Are You Looking to Fix Your Partner?

“Who someone could be still doesn’t change who they are. Never fall in love with someone’s potential because you could be falling in love with a person they’ll never be. Don’t let your hope make you blind to reality.” @trentshelton

If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say if only my partner would... everything would be perfect, I’d be a rich woman. Far too often we enter marriage thinking it will fix the other person or make any issues we have disappear. It feels, when we are under the spell of love hormones, that love is all we need. It can be easy to believe that ours is a love deeper than any ever experienced by anyone else, so no problem will ever be too big to overcome. Down the road, every problem, every annoyance is still there and now we are living together and joined in a legal contract. Is it any surprise the average marriage lasts roughly eight years?

One of the biggest relationship red flags is when someone says of their partner, ‘they have so much potential’. That says, I don’t love and accept them for who they are, but who I can mould them into. The Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program states, “One sign of relationship problems, now or in the future, is when you focus on your partner as the source of the problems”. We want other people to do the changing, to meet us where we are. It is far easier and less painful to have others change than to examine ourselves, discover our flaws, and do what needs to be done to change ourselves. It is far easier to see where someone else is wrong.

A bigger question is: does your partner see they need to be fixed or do they even want to be fixed. Likely, if they wanted to be fixed, they would have done so already. Real change comes from within. A permanent fix is less likely if it comes from an external source. I saw a news article about a young man that had died from an overdose after having been in rehab, not once but twice. If we don’t have the motivation internally, when we find ourselves under pressure or facing things that are triggers, we slip back into old patterns if our motivations are less than a genuine sense of wanting to be better.

Do you feel your partner needs a whole lot of work? If this is who you have chosen, is it actually that you are settling? The desire for love is powerful and in the search for it, we sometimes lower our standards to find it. It makes it easier to see past the red flags, including the fact our partner is a complete tear down. This plays into the question of why you want to be in a relationship. If it’s for reasons of need rather than want, we are like a starving man, subject to taking whomever we can get our hands on. Is this really what you want for yourself?

One thing you may not want to explore is whether the issue you want fixed even rests with your partner. It might actually be you. Dr George Simon had a couple come to see him because the husband saw the need for professional help to fix his wife who was ‘difficult’. Simon, during the counselling sessions, determined the person that needed the most change was in fact the husband. The husband couldn't see it, not until after a divorce and several failed relationships.

We have blind spots when it comes to ourselves. Our partner’s flaws are as visible as Christmas lights on a dark night to us. When it comes to our own: What flaws? Do I have flaws??? You have them as well and likely your partner is very aware of them. They too may be hoping you’ll change. The thing to remember is that the only person we have control over is ourselves. We should focus not on hoping and nagging our partner to get them to be who we want, but on why these things bother us. What can we do to make this area of our partnership better? Are these issues deal breakers? We should not hope to make someone over, we need to take them as they are, warts and all, or be ready to move on.

Do You Both Have the Ability (and Income) to Live Independently?

“Hope for the best, plan for the worst.” Lee Child

Evolutionary study suggests that couples came together to ensure that their children survive to pass on their genes. While, once this was necessary, society has put in place safeguards, so now the community helps in this regard. Marriage has come to mean something else.

We now marry for happy ever after. And a lot of bad reasons. We just have no idea what comes after the fairy tale wedding. Too often, the wedding alone is the goal. Television shows abound about the wedding. There is no reality show called, “Who does the dishes?” that follows newly married couples struggling to split up housework. We have been fed too many romantic notions about love and marriage and lack a clear picture of what love is like over a lifetime.

People come out of divorce finding that they lack certain skills or financial means. The sad truth is: too many women and children live in poverty after divorce. I know no one reading thinks that this will happen to them – I know from personal experience, that person was me. Right up to the end. You may not change, but your partner may. And where does that leave you?

While you have a fifty percent chance of your marriage ending, you have an even higher chance that something bad will happen. When will a job loss, critical illness, or accident befall your household? If you reach your deathbed without such a hardship, you need to consider yourself very blessed. Within the span of a year, three women in my neighbourhood suffered the death of their husbands. Not unusual if these were seniors, but these were women in their thirties and forties. We never know when a crisis will hit, so we should have the skills necessary to run our life independently.

Partnerships work best when we are whole people. When we have the skills to take care of ourselves. Marriage is hard, even though you may love each other completely. People change, love changes, and life throws a lot at us. Having an ability to adapt and a wide skill set is hugely beneficial in helping you navigate the twist and turns life can have.

A neighbour suffered through a period when her husband was hospitalized. She confessed she had never spent a night away from him since they became a couple, some fifteen years earlier. She could not sleep without him there.

A marriage should be a coming together of complete people, not people who need completing. After a divorce, men tell me they did not know how to put a ponytail in their daughters’ hair or sew on a button. Women tell me they did not know what a furnace filter was or where the shut-off valve was for the house water supply. When couples come together for a need – financial, lacking skills, emotional help, etc. – we have a scenario where there could be imbalance in the relationship.

Just because you can do everything, doesn’t mean you have to or necessarily should. My view of a relationship is that we, as a team, work with our strengths. My daughters played soccer and, standing on the sidelines, it is clear that to win, the team needs to put players where they excel. My daughter would not have been efficient in the goal, but she sure was great at defence. I have rebuilt a transmission, but I would rather bake a birthday cake.

When I was married, one of the bathrooms needed a small repair. Once the materials were purchased, I asked my spouse when it would get done. ‘Whenever you do it,’ he replied, because I needed to be able to do these things for myself. I did, it took probably twice as long as it would for someone skilled in these sort of things, but it was a good job. That same afternoon, he asked me to do a mending job on a piece of his clothing, failing to see the irony in the situation.

If you see yourself in this missive, there is an easy fix, even if you feel you will never divorce. Ask your spouse to show you how to do the things you do not know. A last and really important reason to be as complete a person as possible within a coupling: it makes for a stronger relationship.