“I’ll Fix Him”: No More Waiting, Time for #JusticeToLove

“I'll fix him” - a sentence pronounced by several women before they would even fathom its cost. It's spoken not out of superiority, but out of care; with faith, and not arrogance. It carries a quiet belief that love, if provided patience, can soften anger, mature irresponsibility, and heal cruelty. In this imagination, love doesn't remain a mere emotion; it turns into a project. A woman merely doesn't fall in love; she becomes an active ‘investment’ in a perceived transformation.

What unfolds underneath this whole process is essentially a psychology shaped by rigid social constructions of gender, which the woman in love then internalises. What she calls “adjustment in love”, or simply her “feminine duty”, is fundamentally a learnt submission to unequal expectations. 

Morality, Masculinity, Endurance, Absorption

In a country like India, among many others, where consensual sex among unmarried couples is treated as immoral, while marriage functions as an unlimited social ‘license’ for sex—which erases the very possibility of marital rape as a crime—women are pushed into a passivity in intimate relationships. To protect the male conscience and his social respectability, she often lies about her sexual past, since her non-virginity is coded as moral corruption. This moral economy runs contradictorily parallel to men, where early sexual experience is celebrated as a natural masculine instinct. In either case, early sexual experiences aren't something to be stigmatised or morally condemned. After a certain period of ‘maturity’ (leaving my usage of ‘maturity’ as a contested terminology rather than a fixed, laid out or defined understanding), there is no rational basis to criminalise consensual sex, or subject it to moral scrutiny. But what requires critical attention is how early or pre-marital sexual experiences are again gendered: moral corruption for women, natural and even desirable for men. 

This contradiction has also surfaced in legal debates in India. Senior advocate Indira Jaisingh has long advocated in the Supreme Court that the current age of consent under the POSCO Act - fixed at eighteen - ends up criminalising consensual intimate relationships between adolescents aged sixteen to eighteen. Her position is not about weakening protection against abuse, but about recognising that autonomy, dignity, and consent do not suddenly appear on someone's eighteenth birthday. By treating all adolescent intimacy as exploitation, the law disallows the young moral and sexual agency - especially young women - and pushes them into silence, fear, and secrecy. In a society already obsessed with female purity, such legal rigidity reinforces the idea that women’s sexuality must be controlled rather than trusted.

When romantic hopes teach women to endure, and the law orders them to erase themselves, the result is the same: passivity becomes virtue, love becomes slavish. The relationship becomes less about companionship and more about maintenance. He is allowed to be unfinished; she is expected to be endlessly patient. This is the first injustice in such relationships: the man is allowed to evolve, while the woman is expected to endure. When Beauvoir asserted that women are taught to live through men, she already cautioned us about what the “I’ll fix him” story echoes: bend your identity towards your boyfriend’s/husband’s needs. Her desires are postponed, and her boundaries are made fragile in the name of care. What seems like loyalty from outside is an erosion from inside. “Wo pyaar hi kya jo dard na de”? - (“What is that love which doesn’t give pain”?) entered the popular culture where pain and suffering are cast as proof of romantic love. And thus, Sara Ahmed, in her “Cultural Politics of Emotion”, reminds us how happiness and suffering are often used as a social promise to keep people in line - endure now, you’ll be rewarded later.

Mainstreaming “I’ll fix him”

Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (2016)

This ‘mainstreamisation’ of the “I’ll fix him” narrative has been best done by Bollywood itself. Not much is required to talk about Animal or Kabir Singh, which have already received radical feminist critiques on their portrayal of submission by women necessary for romantic love. In Kabir Singh, Kabir’s controlling, violent, and self-destructive nature is lingered with sympathy- his possessiveness is framed as a depth of feeling, while Preeti barely speaks, barely resists. Kabir’s excesses are forgivable. Preeti’s endurance is romantic. Similar to it is Animal, in which the protagonist, Ranvijay, is hyper-violent and proudly patriarchal. But unlike the older scripts of love, where the “flawed but misunderstood” man slowly evolves himself, making him “fit” for love, Animal portrays the girlfriend's (Geetanjali) absorption of such violence as love. Geetanjali's presence stabilises the man without confronting the damage he causes. 

