Want To Break Your Relationship? Try Fixing Your Partner’s Problems

From the full heart I have today, capable once again of swoony lapping waves of love for my partner, I commit to honesty. Here is the real truth about what happened when I tried being a Fixer in my relationship.

My father gifted me with Fixing My Problems as an ambivalent and confusing form of love.

For sure, in his conscious mind, fixing was a love language – something that he, in his healthy masculine, could provide for a person he loved. He was all in for the generous purchasing of plane tickets to cure homesickness or nice meals to cure a bad day, the delegating of a complex problem to someone else to spend time on so I didn’t have to, and coming up with clear and certain fixes I hadn’t thought of yet.

I’d call him with a problem. He’d listen and start with, “Here’s what you need to do,” and – voila! Problem solved.

The Fixer in dad came with his full attention, which felt like sunshine and could easily be mistaken for parenting. And he had a great great mind for problem solving and coming up with genuine, situation-ending solutions.

But here’s where it got sticky for us: when he offered me the gift of his solutions to my problems, he gave himself a gift back: the belief that he had rights to control things. To judge things. To judge ME.

(Photo Credit to ChatGPT for the creative visual)

If mi casa es su casa, then my problems became his problems – not to suffer through, but rather to acquire, the way Goldman Sachs acquires a small business into a private equity fund. When he solved one of my problems, he gave himself a seat on the board. And like any decent board member, he gave himself license to begin going through the books and looking for areas in need of improvement or metaphoric cost-cutting. In MY life.

Wow, this feels so true as I write it, but these reflections are only done by me at today-years-old. Although it often came with unspecified uneasiness as I grew up, I mostly accepted that Fixing was a sixth love language.

And I swear, when I started getting into fixing mode with my partner, K, my intentions were decent, if not pure.

So, it was hard to understand what had happened when my therapist, in a zinger of a truth, told me, “If you don’t stop trying to fix this man, it will be the end of your relationship.”

When I double-click on the ambiguous feelings I often had when my dad swooped in to fix my problems or to fix me, I recall that there was relief, but it always braided together with strands of uneasy. I might not have been able to name it growing up, but I sure can now: We fix things we think are broken.

Every time my father showed up to remove some log across the road of my life, I imagine now, he deemed me incapable of fixing it myself. And here is where I went off track while trying to help K get his business off the ground. Honest painful truth of my heart: I did not see how he was capable of doing it himself. And rather than thinking about other resources – I mean, can any of us do anything significant by ourselves? – my Fixer set out to build his “CEO skill set.”

And while much of what came out of my mouth during those months was intended to be helpful, supportive, and truthful, and was backed by the sophisticated, complex thinking of my brain, it was both intended (unconsciously at least) and received as a vote of no confidence.

It was somewhere in the quicksand arena of the art of acceptance. I accepted that K has shortcomings; I could see them and know and name them. But I fell woefully short of the aspirational acceptance that looks like loving him AS IS and letting his own journey play out.

Acceptance, as it turns out, is a multi-layered thing.

This man I love is so, so far outside the Katz Family Force Field, that on the New Yorker poster that barely notices California … he was in Mumbai. When I’m not in Fixer mode, I remember how intentionally I chose this. In Fixer mode, it’s a problem.

I believe he is smart. He takes in more data on a dog walk than I take in during a month. He notices everything, every fruiting tree and dogs still blocks away, every bird soaring above and every Tesla truck driving by. I believe he clocks details about humans, too, and situations. This is a guy who will spend days or weeks solving a challenging construction project, hanging a sculpture or sheltering the front door from rainstorms – who will keep designing, trying, learning from what fails, and trying again … until he gets it finished.

He gathers information – webinars, books, questions, podcasts – until he understands things to his satisfaction. He is patient.

This is a man who, when he allows himself to be connected and give his attention, is unrivaled. When he gives sunlight to his creativity, he oozes talent.

I love him.

But when I want to create distance, when I want to feed the lifelong narrative that tells me that safety comes from not getting too attached, I will pull out his resume and start red-lining this man I love. The lack of higher education, the use of words that are not quite exactly right or are overly flowery … the un-traveled, low-brow humor parts of him… The way he darts off into a detail like our dog goes after bunnies, the way he can take a 2-minute story and tell it for ten. I think about him in front of the MIT- and Harvard-educated potential investors I know who might give him the capital he needs to get his company off the ground, and it leads me to a deep and vibrating cringe.

