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.