Why Do I Fall in Love with Potential?
The Pattern
You see who they could be. You see the version of them that exists in flashes, in the rare moments when they let you in, in the stories they tell about who they want to become. You fall in love with that version. You commit to it. You wait for it to arrive. You spend years with the person they are not yet, hoping that your steadiness will midwife the version that you have already loved into being.
Origins & Context
Robert Firestone's work on the fantasy bond describes the way intimate relationships can become structured around an internalized image of the partner rather than the actual partner. The image is more loyal, more available, more capable of love than the person in the room. The relationship is, in a real sense, with the image, and the daily reality of the partner becomes evidence to ignore.
Sigmund Freud, and later Bessel van der Kolk in his work on trauma, name the repetition compulsion: the unconscious drive to re-enter relational dynamics from early life in an attempt to master them. The unavailable person of childhood, the parent who could not quite meet you, becomes the template for the partner you fall for. The fantasy that your love will transform them is the fantasy that you can finally make the original story end differently.
You are organizing a present around a future that exists only in your head, and the gap between your investment and theirs grows wider every month.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
It shows up as your defense of them to your friends. You explain the version they have not seen yet. You point to the moment last week when they showed up. You hold the line on who they really are, even as their actual behavior contradicts it for the hundredth time.
It shows up as the long timeline. You think in years. You see what is possible in five years, in a decade, in the version of this where they finally do the work. You are organizing a present around a future that exists only in your head, and the gap between your investment and theirs grows wider every month.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as the Fantasy Bond (Robert Firestone), the attachment to an internalized image of the partner that substitutes for actual relationship. It is also named as the Repetition Compulsion (Sigmund Freud, Bessel van der Kolk), the unconscious drive to recreate early relational dynamics in pursuit of a different ending. In Lori Gottlieb's clinical writing, this dynamic appears as the Hope Trap, the long investment in a future that the present is consistently failing to deliver.
Related entries in this library: Why I Always Choose Unavailable People, the Anxious-Avoidant Trap, Trauma Bonding, the Fantasy Bond, Self-Abandonment.
Nikita's Note
What I have come to understand is that loving someone's potential is often a way of loving the part of myself that needed loving. The person I was working so hard to save was, in some way, the child I had been. And the unavailability I was trying to dissolve was the unavailability that had shaped me.
The shift is not loving them less. It is meeting that earlier version of yourself directly, and letting the present partner be exactly who they are showing themselves to be.
From the work
You are organizing a present around a future that exists only in your head, and the gap between your investment and theirs grows wider every month.From The Waiting Is the Wound by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in The Waiting Is the Wound — available on Amazon.