Potential: Overcoming perceptions and realities
Stop falling for potential.
Intoxication and doubt
Have you ever felt like you couldn’t recognise someone you thought you knew inside out? Have you been shocked by someone’s reality, who they really are, because the version of them you built up in your head was a completely different person?
I know this can feel unnerving. You don’t know what happened, did they change? Did you change? Did they trick you or did you trick yourself? All these questions swirl around in your mind when reality strikes. What we don’t realise in those moments is that sometimes we fail to see people for who they are because we’re too intoxicated by who they could become. This doesn’t happen through anyone’s fault, neither yours nor theirs, so don’t go blaming yourself and resorting to “how could I be THIS stupid?” before I can even finish my sentence. I like to call this phenomena falling for someone’s potential, and if you feel like you’re the only one who’s been there, I assure you, so have I, and so have thousands of other people.
A pie, a pizza, and a bar of chocolate
So let’s talk about why this happens. When we see someone’s potential before the reality while entering relationships our idea of them can become sort of fictional. Why fictional? Because when we look at this person we rarely see them at face value, instead we see them as a future versions of themselves which we desire. Who they are today, right now stops mattering when we get caught up in who they could become and you build a faux identity of them in your mind. For instance, you start seeing an apple as apple pie, a cacao bean as a bar of chocolate and a bag of flour as a hand tossed, wood fired, gourmet pizza.
However what usually escapes you when falling for potential is that while there’s a possibility they’ll end up being everything you saw them becoming, a pie, a pizza and some chocolate, there’s also a possibility they won’t. Sounds simple right? A probability that should be vastly clear to each of us because on hearing it, it sounds like common sense. But often relationships are so complex that they extend far beyond the realms of sense and sensibility. In simple terms, when emotions are involved, and you want to believe the best about someone, basic truths can become blurry.
Again, this isn’t your fault although it’s easy to blame yourself. When contemplating a topic like this, ’falling for potential’, fixing the blame seems like the easiest way out. But stop and reconsider, is fixing the blame going to fix the problem? Are you really finding the root of what goes wrong if you aren’t accepting that in could and has indeed gone wrong.
My advice
It’s not naive, it’s not toxic, it’s not a defect. Infact, in many friendships, families and romantic relationships conflict arises due to false expectations. It is Infact, a natural tendency to be selective about what we choose to see about a person such that it’s in favour of their positive development. Especially if through emotion and attachment into the mix…
So, how do you avoid falling for potential? This isn’t a question with a perfect solution or a fix-it strategy, but maybe a simple piece of advice can go further than a 10 step ‘how to’ guide?
The way I see it, people are built to compromise and it’s taught to us that it’s the ‘bigger person’ thing to do. But if you think about it compromising your values, boundaries and standards in this case can be detrimental. You can lose all measure of what kind of people and relationships suit you, what your realistic expectations from them look like and what you need from them. Don’t compromise on basics because that’ll rig your judgement of what a healthy relationship looks like for you and you’ll end up falling for a version of someone that is yet to exist.
In such moments coming back to the present and what the image looks like right now is crucial because although potential is ever so inviting it’s a possibility not a truth. You’re job is not to help someone live up to who they could be in your eyes, to save someone from wasting their potential or to turn an apple into a pie.
Leave a Reply