Potential

No one wants to be told they have potential, and I’ve heard it all my life. You know what that really means? It means you COULD be awesome but you aren’t. It means you are not living up to what you were created for. It means you are wasting space, time, and the skin you are in. And I find myself saying this in my dating life about the person I am dating. “But he has so much potential.” So why do I constantly find myself and my friends choosing guys with potential who aren’t striving to live up to that? It’s not an admirable quality. I mean I don’t expect everyone to fully live up to his or her own potential, but I do expect everyone to be TRYING their hardest. Circumstances in our lives definitely hinder us in fulfilling our potential, but it doesn’t stop us from trying. And so, with that being said, these men that my single friends and I are finding are not even trying to live up to their potential. The problem here is that we are falling for the potential in these men guys and avoiding who they really are. I don’t know how many times I have caught myself saying, “Well, this isn’t who they really are. This is just because of circumstance A or B,” instead of realizing who they are is actually who they are in that moment, not who they could be. We fall in love with the IDEA of someone, rather than who they are. And then we wonder why we are disappointed. It’s time to take the blinders off and realize who people are. Stop making excuses for their mistakes and then maybe you won’t be embarrassed by who they are later. For some reason we find ourselves looking at these men as if they might be someone we should take a risk with. These best friends of ours that we think we should risk things with because how romantic would that be to have known someone intimately as a friend for thousands of years and to all of a sudden realize we love them? In reality, they are unemployed, living at home, deadbeats. But we think because they have potential that we will somehow be the ones to bring it out in them?! Sure…keep dreaming. 

 I am not a fixer. I don’t like dating men with the idea of fixing their problems. I want to genuinely fall in love with someone because of who they are. And I do. Well I start falling in love, and then all of a sudden these huge ridiculous dysfunctions arise. That is when I start making excuses for their potential, because they have shown me  lied to me about  who they are in the first place. I saw what I thought they were and fell for the charm. Maybe it is because I have so hopelessly loved love. I have always wanted it to work, so I force it… with potential. All for the sake of not being embarrassed by publicly ending a facebook relationship status in such a short time.