What Happens When You Fall In Love With The Potential Vs The Truth?

It’s sometimes hard to admit but what we share on social media is rarely the whole truth of what our lives are like. Some people even say “I wish I had the life that I had on Facebook”. The majority of people just want to share the ‘highlight reel’ of their life. As a result, it’s become easier for singles to fall in love with a partner’s potential, rather than the truth. 

Why is this a problem? The type of partner you pick is going to influence everything in your life—so you need to get it right!

Are you someone who wears your heart on your sleeve? Have you ever fallen into the habit of seeing people through rose-tinted glasses? This blog post is for you. 

We’ll explore why you fall in love with a partner’s potential. Then we’ll explain how you can start to see the truth so you can make informed decisions when it comes to love. 
 

How Do You Know If You Fall In Love With A Partner’s Potential?

See how many of these elements ring true for you. If you can relate to at least five of them, then you’re possibly someone who loves potential, rather than truth.

But don’t worry! Change begins with awareness.

1. You always end up feeling disappointed with your partner.
2. You often put your partner on a pedestal.
3. You use your partner or the relationship to feel good about yourself.
4. You believe your partner is just like you, that they think and feel the same way you do.
5. You distort your reality to see the best in them. So you might make excuses to other people, like “they were just having a bad day” or “You don’t know them the same way I do”.
6. You often feel isolated in your relationship, like you can’t share with others what is really happening.
7. You feel the need to overprotect your relationship, keeping up appearances that everything is going really well.
8. You end up in codependent relationships where you are so ‘in tune’ with what your partner is feeling, thinking, or wanting that you lose connection with yourself.
9. You are the only problem solver in your relationship.
10. You find that your relationship has lost its passion and the sex drive is gone. 

If you found yourself nodding along to any of these, do not feel bad! We’ve been conditioned through rom-coms, and other media, to value codependent relationships rather than healthy ones. No, you and your partner cannot be exactly alike or you’ll never grow as people. And so many stories have shown us what we think a relationship ‘should’ be like. As a result, we end up gaslighting ourselves if our reality is different.

Making excuses for the other person’s behaviour is also a sign you’re not being truthful to yourself or your needs. It shows you’ve lost control of your boundaries. Ask yourself what kind of person repeatedly over-steps boundaries to the extent you need to make excuses for them.

Understand you will never be able to have a healthy, long-lasting relationship with just anyone. It’s not your job to make a relationship work just so that you can be in a relationship. You don’t want to end up in a situation where you’re the only one solving problems or meeting your partner’s needs. Remember the 4 C’s of successful relationships—you can’t collaborate on your own!

How Can You Stay More Grounded When Dating?

So the question is: how do you stop yourself from flying away with the romantic vibes? Is there a way to stay more grounded so you don’t fall in love with a partner’s potential, rather than who they really are?

Yes!

You want to feel good about you, your partner, and your relationship. But you can only have mutual respect and commitment when you’re both working on the relationship together. This can only happen when you see the truth, not the romanticised version. Let’s see how you can achieve that.

See the value in who you are.

What is it that you really love about yourself? Are you kind, loyal, highly ambitious, emotionally mature, or self-aware? What do you really value about yourself? 

Now ask yourself, how would you react if you met someone with the same excellent traits as you? That’s how they’ll react when they meet you. 

Keeping this in mind stops you from putting them on a pedestal, so you can come to the relationship as yourself, not just an ‘other half’.

Connect with your feelings.

When was the last time you sat down and noticed how you were feeling? When I ask my clients this, at first they often list the tasks they need to do. Or they might tell me they’re tired and then go on to explain why.

The logical mind often tries to rationalise how you’re feeling, which stops you from looking at how you actually feel. It blocks you from actually feeling the feeling.

The more you work with your emotions, the better you’ll get at following your intuition. Your gut instincts are faster than your logical mind, so you can actually make better and faster decisions. They’re also better aligned to you, compared to the rationalisations your logical mind will make. 

Once you’re feeling your feelings and following your intuition, you won’t talk yourself out of how you feel. No more wasting time in a relationship that doesn’t make you feel good. Remember, whenever we ignore that internal ‘no’, we usually end up paying the price for it later.

Know what you are looking for.

If you’re someone who loves to ride that romantic, loving wave, then you need to make sure you have a structure in place. This means you can still enjoy the loving wave but you won’t be swept off your feet by the wrong person. 

Check out our Meet the One guide, which will walk you through how to do this.

It’ll also benefit anyone looking for love. Once you know exactly what you want in a relationship, you won’t settle for less. Any old relationship will stop being enough for you. 

Understand your childhood patterns.

