The Fixer loves a man for who he could be instead of who he is. You see his potential so clearly that you've built the relationship around it, working harder on his growth than he ever has, and waiting for a version of him that may never arrive. The blind spot is that you're in a relationship with a possibility, not a person.
The Fixer falls in love with the idea of who a man could be instead of who he is in reality. From the outside it looks like patience, loyalty, and trust, but underneath, it's a way to avoid feeling what's really true about your experience of him day by day.
The thought running underneath: "If I love him enough, he'll change."
What it looks like
Maybe you've caught yourself wondering things like this: Why do I keep waiting for him to change? Why does every fight end with me deciding it's just a rough patch? Why do I feel selfish for even thinking about leaving?
If those questions sound familiar, here's what's probably happening. He does something that hurts you, and within a few hours the story in your head is that this is just the rough patch and he didn't really mean it. You hold onto the good weekend, the rare moment he opened up, the glimpse of him at his best, and you treat those moments as the truth while everything else becomes just stuff getting in the way. When a friend asks how it's really going, you don't say out loud what you're really feeling, which is that you've been waiting a long time for him to change.
Where it comes from
Here's the wonderful thing about you. You see potential in people, and you can look at someone at their worst and still see the good in them. That's a gift, not a flaw.
But somewhere along the way, that gift became a hiding place, because hoping is a form of avoiding. As long as you stay focused on who he's becoming, you never have to sit with what it's like to be with him as he is today. Your brain isn't doing this to hurt you. It's protecting you from a feeling it believes you can't handle, and in that sense the hope isn't naive, it's just been working as a shield to protect you from feeling sadness and grief.
What it costs
Love isn't the same as influence. You can pour everything you have into someone and it still won't change them, not because you're not loving enough, but because they have to decide to change.
Sadly, while you're busy loving who he could be, nobody's loving who you actually are. In one sense, you left yourself to live in a relationship that doesn't really exist, and that's the self-abandonment hiding under all that care.
What change looks like
The real question isn't "how do I help him change?" It's harder than that. "What's it like to be with him exactly as he is today, with no hope of any change?" Sit with that and notice what comes up, because the feeling you don't want to experience is the truth you've been working so hard not to know and feel.
Seeing him clearly isn't giving up on him, it's where you start seeing reality and what the cost is for you. It's finally showing up for yourself, and that's exactly where the work begins when women come to me for 1-on-1 coaching. We don't start with the relationship between you and him, we start with the relationship you have with yourself.
Not sure this is your pattern? Take the quiz and find out which one is running your relationship.