<human>: Can you give me a shortened version of the text?

I don't know who to talk to about this in real life because it makes me seem like a pretty bad person, so here's a Reddit post. I've noticed a pattern in my relationships over the past several years where most girls I date have one thing in particular that they really care about, environmentalism, social justice, travel, cooking, whatever, and during the relationship I'll never be able to care about it as much as they do, it just never clicks. 

Sometimes, especially if it's something I didn't particularly care for beforehand, I'll catch myself being dismissive of it for no real reason even, i.e. "Do we have to spend this much time making a meal, lets just order pizza" or "Do I have to wash out all these beer cans, recycling doesn't matter that much lets just toss them out." 

Then, once we've broken up, without even consciously deciding to do it I'll realize that I care about whatever it was. Not in an "if I start to care maybe I can get her back" kind of way, just in a "this makes me feel like a better person, this is a good thing" kind of way. 

It makes me feel like I'm just an amalgamation of things other people have been, as though if I tried hard enough I could probably trace almost every habit I have to somebody in some way or another, even down to the way I hold a pencil being the same weird way my dad learned to in home-school or the way I hold a cigarette being the same way the [cigarette-smoking man does in X-Files] (a silent reference I'm forever hoping will spark a conversation with a stranger, which never does). There are things that I care about that I always have cared about that are /my/ things, for lack of a better phrase, but the longer I live the more I feel like those things aren't changing. 

But that's not really the important part, and I'm starting to waffle, because the main
<bot>: is **I can't bring myself to care about stuff other people care about until it's too late, does anybody else have this problem and if so what do you do about it?**