Potential to be a mass-murderer or a great lover

You’ve maybe heard it said before: “You can’t date people’s potential, you need to date them as they are”.

A great and true quote. To help you grasp the real meaning of this:

People can indeed become anything. And yes, people are born as blank slates on which experiences and possibly a deal of random chance inscribe certain behaviors which the people then identify with. Hitler became a mass-murderer for example. Mussolini and Stalin also come to mind. Casanova became a great lover.

Now if people can become anything, why “favor” the outcome which is most in your interest?

To put it crassly, the person you are interested in and which is not reciprocating in a way you want them to, has as much a chance to become a mass-murderer as a great lover. Both are skills and born out of certain convictions.

In reality, the people will most likely stay the way they are, unless some particularly traumatic experiences happen to them. Or they happen to come into contact with LSD and have transformative experiences through it. Think about it: we are energy-conserving beings. And we tend to repeat the patterns which have worked for us in the past. The person you’re interested in has learned that their particular patterns work (for them!). They may not work for you, but that’s not the point of these patterns – they work for them and they’re their patterns – and so they will keep using them!

Keep this picture in your mind the next time you think about dating someone’s potential: “They have as much potential to become a muss-murderer as the greatest lover on earth”.

And maybe you’ll realize that you should not date potential anymore 🙂