I Was the Fixer in Every Romantic Relationship I Had

I had a type and it was not what I would have admitted to having. The person I was consistently drawn to was someone who was brilliant and chaotic and needed, in ways that were often appealing in their originality, a specific kind of management that I provided without quite acknowledging I was providing it.

The first relationship, at 23 in Udaipur, involved someone whose financial instability required me to quietly absorb more than my share of shared expenses while maintaining the fiction that we were equal. The second, at 25, involved someone whose emotional volatility meant I was continuously calibrating my own responses around his state.

The third, at 27, involved someone whose career instability required me to make practical concessions in my own that I had not fully agreed to. Each of them was a person I cared about genuinely.

Each of them was also, I understood at 29 with the particular clarity of someone who has examined a pattern rather than an incident, a person whose specific kind of need activated in me a compulsion to manage rather than to simply be. I had found safety in being the capable one.

The capable one has a function that is always required. The capable one cannot be abandoned because the capable one is too useful. The insight, which arrived in therapy and was uncomfortable in its accuracy, was that I had been choosing instability in partners because my own stability was something I experienced not as a gift but as a responsibility - and the responsibility required an object.

I had to learn what a relationship felt like when neither person required the other to be managed. The learning took practice. The first relationship I entered after the pattern was identified, at 30, with a person who was grounded in ways I found initially unfamiliar, produced the specific discomfort of having nothing to fix.

I stayed with the discomfort. It became, over time, genuine ease.