Relationship Under Construction: Why “I Can Fix Him” Is the ENTJ Curse

When I first heard Taylor Swift's “I Can Fix Him,” I felt called out. Just like the Mother herself, I have a long history of dating mysterious, brooding, complicated types. And just like her, I had to learn the hard way that it's a path leading nowhere.

More importantly, I had to accept my own part in the story—I chose those partners. Not because they were hot and interesting, although some of them were. I chose them because I looked at a man and thought that, with a few fixes, this could work perfectly. I remember saying to a friend when I was in my early twenties: “I like them half-finished.” 

It took me years to realize that this was not, in fact, a charming personality quirk, but a role I was casting myself in. That’s the ultimate curse of the ENTJ personality type—seeing somebody's potential and falling in love with that instead of the real person.

Three Exes of Milena Wisniewska

I met my first boyfriend when I was seventeen. From my side, it was love at first sight. From his side, he had a girlfriend. A healthier person may have registered that as “he’s unavailable.” I registered it as a logistical complication. They eventually broke up, and I had nothing to do with it. We got together shortly afterwards. He was three years older, studied in the evenings, but didn't have a job, didn't have a driver's license, had barely even traveled. He was an indoor person who loved trolling people on the internet. It’s almost funny how caricaturally mismatched we were. But, at the time, I didn't think, “This person wants a completely different life from me.” I thought, “He just hasn't been exposed to enough yet.” So I encouraged him to travel, move to a new town, dress differently, think bigger, want more. And because he loved me, he tried. The problem was that it wasn't really his life. It was mine, and I was just dragging him along everywhere. 

The driver’s license became the perfect symbol of it. I paid for driving lessons because, of course, he didn't have a job, and eventually he lied to me about passing the test. At the time, I saw only betrayal. Now—older and wiser—I see the pressure underneath it. After we split up (amicably), he went back to his home town.

After Mr Mismatch there was the pilot, which sounds glamorous until you remember that a pilot's job is to travel constantly and work irregular hours. For someone like me, who needs presence, reliability and enough time together for a relationship to feel like a shared life, it was torture. His frequent infidelities didn't exactly help. Neither did the avoidance. He was a man who, by default, could not meet me where I was. We met abroad, and I knew he eventually wanted to fly for an airline in his home country. I also knew I would never move to India full-time. These were not hidden facts. Yet somehow I still managed to construct a fantasy in which this relationship would work.

Did I take his lifestyle seriously and his avoidance as part of who he was? No, I did not. I treated both as things to negotiate. Surely there was a way. I could become more independent, he could become more available, or the relationship could somehow be engineered into a shape that suited us both. I approached it like a scheduling problem rather than a basic mismatch in needs.

Then there’s the third boyfriend, an alcoholic. The most shocking part is not that he was an alcoholic but that I didn't realize it. He came from a family with a history of alcohol problems, and I knew there was a risk, but he assured me it was under control. He was bright but undisciplined. He had smoked a lot of weed as a teenager and later seemed to replace it with alcohol. He smoked, drank far too much coffee, had self-destructive tendencies, and what I now suspect was depression. Naturally, I did not look at this and think, “This is bigger than me.” I thought, “He needs structure.”

So I pushed him to study Information Technology so he could get a better job. Then I pushed him to move with me when I had a better opportunity elsewhere. I pushed him towards many things. The thing is, he was used to being pushed. His mother had done it. His grandmother had done it. The dynamic felt normal to both of us. 

Maybe some of those changes would have been good for him. Maybe they wouldn't have. Either way, my mistake was thinking that because I could see the problem, I was entitled to manage the solution.

Why I Date Like I'm Running a Project

Whoever I'd date would eventually go through a style transformation, a work-life transformation, and a family-relationship transformation with me. I tried to take a man who showed me affection and turn him into the person I thought he could become. When one of my exes said, "You don't really love me, you love who you'd like me to be," I was outraged. I argued with him. I insisted that of course I loved him—I just wanted him to live up to his full potential. Which, in hindsight, is not the defence I thought it was. I didn't accept the man standing in front of me; I was more interested in the version I could already see in my head.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not absolving my exes. They were responsible for their own choices, and I wasn't imagining the problems. But it was also my responsibility to walk away when those problems made a relationship unworkable. Instead, I treated them as challenges. Looking back, I can't honestly say that their repairability wasn't part of the appeal.

Why? Because I'm an ENTJ, okay?

We're often described as strategic, decisive and goal-oriented. Which is true. But the same person who can look at a messy situation and immediately see a plan can also look at a messy person and immediately see a plan. ENTJs are future-focused. We naturally think in terms of what something could become rather than what it currently is. That's a useful trait when you're building a business. It's considerably less useful when you're choosing a partner.

The more “under construction” the man was, the more room there was for me to imagine what he might become. I don't think I fell in love with potential exactly. I fell in love with the fantasy of what my influence could turn that potential into. That was the pattern. I chose men I could improve, organize, guide or help. Then, when they inevitably failed my completely unrequested SEAL-level training program, I'd feel disappointed, resentful, betrayed.

This is the dark side of the ENTJ fixer instinct. We're good at seeing inefficiency, untapped potential and future outcomes. We're not good at accepting things exactly as they are. A person is not a project. A relationship is not a start-up I can invest in and optimize. My job is to fall in love with who someone is, not who I've decided they're about to become.

The harder truth is that fixing them also gave me something to do. As long as I was focused on their issues, I didn't have to ask myself why I kept choosing people who needed that much fixing in the first place.

What I’m Doing Differently Now

Looking back, all three relationships tell the same story. One man wanted a smaller life than I did. One man had a life too unstable for me. One man had problems much bigger than me. In each case, I saw the mismatch and thought: “I can fix that!” 

The thing is, I shouldn't have.

I wish I could say that I no longer do this, but that would be a lie. I'm still me. I still notice someone's bad habits and immediately start thinking about how to improve them. The difference is that I no longer confuse that impulse to fix them with a good reason to date them. I try to listen now to what people are actually telling me about themselves. If someone says he doesn't want anything serious, I no longer translate that into “he's scared of intimacy." If his life is unstable, I try not to interpret it as evidence of hidden depth. If he's avoidant, unavailable, addicted, or moving in a completely different direction, I try not to call that “complicated.” I call it “not for me.”

And most importantly, I'm trying to remember that walking away is also an action. It's not a failure. It's not giving up. It's simply accepting reality instead of arguing with it. Realizing this alone took a hot minute.  Because the fantasy of “I can fix him” is incredibly appealing. But I don't want to audition for the role of the woman who finally changes him anymore. I have other things to do.