What caused you to put your feelings aside to get in sync with those around you? Hint: it’s your childhood patterns. They are what leads us to idolise or romanticise our partners. We’re taught to give and receive love as children. If that wasn’t a healthy lesson, then we’ll have unhealthy patterns around love. 

If we don’t heal these patterns, our unconscious mind will just keep running those patterns in the background. Think of them like a computer program. The mind automates what it knows has worked in the past to keep you safe. It plunges you back into the same types of relationships over and over because even if they ended badly, hey! You’re still here!

But if you want those relationships to change, then you need to run a new program. That means changing your patterns. You can only do that once you know what they are.

Have clear boundaries.

If you don’t have boundaries, how can you know when someone has crossed them? How can you know when to end a relationship? How do you know when to stop a form of behaviour because something doesn’t make you feel good?

People will happily stick to boundaries on behalf of their friends and family. So if anyone hurts or mistreats someone they know, they’ll stick up for them. But they often don’t stick up for themselves. So pretend you saw your best friend in the same situation. How would you stick up for them? Great—do that for yourself.

Remember, people learn how to treat you from how you treat yourself. If you let people walk all over you just to have some kind of interaction with them, then people will keep doing it. Your boundaries are there to help teach them how to treat you the way you want to be treated. 

When everyone abides by everyone else’s boundaries, then everyone can be a lot happier because they know where they stand.

Be truthful to yourself.

Is someone not treating you the way you want to be treated? Do you know something isn’t working? Before you start analysing what you did wrong, remember this. It’s nothing to do with you. Don’t make someone else’s actions make you feel like a bad person. It’s okay to walk away from people who don’t treat you well. 

Someone else’s actions don’t mean you’re in the wrong. 
It just means you’re not compatible with the people around you.

Think of it this way. Say everyone around you uses an iPad, and you use a Microsoft Surface Pro. They’re all using Procreate…but you can’t, because it’s not available on Windows. That doesn’t mean Windows is bad, or that iPads are bad. It just means they’re incompatible operating systems. 

The same goes for people.

It’s common for people to lose friends when they go on a journey of self-improvement. That’s because they suddenly realise how many of those ‘friends’ treat them badly.

Notice when you are not telling the truth.

Look at how you talk about your partner or relationship to those around you. Are you exaggerating to friends and family? Are you trying to seek their approval? What are you sharing about your partner? What response are you looking for from the people around you?

This will give you a huge insight into your intentions. Are you just looking for their approval? Or their ‘OK’ about your partner? This shows that you don’t trust your own judgment so you’re looking for other people to tell you what to do.

Learning to trust your judgment will go a long way towards seeing a person’s truth versus seeing their potential.

Ask yourself, what it is that you love about your partner? 

What do you love about them? Is it superficial or about their personality? Is it their status, or their job? If it’s about their personality, what evidence backs this up?

Let’s say you love the fact your partner is kind. Then look for evidence of that. Is it the text message they sent where they said you bring out the best in them? That’s not about you, that’s about them! Where is the genuine kindness there?

Or did they bring you a cup of tea in bed because you woke up with a headache? Did they pay for an old person’s shopping in the supermarket queue because they’d left their purse at home? Do they do things to help others without any reward? Now you’re finding the right kind of evidence.

Is the relationship 50/50 or are you running the show out of fear?

People will often try to manage a relationship to avoid it from ending. That stems from a fear of abandonment or a fear of being alone. Where does this fear come from? Go back to those childhood patterns to see where that fear first started. Or you can look to the media that keeps showing singles in a bad light, and only praises couples.

Remember, if you have to prove yourself, or work for love, then what are you doing it for? If you have to work for love, then it’s not love you’re getting.

That said, if you’re both investing time and effort into that relationship, then you’re off to an excellent start.

Understand your needs and know how to fulfil them first!

So many people go into a relationship without knowing what they want or need. They don’t know how to feel good themselves, so they can’t communicate their needs to their partner. They end up feeling unfulfilled and they blame their partner for not making them happy. 

This isn’t fair. If you don’t know how to feel good in your life, then you shouldn’t put pressure on your partner to make you feel better. That’s both codependency and putting too much responsibility on the other person.

You are never responsible for your partner’s happiness, actions, or emotions, and they’re not responsible for yours.

Whenever a couple gets together, they amplify each other. So let’s say we have two people who know themselves and who are already fulfilled get together. Guess what? That’s going to be a healthy, emotionally mature, and secure relationship. They’ll be able to communicate, ask for support, and say what they need. There’s more openness and less judgement.

But if one (or both) of them expects their partner to make them happy or—worse—make them whole? That is never going to work.

Remember, the deeper understanding you have of yourself, the deeper understanding you can have of others. Higher self-awareness equips us better to relate to other people. We can only connect to others as deeply as we are connected to ourselves.