My best friend has come out and completely changed personality at the same time

[User20191]

Background...I’ve known her since I was 10 and we are now in our thirties. She has dated men and been in relationships always, long term ones. Always very into make up, enjoyed watching tv and the cinema, wanted to progress at work and enjoyed her independence. She was caring about family and made effort with friends and has always wanted children.

She came out in February, met a woman online in April and has suddenly stopped wearing make up, got rid of her tv, gone down to part time and moved 2 hours away from family to rent a house a mile from this woman. She says she no longer wants children.

These new things very much reflect her girlfriends approach to life.

Just to be clear this isn’t a jealousy thing and of course I am understanding of her desire to spend time with her new girlfriend. But I find the sudden change in her personality quite drastic. Should I be concerned for her?!

Sounds like she always moulded herself around the men she was with and tried to appeal to them, and she is now doing the same with the girlfriend.

Or maybe this is the alternative scene, no tv, no makeup, and shes just experimenting?

Maybe. I was just worried she was doing drastic things and changing her outlook on life for this woman. I’ve met the girlfriend and she’s nice.

It all seems odd and totally uncharacteristic from the last god knows how long

Does she have any mental health issues that you know of, or has she made drastic changes before?

No never made changes before and in particular was set on having children and also never wanted to live in this particular place until she met this woman. In fact she was very against it. I just worry she’s not focusing on herself much and has now uprooted her life to live down the street from someone who owns a house but isn’t ready to live with her. Fair play but she shouldn’t then be moving 2 hours to live down the road and pay nearly double rent compared with where she was before.

Maybe I am worrying unnecessarily. She just seems like a whole new person but maybe that is who she really is.

Sounds like she realised she's spent her whole life following a set of external culturally constructed rules for how to be female, including assumed heterosexuality, and has just managed to figure out that she doesn't have to do that.

tbh losing interest in makeup and popular culture doesn't sound like a huge personality change unless your original personality is really shallow, and ones opinion about whether to have kids is not part of anyone's personality.

yoba I’m not sure I agree. If someone passionately wants children then that’s part of who they are. It’s also not shallow to like wearing make up and can be a feature of who someone is just in the same way as someone who is into tattoos or piercings.

Maybe she was fooling herself with what she thought she wanted at that time? And now she is accepting that she likely didn't want those things, just felt like she should

Yep that is probably it!

My friend did the same thing. I think it was part of figuring out her identity. I was supportive and there for her throughout her very self reflective transition from 'a little bit bi' to 'lesbian' - both her words (we lived together on an overseas posting) but when we got back she didn't want anything much to do with me and just said a lot of anti-"breeder" slurs every time we were together. I overreacted (I was young and didnt quite get what she was going through) and got offended after a bit and the friendship came to an end. I've heard from mutual friends she's calmed down a bit around straight people but it was obviously something she needed to do to test out her new sense of self. I wish I'd not lost the friendship in the process as we were close.

A friend of mine did something similar

I had to hear on the grapevine that she was gay and later that she was living with a woman

We were really close friends, and if anything I was always more pro/accepting of LGBT people (as in I was completely and she wasn't) than her, but she dropped me upon reinventing herself, still hasn't officially come out to me, and sometimes I wonder if she's falsely painted me to acquaintances as not supportive as an excuse to ghost because of timing.

I also think she doesn't want someone who knows her as well as I do in her life post reinvention

I find it bizarre but the way she's played it out means I no longer care enough to confront her.

I'd be concerned but partly because I knew a girl who did exactly this, and then committed suicide. Obviously not saying your friend's in danger of that but the sudden and drastic change is concerning

Well in my teens & 20s I wanted at least 4 kids - perhaps more. Until I was a lodger in a house with a small child and realised quite how much work it was and how overwhelmed the single mum who I lodged with was. I was then anti-kids for the next 10 years before I decided I might be able to cope with parenthood. My personality didn't change. The facts available to me and my opinions and conclusions did.

And I don't know anyone whose personality could be summed up with two examples of things they like. Personality is about things like sense of humour, open/closed mindedness, conscientiousness, level of extro/introversion, etc etc. Tastes and opinions are not personality.

Maybe she was just conforming before? She wasn't out so she had to play the 'hetero-femininity' game?

Or could she be in an abusive relationship where this woman is controlling/dominating her? It happens .