Apart from the very popular Animal and Kabir Singh, a benevolent, polite and more ‘accepted’ form of the same structure has been narrated by Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani. Bunny here isn’t violent but emotionally unavailable, restless, and allergic to commitment. Naina loves him anyway. She grows, builds confidence, and develops herself— yet is stuck at a timeline where she continues to wait in some emotional register. Eventually, Bunny “realises” the cost of losing Naina and returns. What the film portrays as “maturity” revolves around the arc that privileges the male timing. He gets to wander; she remains steady. He ‘discovers’ love when he is ready; she has been ready all along. Similarly, in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, the protagonist Ayan’s obsessive, unreciprocated love dominates the story. His heartbreak is framed as profound and poetic, while Alizeh must constantly absorb his pain. Even after she rejects him romantically, she is expected to remain emotionally available and patient. The film emphasises Ayan’s suffering, undermining Alizeh’s emotional labour.

What connects these films is not identical behaviour, but a shared narrative logic: the man is spared the grace to be human, while the woman must be ideal and perfect—not just for herself, but also enough to fix her flawed partner. But in real life, love rarely transforms without accountability. Men do not evolve because the woman stays. What is then conveyed is that female waiting is romantic, that suffering is the proof of devotion, and that women need to absorb every flaw of the man because he loves her. With this, there is a time when hope stops feeling hopeful. It bears her down heavily. She notices that the relationship has potential, but no practice. She realises that she has been living for a promising future version of him while sacrificing her present.

Doing Justice to Love

Before we talk about something called “justice to love”, we must first ask why justice is necessary in something presumed to be pure, private, and beyond politics. Echoing ‘the personal is political’, relationships do not float above society; they are shaped by the same hierarchies of morality, gender, and control. In her God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy centred on what she called ‘love laws’- the laws that define who should be loved, and how much. Just as Ammu is punished for loving across caste, the woman who says “I’ll fix him” is disciplined by a distinct but related law- the law that women must endure, adjust, and absorb. That’s an injustice to love. But what would bring justice to it? Is it just a form of activism which will bring symmetry in love? Or something deeper, which will allow us to alter what he makes out of love? 

What first needs to be eliminated is the asymmetrical nature of responsibilities. Indeed, love or any relationships come with a responsibility, but that asymmetry is shaped by gender dynamics. Love shouldn’t mean allowing the incompleteness of a man, or requiring the woman to be patient; it shouldn’t allow the man to be endlessly imperfect, or require the woman to embrace that imperfection, thereby sacrificing herself completely. Human beings are by no means perfect, and imperfection resides in everyone. But this ‘imperfection’ must not be sympathetic for one gender, and troubling for the other.

Before romantic love, it is equally important to love oneself. Her refusal, anger, or departure isn’t a “failure in love” but simply that she chose self-preservation as love. This is not selfishness, but love in action. If one is allowed his incompleteness, the other must not be expected to have endless steadiness.

Redefining Romance and Intimacy

In reclaiming justice for love, feminism doesn’t reject romance; it shakes its foundations. It shifts love from sacrifice to solidarity, from tolerance to mutual recognition. It refuses to romanticise waiting and value choice. For love to be fostering, it must allow both partners to grow without one becoming the scaffold for the other. It must ensure that affection doesn’t excuse harm, and that devotion does not suppress dissent. Human beings aren’t born under a teleological framework, and neither is love. Extending the Sartrean philosophy of ‘radical equality’ in romantic love- love doesn’t have a predefined purpose; the purpose is written over time. So what would ensure justice to love? Not mere activism, and not superficial symmetry of roles, but of reimagining of intimacy itself. Justice to love means refuting the popular idea that endurance is feminine, and transformation is a female responsibility.

To alter what we make of love is to reject the fantasy that suffering proves devotion. Change cannot be mothered into a man through loyalty; it must be chosen and self-grown. Walking away isn’t a failure of love; it's asserting your ethical boundaries.

Justice to love, then, is simple yet radical: love must not require erasure. Equality must be practised, and not just promised. Only then does it cease to be labour and become freedom.