You Cannot Love Someone Into Their Potential

Let me tell you something I learned the hardest way possible:

You cannot love someone into their potential.

And trust me, sis — I tried.

For eight years of my life, I poured my heart, energy, and soul into a man I believed could grow. Not because he showed me growth…but because I saw the version of him he could become.

And I was convinced that if I loved him enough, supported him enough, believed in him enough…he would eventually meet me there.

Let me say it louder for the women in the back:

Potential is not the same as presence. Potential is not the same as capacity. Potential is not the same as emotional maturity.

I was in love with a man’s future self while living with a man who couldn’t even show up in his present one.

And that disconnect? That gap between who he could be and who he actually was…that’s what slowly broke me.

I Thought My Love Could Fill the Gaps

I thought…if I held it all together, if I carried the emotional load, if I kept forgiving, if I kept believing, if I kept hoping, if I saw the good in him, if I just stayed a little longer, if I just gave him more time…

…he would eventually rise to meet me.

But here's the truth I didn’t want to accept:

My love was never the problem. His capacity was.

You can’t pour sunshine into someone who lives inside their own storm. You can’t heal wounds they refuse to look at. You can’t build a man from a blueprint he will never pick up.

Love can inspire growth —but it cannot create it for someone who is emotionally unavailable, shut down, or avoidant by survival.

Loving Someone’s Potential Will Exhaust You

Being with someone based on their potential is the emotional equivalent of:

• trying to water concrete

• writing poetry to a locked door

• holding your breath waiting for someone else to exhale

  
  

It’ll wear your soul out.

I spent years confusing his avoidance for peace, his numbing for strength, his silence for stability, his dependence on others for “he’s trying,”and his lack of emotional presence for “he just needs time.”

No, babe. He didn’t need time. He needed tools. He needed emotional maturity. He needed to face himself. And he wasn’t willing — or capable — of any of it.

And here’s the real kicker:

You can’t drag someone into their potential. They have to walk there themselves.

The Day I Stopped Loving His Potential Was the Day I Saved Myself

When I left, people asked me:“But didn’t you love him?”

Yes. Deeply. Fully. Painfully.

But I finally realized loving him wasn’t helping him grow —it was keeping me small.

My love wasn’t building him. It was bleeding me.

And the moment I stopped trying to love him into his potential, I started meeting my own.

I began:

• reconnecting with myself

• feeling again

• grieving honestly

• healing my nervous system

• taking up space

• remembering who the hell I am

• stepping into the woman I am becoming through surviving this heartbreak

• 
  

Loving him didn’t transform him —but leaving him is transforming me.

You Can’t Love Someone Into What They’re Determined to Avoid

You can’t love a man into:

• accountability

• emotional growth

• breaking generational wounds

• self-reflection

• honesty

• communication

• maturity

• vulnerability

• presence

  
  

Love can only meet someone where they already ARE. It cannot drag them up a mountain they refuse to climb.

Potential is a promise they never signed.

Women Like Us Don’t Love Men “As They Are” — We Love the Man We Know They Could Be

But that’s the trap.

We’re visionaries. We’re healers. We see souls, not behavior. We see potential, not patterns. We love the deeper layers. We hope. We hold. We give.

But potential is NOT a relationship.

It’s a fantasy we keep alive with our own effort.

And the moment we stop supplying the effort…the fantasy collapses.

And THEN we’re forced to look at the man in front of us —not the man we imagined he could become.

And that’s when it hits:

He was never going to get there. Not because you weren’t enough. But because he wasn’t willing or able.

If You’re Loving Someone’s Potential… This Is Your Sign

Stop trying to love them into the person they refuse to become.

Stop sacrificing yourself to keep the dream alive.

Stop bleeding so someone else can grow.

Stop confusing your intuition with your attachment.

Stop mistaking your strength for their progress.

You cannot love someone into their potential.

But you can love yourself into yours.

And that’s exactly what I’m doing now.

This heartbreak didn’t destroy me. It cracked me open. It showed me my strength. It showed me the limits of my love. It showed me the cost of staying small for someone else.

And it taught me the lesson I will never forget:

Love is powerful —but it cannot build a man who refuses to wake up.

Potential is not presence. Potential is not partnership. Potential is not enough.

I deserved a man who meets me where I am —not one I have to drag into becoming himself.

And so do you.