I have a friend who is similar. She has been with both men and women and each time she has a totally different personality. It's like she morphs in to what she thinks is their ideal person and becomes borderline obsessed with them. Suddenly she is die hard fan of a band/football club etc. She also compromises a lot of her own happiness and like your friend she decided she didn't want children anymore with her most recent boyfriend, but he broke up with her a couple of years ago and now she's talking about using a sperm donor. Unfortunately she might struggle as she's 40 now it's so sad, I think she has really low self esteem

My personal experience has been that several of my friends changed quite a bit after coming out. Not in a bad way - I think it was just their genuine, unforced personalities and tastes coming through after years of self-censoring. Possibly a couple of them went a little to extremes as a reaction to years of repression but that's understandable. Plus, when people come out, they often face the same old questions again and again, asking them if they're sure they're really gay, so it's understandable if they react by adopting a more exaggerated persona so they don't have to keep defending or proving their sexuality at every turn. For instance, a female friend of mine at university gave up make-up for a while after coming out. As she grew more confident in herself, she

What Yoba said.

OP, you sound as if you’ve decided that this new self is inauthentic, and she’s ‘really’ a makeup-wearing, TV-watching, work-and-family-minded straight person. When it’s at least as possible that it’s the other way round, and this is who she really is, that she wants to assert her independence from her family if she’s always lived near them, wants to explore non-mainstream/consumerist ideas of female beauty, and is more into women than she is into the idea of having children. (Obviously lesbians can have children, but it’s not ‘assumed’ in the same way...)

With my friend as well I felt like she knew that I'd be supportive of her sexuality (she must've done) but part of her reinvention meant massively airbrushing history and personality facts I would've been able to challenge - so I was for the bin because I knew too much

With your friend OP I do think it's a bit worrying because of the dramatic and intense lifestyle changes involved

resumed her obsessed with expensive make-up and grew her hair long again. I guess she'd become secure enough in herself not to be worried about twats thinking she wasn't a "real" lesbian because she didn't look like their idea of one (if that makes sense!).

Thanks for the insightful posts.

I’m not at all saying I think it’s inauthentic. I’m saying it’s a drastic change and it concerned me.

I couldn’t care less what life choices she makes or what make up she wears as long as she’s happy. Moving two hours away (incidentally closer to me) is odd to me when you’ve known someone only a short time and they clearly were unwilling to move to you or uproot their life. That coupled with the other changes is a little concerning.

I think some people have a tendency to "mirror" the person they're currently with, not necessarily because the relationship is abusive but because their sense of self isn't very strong. My mother was racist and materialistic when she was with my father, passionate about her Scottish ancestry and birdwatching when she was with a Scottish birdwatcher, a heavy drinker when she was seeing a married alcoholic, and she's now primarily into gardening because her current partner is. It's not a conscious thing - she just doesn't seem to have a very strong identity of her own and she takes on the personality and interests of the last person she was with. I've had friends of my own age who were the same, flipping from "stoner" to "cycling obsessive" on a change of boyfriends, without even being conscious of it. It's disconcerting but not automatically a red flag unless there are other concerns.

Is she happy?

Is it possible she doesn't really know who she is so was mirroring you before and the gf now?

Moving two hours away (incidentally closer to me) is odd to me when you’ve known someone only a short time and they clearly were unwilling to move to you or uproot their life.

But if you look at it another way, wanting to move away from family could be seen as a natural response to coming out, embracing a new (and still far too often stigmatised) sexuality, and making decisions which are likely to cause comment and consternation among relatives (deciding she doesn't want children). Especially if she's always lived in the vicinity of her family, a move could be a good thing.

I mean, one person's 'deeply eccentric and concerning alterations' is another person's 'normal'. For some people, stopping wearing makeup is a sign of depression/poor self-image/'letting yourself go', while for others (including a lot of people on Mumsnet) it's liberating, time-saving, and involves a whole new appreciation for what women actually look like, and an impatience with gendered grooming norms. Some people's work is the cornerstone of their identity, for some people it's a means to an end, and they arrange their life to be as little work-focused as possible.

Obviously, if this relationship ends, and your friend gets a new girlfriend and suddenly moves to Glastonbury to embrace Wicca and live in a commune, and the relationship after that involves an exclusive focus on the death-metal scene of Tamworth, then you'll be right to be worried. But there's nothing in what you've said so far that's incompatible with the possibility that your friend is figuring out who she really is.