Messed-up and in-love

A situation came up in which the subject of love and messed-up people being in love came up in my mind. Specifically, how sometimes messed-up people fall in love with others and realize that they're messed-up and thus intend to change it for the sake of the person they're in love with. I mean, they could change it in a healthy way or an unhealthy way, but the point is that they think, "Oh, I'm in a relationship with this person, I'd better change for the sake of this relationship." Or sometimes it's not even because you're in a relationship with proper relationship dynamics, sometimes it's just because you love somebody and realize that the potential of the relationship with them or even just the fact of their existence motivates you to clean up the mess of your own life.

I'm aromantic and emotionally muted besides, so I can only look at these things and wonder about them. People like that, do they know their lives are a mess before love happens to them? If they do, then did they try to change before but couldn't, or maybe they didn't care to change until the extent to which they valued this person gave them suitable motivation. I can't imagine what it must be like to love someone so much that they would make you want to help yourself in ways you hadn't wanted to help yourself before, or hadn't been able to help yourself before. Or maybe it's not that you love that person an awful lot, maybe it's because you just didn't care about yourself. But that still dictates that you love that person 1. more than you love yourself and 2. to something resembling a great degree (even if it's only "great" by your own standards). Which is still something.

Or maybe you don't realize you were messed up prior to the other person. Maybe they serve as a sort of contrast to yourself. I hate suggesting that the literary trope of a beautifully uncorrupted person entering the life of an unhappy wreck, but imagine a toned-down sort of version of that happening. A realistic version. Someone falling in love and realizing that their state isn't the norm and wanting that to be different because this person's state has allowed them to see it. 

Or maybe this person finally makes you love something in this world and starts making you care. Breaks through a layer of apathy and lack of concern for anything, your own state included. Makes you realize you ought to change. Gives you the motivation to do so. Is that realistic? Does that happen? I've heard acquaintances of mine saying it's happened to them. How common is it?

My view of these things is probably quite tainted by notions I've gotten from fiction and music and stuff (I've been listening to the Magnetic Fields more lately, and their stuff tends to make me think more about love and romance and other things I don't feel, yeah). So maybe my understanding of how these things occur isn't even based in reality. But the reality I've observed does confirm that situations like I'm imagining do happen. So you know.

It's late and I'm thinking about things of which I'm merely an outside observer. Wondering how things are, really. How love is. How it changes people, maybe. Or how it makes people change themselves as well.