I personally feel that if you are in a relationship with the right person, there is little to compromise on as you would share the same values and have similar goals in life although you may not have similar personalities.
Compromise is, however, sometimes required for a temporary or long-term adjustment on small issues. If you are finding yourself in a position where you have to compromise on everything, visibly, you are not in the right relationship. If the balance is 50/50 then you are probably in a relationship which is not perfect but you may be willing to settle for this and work regularly on your relationship. If there is little or no compromise to be made on one side or the other, you are in the perfect relationship and have found your significant other. Good for you.
In all cases, if you are a good person, you need to make sure that the compromise you are making is not against your core values.
We all have core values that we consider as having built the floor level of who we are and other peripheral values that have been added on through the years and which we may relate to less strongly. Compromising on your core values makes you adjust to being a different person than who you are intrinsically, at the bottom of your heart and soul. Being a different person totally throws you off balance and although you may sustain the compromise on a short-term basis, the long-term effects of that compromise could result in the destruction of who you are. Indeed, our core values are often interconnected and the removal of one of them tends to have an effect on the other remaining values.
Change is good when it enhances your good qualities, strengthens your core values and removes only the peripheral but it can be disastrous where it destroys who you are.
In some extreme cases where your core values were wrong or built on wrong assumptions, you will find that the loss of those values is a good thing but it is seldom the case. This only would have happened if the references and role models you had as a child were corrupt. In that case only, you should embrace the new core value and compromise to keep the relationship. After all, it might be that you have met the one who will make you a better person.
So whenever you feel an external impulse to compromise and change, take some time to examine what kind of value is at stake, reassess that value if it is a core value and be ready to compromise on it if it is not a core value and the relationship is important to you. If it is indeed a core value and you have reassessed it as necessary and good, give up the relationship if the other is not willing to see the importance of that value. If your core value is necessary to you but not a good value in its effects (say like valuing very hard work to an extent that it is the only important thing in life) , you might want to do some more introspection into why that value was a core value in the first place and what interior need in you made that so. Once you have dealt with that, you can assess what other value you could replace it with and then merge it into yourself to form a new core value. This is not an easy process so you would have to be patient.
Always remember that whatever the nature of the relationship, if that particular someone at the other end of the relationship keeps asking or pushing you to compromise and let go of your values one after the other, chances are it was someone else they had in mind and are shaping you out to be that person in their minds. But you are no figment of someone's imagination. You are you and any relationship you have with another person should be built on who you are and not on whom the other person wants to be in a relationship with.
Don't change for anyone, unless the change is good for you. The essence of who you are should only give in to the possibility of who you could become if the transformation were necessary to make you a better person. Be yourself and always differentiate between your own core values and those that are external
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_31Ut_KpLQ&feature=related
