Fix You

by maryhelenc, posted in Douchers, MH vs Dating, My New Life As Me, Relationships, Seriously WTF?

Over the last week, A friend of mine has struggled with her partner’s despondence. As we sat on her patio, she asked me a question:

“How do I fix her?”

Sadly, the answer is that you can’t. The cold reality is that you cannot “fix” a partner. All you can do is love them, respect their limitations & accept them.

Sometimes people don’t communicate the way we want them to. Sometimes they don’t communicate at all. I communicate too much. But the thing about relationships is that we always try to force the other person to communicate the way we want them to instead of accepting them as they are. I’m guilty of communicating too much, and it ends up getting me into trouble.

You cannot “fix” your partner and too many of us spend too much time trying to make people do things the way that we want, but that never works. No two people communicate the same way and many of us struggle to find a way to make the person we love understand what we need from them.

That’s when we have to let them do what they need to do in order to feel better, even if it sucks for us. We have to stifle our hurt feelings, our inability to understand why they won’t just talk to you about what bothers them, why they’d rather run away from their problems than just communicate, why they paralyze themselves with fear or vice versa, why won’t that person just shut the eff up?

We have to learn that with love comes respect, patience and faith. Respect for their wishes, patience that eventually they’ll come to you and faith that when they’re ready, they’ll listen with an open mind and you can work through the things that hold us back. It’s all we can do really.

So, even when it’s hard and you don’t understand why your partner is doing the things that they do that you just don’t understand and you wish you could wave a magic wand and fix their troubled mind or help them feel better, we have to remember that we can’t fix them, because they’re not broken. They’re simply just different from we are and eventually, you’ll find the compromise and everything will be okay.