You are not in a relationship with him.
You are in a relationship with the version of him that exists in your imagination. The one who is almost there. Who just needs a little more time, a little more support, a little more of the right environment to become the person you know he is capable of being.
He is talented. He is intelligent. He has qualities that genuinely impress you. And when he is at his best, which happens often enough to sustain your hope, you can see so clearly who he could be that the gap between that version and the one actually showing up in your relationship becomes something you are willing to manage indefinitely.
This is what romanticising potential looks like from the inside. And it is one of the most expensive habits a Nigerian single can develop.
Why Potential Is So Compelling
Potential is not an illusion. The qualities you see in this person are real. The talent is real. The intelligence is real. The moments of genuine connection are real. You are not imagining things.
What you are doing is weighting those qualities more heavily than the behaviour that is consistently showing up alongside them.
Potential says who someone could be under ideal conditions. Behaviour says who someone actually is in the ordinary, imperfect conditions of real life. And it is behaviour, not potential, that you will live with in a marriage.
The reason potential is so compelling is partly because it is genuinely present and partly because it activates something specific in certain people. The belief that love is most meaningful when it costs something. That choosing someone in spite of their current limitations is a higher form of devotion than choosing someone who simply shows up well consistently.
This belief is not entirely wrong. Growth is real. People do become better versions of themselves. Love does play a role in that becoming.
But the belief becomes dangerous when it is used to justify staying in a relationship where the gap between potential and reality has remained consistent for months or years without meaningful movement. When the cost of the love is being paid entirely by one person. When the becoming never quite arrives.
The Difference Between Growth and Potential
This distinction is critical and it is worth spending time on.
A person who is growing is someone whose behaviour is changing in observable, consistent ways over time. Not dramatically. Not perfectly. But directionally. You can point to specific things that are different now than they were six months ago. There is evidence of genuine internal movement, not just stated intention.
A person with unrealised potential is someone whose behaviour has remained largely consistent while the story about who they are becoming keeps updating. They have been about to turn a corner for as long as you have known them. The corner exists in conversation but not in demonstrated reality.
The question to ask is not whether this person has potential. Almost everyone has potential. The question is whether the trajectory of their actual behaviour over the time you have known them is moving in a direction that is genuinely promising or whether the potential is a fixed feature of the relationship, always present, never arriving.
What Romanticising Potential Actually Costs
The most obvious cost is time. Time spent in a relationship that is not moving is time not spent building something that actually is. Nigerian singles, particularly women, are acutely aware of the social and biological dimensions of their relationship timeline. And yet the very awareness of that timeline can paradoxically make it harder to leave a situation that is consuming it, because leaving feels like losing the time already invested rather than protecting the time that remains.
But the less visible costs are equally significant.
Romanticising potential requires you to consistently override your own perception. To see what is actually in front of you and choose to interpret it through the lens of what could be instead. Over time, that consistent overriding erodes your ability to trust your own judgement. You stop believing what you see because you have trained yourself to look past it. And a person who cannot trust their own perception is significantly more vulnerable to the next situation that asks them to do the same thing.
It also costs you the relationship with yourself. When you are primarily focused on who someone else is becoming, your own becoming gets neglected. Your own needs, your own growth, your own clarity about what you want and where you are going, all of it gets subordinated to the project of supporting, waiting for, and believing in someone else’s potential.
That is not love. That is self-abandonment dressed as devotion.
Why Nigerian Women Are Particularly Vulnerable to This
There are specific cultural reasons Nigerian women develop this pattern more acutely than most.
The first is the narrative of the woman behind the man. The idea that a great woman shapes a great man. That her patience, her support, and her belief in him are what unlock his greatness. This narrative is not entirely false. Genuine partnership does involve mutual support and belief. But it has been stretched into a justification for staying in situations where one person is doing all the investing while the other is doing all the receiving.
The second is the sunk cost dynamic intensified by cultural pressure. The longer you have been with someone, the more family and community know about the relationship, the higher the social cost of leaving. And the higher the social cost of leaving, the more pressure there is to find reasons to stay. Potential is the most readily available reason.
The third is the genuine goodness of the person involved. He is not a bad man. He is a good man who is not yet the partner you need. And in Nigerian relationship culture where the alternative, starting over, navigating the dating landscape again, facing the family questions, is so socially loaded, a good man with unrealised potential can feel like more than enough reason to stay.
How to Start Seeing Clearly
The shift from romanticising potential to seeing clearly is not a single decision. It is a practice.
It starts with separating observation from interpretation. What is actually happening in this relationship, described in plain, specific, behavioural terms, without the story you have built around it? Not what his behaviour means about who he is becoming. What his behaviour is, right now, consistently.
It continues with asking the question that most people in this situation avoid. If this person never changed, if who they are today is who they will be in five years, would I still choose this relationship? Not hopefully. Not with the caveat that they will change. As a straightforward yes or no about the person currently in front of you.
And it requires honesty about what you are getting from the dynamic. Because romanticising potential is not only about the other person. It serves something in you. It may be keeping you busy enough not to examine what you actually want. It may be providing a sense of purpose and meaning that you have not yet found elsewhere. It may be protecting you from the vulnerability of choosing someone who is already showing up well, which carries its own kind of risk.
Understanding what the dynamic is doing for you is the most honest and most effective path to releasing it.
What Becomes Available When You Stop
When you stop romanticising potential you do not become harder or more guarded. You become clearer.
You start seeing people as they actually are rather than as you need them to be. You start making partner selection decisions based on demonstrated reality rather than projected possibility. You stop carrying the weight of someone else’s becoming as though it is your responsibility.
And you become available, genuinely available, for someone who does not require you to look past who they are to find a reason to choose them.
That person exists. But you cannot find them while you are fully occupied with the potential of someone else.
Learn more about building the clarity that changes who you choose at jojeanimohita.com.
You do not have a love problem. You have a clarity problem. And clarity is something you can actually work on.
About the Author
Jo-Jean Imoh-Ita is a Certified Relationship and Marriage Coach and Relationship Clarity Strategist. She is the founder of Soothing Solutions Ltd and RFC Academy, and has coached over 150 clients across Nigeria and the diaspora. Her work helps career-driven Nigerian singles choose partners with clarity, not just feelings. Learn more at jojeanimohita.com
