You gave him everything you had. And somehow, you're still the one holding it all together.

My dear, if you're reading this, I already know what your evenings look like.

You check on him before you check on yourself. You're the one remembering the important dates, softening the hard conversations, and quietly picking up whatever he drops. You call it love. Some nights, you're not so sure anymore.

I lived that exact life. Not once, but three times, with three different men, in three different seasons of my twenties. Each one felt different at first. Looking back now, they were all the same story wearing a different face.

There was the one with "so much potential" that I was convinced I could help him reach. There was the one I quietly paid for more times than I want to admit, telling myself it was temporary. And there was the one my own mother warned me about, and I stayed anyway, because leaving would have meant admitting she was right.

By the time that third relationship ended, I wasn't heartbroken. I was just tired. The kind of tired that makes you stop asking "why do these things keep happening to me" and start wondering if something in me was choosing this, over and over, without my permission.

So one weekend, alone in my flat, I did something I'd never done before. I sat down and actually wrote out every relationship, side by side. What I gave. What I got back. What I ignored in the beginning that I could see clearly by the end.

What I found on that page shook me. Every single one of those men had the exact same starting trigger for me. A specific kind of "not there yet, but so much potential" that made me feel needed, useful, necessary. I wasn't choosing partners. I was choosing projects, and quietly signing myself up to run them alone.

Once I could finally see the pattern in black and white, I couldn't unsee it. And for the first time, I could actually do something about it, instead of just surviving the next version of the same story.

I met my husband less than two years later. We've been married over twenty years now. Not because I got lucky the fourth time. Because by then, I finally knew what I was looking for, and just as importantly, what I would never carry alone again.

When my daughter got old enough to start dating, I wrote everything down for her. Every question I wish someone had asked me sooner. Every early sign I wish I'd known to look for. The exact way I finally worked out my own pattern, so she wouldn't have to spend ten years and three heartbreaks figuring hers out the way I did.

A few of the women in our church group asked to read it too, after watching their own daughters go through the same thing. Then their friends asked. Eventually, I sat down and turned my old notes into something anyone could actually work through on their own, in one sitting, instead of over ten years like I did.

That became The Fixer Pattern.

With all my love,
Big Mummy