I guess I should start off by saying that I really wanted to title this column ‘F*ck Your Potential’. But I work for a family newspaper, so there’s that.
The thing is, I’m tired. Tired and annoyed and just a little bored, really, with a notion that keeps cropping up, no matter what women like me do to squash it.
The notion is a common one. You’ve heard it before, you’ve repeated to friends over wine and you probably believe it wholeheartedly too. But you’re wrong.
Women are often encouraged, and even more often than that – expected, to stick with their men through thick and thin, to support them even when they’re broke, to stand by them even when they have nothing, to love the man they could one day be. We’ve been told about loving a man’s potential so often that we’ve got it coming out of our ears by now.
Always about his struggle, always about his come-up, always about us being the supporting act in the ‘Behind Every Man There’s a Good Woman’ show.
Potential is all good and well until you end up with a Sunday afternoon daydream of a man who has no intention of being who you think he could be.
It’s easy to fall in love with someone’s potential. I’ve done it too. It’s easy to fall irrevocably for what someone has the potential to become, but what if they never become it?
What if you’re the only one who can see that potential? What if it’s all is just a dream deferred? What if all the dreams you had for you and your man – if only he got his shit together – never come to fruition? What then?
We’re so quick to settle for what could be, for what we hope will be, that we often overlook what is. He may have the potential to be a great man eventually, but what matters right now is who he is right now. Holding onto the hope that his potential will see him becoming the man you want, the man who calls when he says he will, the man who makes time for you, the man who doesn’t cheat on you and the man you can build a life with isn’t going to magically make him that.
The only thing that can make him that is him.
I’m tired of women being told to stay loyal to men who’ve proven that they don’t deserve it in hopes that one day, some day, when he finally ‘makes it’, they’ll be rewarded. Women are not dogs. We don’t need rewards for ‘good behaviour’. We need action.
Without action, without hard work, potential is nothing but a daydream. And we’re too old for fantasies.
So f*ck your potential. If potential’s all you have to offer, you can keep it. Give me hard work instead. Give me dedication. Give me someone who shows up. Someone who is present and available and interested. And willing to grind. With me. And for me. For us.
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