I’ve always had a detailed picture of my ideal boyfriend in mind and when I didn’t find those qualities in the guy I was dating, I tried to mold him into the person I wanted him to be. Surprise! It never worked out. Learn from my mistakes and keep your eyes peeled for these red flags that you’re trying too hard to fix your boyfriend.
- You have a checklist. As soon as we were on our first date, I was checking off my mental list. I asked questions to find out if he would eventually develop a certain quality I was looking for and if he didn’t possess at least 50% of my must-haves, I would write him off as lacking potential for a long-term relationship with me.
- You can’t give a compliment. When my boyfriend did something nice for me, I would find it hard to compliment him without also including a side note of how he could do it better next time. I thought giving him side notes was my sweet way of nudging him to improve, but looking back I can almost see how the sparkle in his eyes would fade whenever I “helped” him.
- You’ve set an unrealistically high bar. I pride myself on being a great girlfriend. I’m attentive, learn my partner’s favorite things so that I can give the best gifts, and I am always great with my boyfriend’s friends (for starters). As a result, I expect my boyfriends also to be able to go above and beyond for me. I mean, if they like me as much as they say they do, then they’ll put in the effort to make me happy and become my perfect guy.
- You make mental notes. Each time we were together, I was always making mental notes of things he could work on. Then when the time was right, I would address them and say I would help him to work on them. I would always say that I just wanted to help him to be the best version of him that he could be but my motivations were a lot more selfish than I was willing to admit.
- You care more about what others think than you should. I would always try to make the relationship seem perfect. If he did something to embarrass me, I would throw a tantrum and make up stories about how some of my friends made fun of me because of it. Of course, this would make him feel bad and motivate him to change… or so I thought.
- You try to control everything. If I felt that the friends he was hanging out with wouldn’t help him to achieve his goals in life or his career, I’d try and dissuade him from hanging out with them. If I considered his hobbies to be childish, I’d buy him gifts to try and make him like an appropriate hobby like golf or something similar. I would tell him that it could be the hobby we did together as a couple. Truth be told, I was trying to make us into the power couple of my dreams.
- You don’t live in the moment with him. When we were having romantic dinners or dates, I’d always imagine what my ideal boyfriend would have done differently and how would just know what to do without being told. This made spending romantic moments together kind of annoying because I’d imagine what a long way my boyfriend had to go before he was perfect for me.
- You lose patience with him. After I confronted my boyfriend about working on certain behaviors things would go well for some time, and then he would slip up and revert to his old self. This would make me explode in anger because I would feel frustrated that my efforts were going to waste. I guess you could say I went a little crazy.
- You have a timeline. At the beginning of the relationship, I’d assess how long I thought it would take for my boyfriend to be changed into the perfect guy for me. When it looked like he was taking too long to change, I’d try and speed up the process by threatening to end the relationship because I felt like he wasn’t committed to making it work by changing some of his ways of doing things.
- You don’t appreciate the small stuff. When we started dating, I liked the moments we would spend together as a couple, the cute gifts he would buy me and the romantic gestures he made. However, with time, I felt as if everything he did wasn’t enough. Instead of a romantic road trip, I’d be thinking about how fantastic a surprise getaway to a different country would have been instead. I stopped appreciating the small things and this made me realize that maybe I’d taken fixing my boyfriend a bit too far. I can’t tell you how many relationships I ruined because of it.
