ideas

As you grow older, does it become more easy or more difficult to accept opinions opposing your own? I am not sure of the answer.
When you are young you have a firm belief that what you experience or what you think is the only truth and this is strangely coupled with an insecurity that makes it necessary to have that view endorsed.
As you grow older, you are less firm in your views but also need less endorsement from others and are more accepting of others' views.
I would like to think this is how it is. I know this is how it is with me when it comes to trivial matters. But will it stand the test of some serious differences? I don't know.
An embarassing episode happened to me. When I was 17 or 18 years old, I used to read a lot, and I had just read Anna Karenina. A friend who did not read much, was my bouncing board for thoughts and ideas. I was one day expressing the view that love was everything and marriage, fidelity etc was prisons of society. I was actually thinking aloud about this.
However, about 25 years later, the friend and I met up at the airport just as she was leaving , and she told me that she was contemplating an extra marital affair because of that conversation. She believed that I would still be of the same view!!
How can a 18 year old understand what leaving a husband and child to go away with a lover, will do to her, her child , her husband and even her lover? And how can a 40+ year old woman not understand that at 18, one is just trying out ideas ?