't say this to make myself out to be unique... I believe most people are just as adaptable.

This adaptability extends also to the type of person I am with, but it also seems to go a bit deeper.  When it comes to a prospective partner, it is more than simply enjoying his company... I personally change to more closely match the kind of person he is.  This change is not an affectation consciously adopted with the idea of making myself more attractive to him, but his presence naturally brings out in me different aspects of my personality that are complimentary to his own.

Years ago there was a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode by the name of The Perfect Mate.  In it, there was a woman who had from birth been groomed to be a political gift to a leader of another world.  Her uniqueness was that she had the empathic ability to flawlessly and permanently change to become the perfect mate to whatever man she finally "imprinted" on... an ability that was referred to as her being a metamorph.

In that episode she made the following comments:

I wish I could convey to you what it's like to be a metamorph... to feel the inner strength of someone... to realize that being with him is opening your mind and heart to endless new possibilities... to hear yourself say: I like myself when I am with him.

This sentiment resonates deeply within me.  It describes the feelings behind the desire I mention above... the desire to be in the presence of someone who embodies the essence of all that you hold dear in humanity.

While I am adroit in my ability to adapt to and enjoy many different situations and personalities, there are of course my own personal preferences.  In my search for a dominant, I looked for those traits that most appealed to me because, in the end, I wanted to say, "I like myself when I am with him."

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ORIGINAL: pyroaquatic

...This reminds me of the Borg from Star Trek. They assimilate, move on, assimilate..... so on and so forth. I am very sure few people don't know what I am speaking of...

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I tend to believe that every person is the sum of everyone else they have met in their lifetime, and then something extra because the whole tends to be greater than the parts involved.

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I often wonder if there is a certain point in which we stop melding and morphing, shifting and changing into other people and as we begin to decline in our mortality we morph into our true selves, and then we morph into......