I forget, when that Fixer hat rests on my head, that there is a very decent chance that his Every Man is actually the perfect voice for his company. I forget that this great idea he has was actually his brainchild.

I forget all that … and focus only on how all of this might reflect badly on me. And then – wham! – I go even deeper into Fixer mode. It’s not unlike what my dad did, the version of him who told me he was “appalled” when I didn’t know the answer to a history question in Trivial Pursuit – like my ignorance was an embarrassment to him. Like he was mystified and disappointed by the subpar quality of my own Ivy League education.

And with a fair dose of shame, I realize: I have done this same thing to my man, allowed myself to wallow in seeing him through other people’s eyes, people who share the values of the Katz Family Force Field, and started looking for ways he might make me look less in some way. (God, that’s hard to admit. But I promised to stay in the truth here.) And when I feel that way, then I, like my father before me, began fixing – and then, just like my father, claimed a seat on the board.

I have since learned that most companies need a dyad to get them started. Almost never does one person get both skill sets of creative/inventor as well as front-facing/CEO energy. Now, I can see that K is only half of that duo, that he needs support, a mentor, or a partner – not a second personality.

But when I got into my own cringe-y fixing mode, it looked like: how could I turn him into a guy who could sound more sophisticated and smooth during a pitch? Who could run a business? Who could appear to be a financial player and entrepreneurial master? Who could, if nothing else, earn enough money to buy me dinner occasionally?

And with my suggestions, my “coaching,” my knowing, my scolding … I understand now I was poisoning our space. I was projecting my own force field onto him, my fixing serving as a carrot peeler to shave away his own sense of potency and self-esteem. To peel away what is, in fact, magnificent about him.

Acceptance level one: I didn’t pick a Master of the Universe to fall in love with. I didn’t pick another attorney or a hedge fund manager or an Ivy League grad. And I did that with intention. I was pulled in by this man’s availability, his creativity, his presence, and his ability to roll with my occasional insanity.

K is not a CEO, he doesn’t have that energy. Fact.

I can’t give it to him. Fact.

And also, fact: I don’t need that from him.

Acceptance level two: I chose this man for the sheer strength of what it felt like for me to bask in his love – the extraordinary sense of safety and fun and ease that I feel around him. For the knowing that I don’t want him gone or out of my life. So, changing him is not an option.

Acceptance looks like letting him figure out how he wants to handle his own life, his own successes. His own failures.

Acceptance means understanding that when I try to fix him, try to turn him into a different man, I begin to extinguish our flame. It’s like throwing plastic onto our fire instead of nice dry logs.

Coming back to that and holding all the things that are true, the things I like and the ones that make me occasionally cringe … that is how I feed the love. That is where expansive lives.

Fixing means we define a thing about a person as broken.

And once it is labeled that way, we can forget to wonder, What if this isn’t broken, but actually an important plot twist and a chapter I didn’t see coming? What if the so-called fracture is the thing that lets the light in?

When I start to fix, I infuse energy into our space that makes my partner feel broken … and the long list of synonyms that go under broken. Not whole, inferior, less than, not compelling …

Then, when he starts to feel less and less potent, I continue to step back. I feel less attraction, suddenly my text conversations and some sitcom I’m watching become more interesting. Suddenly, I don’t feel like making fun meals together or doing our kitchen dance. Suddenly, I get anxious about our otherwise fantastic sex life.

He of course, being the guy who’s never missed a hawk flying overhead on a walk, clocks all of it. And feels less interesting and valuable to me. And then he starts shrinking even more.

My father’s fixing was, as I’ve said, slippery. Mine is equally eel-like.

Since my therapist’s dire warning, I have done my best to cease and desist. I’ll be honest, I’ve had a few backslides, but I’ve managed to catch myself and knock it off before it got too bad.

And as I’ve stopped, and as I’ve practiced focusing on what I love about this man rather than what’s “wrong,” our flame has recovered, burning again with a consistent blue-bottomed beauty. I’m learning to trust that his missteps, mistakes and lapses – just like mine – are not problems, but rather in service of his learning. I’m finding ways to be of service to him – without fixing.

He doesn’t feel like he’s doing everything wrong (because I’m not pointing it out), which turns out to allow for him to be creative and fun again. Wait, that’s the guy I love!

Do you see how squirrelly this is?

But here’s where I’ve landed: Want to end your relationship? Try fixing your partner.

P.S. As I near the second anniversary of my father’s passing, I also want to say, Hey, Dad, thanks for the love and all these amazing lessons.