I once genuinely believed I had a particular kind of magic.

I thought my love, encouragement, optimism and instinct for seeing possibility in people could help the man I loved recognise his own. I saw enormous potential in him, and I was convinced that, given the right conditions, he would eventually begin to realise it.

So I tried to create those conditions: a healthier way of living, interesting people, a different rhythm, new possibilities. I talked, encouraged, suggested alternatives, and waited.

But the man beside me continued to love the life he had always loved. The drinking, the parties, the sense of an endless celebration did not disappear. Instead, something happened that my theory of relationships had failed to anticipate: I was not changing his life. His life was beginning to change mine.

I believed relationships could change people.

I was right.

What I got wrong was assuming I knew which one of us would change.

The Person You Could Become

The uncomfortable thing is that my belief was not entirely foolish.

People do change through their relationships with others. Sometimes another person’s faith in us helps us attempt something we could not quite attempt alone. Close relationships can provide security, support our goals and alter our sense of what might be possible.

Relationship researchers have a term for one version of this process: the Michelangelo phenomenon. The metaphor is appealing. The sculptor does not create the figure from nothing; he reveals the figure already contained within the stone. Something similar can happen in intimate relationships when one partner supports the other in moving towards their ideal self.

But there is one word in that formulation that I once barely noticed.

Their.

Their ideal self.

Not the person I can imagine you becoming five years from now. Not the healthier, more confident, more successful or fulfilled version of you that seems so obvious to me. The person you want to become.

The boundary between those positions is remarkably thin.

“I believe in you” can easily become “I know what you could be.”

Then: “I know what you need to get there.”

And eventually: “With me, you will become that person.”

Somewhere along that progression, support can quietly turn into a claim of authorship over someone else’s future.

When the Future Outweighs the Present

For a long time, I thought my mistake had been idealisation.

Now I am not so sure.

I saw the reality reasonably well. I saw the drinking and the parties. I saw a way of life increasingly at odds with the one I wanted. We talked about it. I watched, over time, as very little fundamentally changed.

I did not lack information.

I assigned it the wrong weight.

The present seemed temporary; the potential seemed permanent.

Today’s behaviour could be explained by circumstances, old habits, history, another difficult period. The abilities I saw in him, by contrast, seemed deeper — evidence of some more authentic self that would eventually emerge.

Gradually, the future acquired more votes than the present.

The relationship became a kind of waiting room.

It is a strangely comfortable place to be. You do not have to choose the person entirely as they are today, because beside the real person stands another one: the future person. More mature. More confident. More fully realised.

There is only one problem with this second person.

They do not yet exist.

What exists is the person in front of you now, with their desires, habits, decisions, values and, crucially, their own agency. And that agency may be directed somewhere entirely different from the potential you see.

Eventually, the question “Can this person change?” stopped seeming particularly useful to me.

Of course they can.

A much more revealing question is:

Who wants the change more?

If I want you to become healthier, more successful or more fulfilled more than you do, perhaps this is no longer your life project.

Perhaps it is mine, with you cast in the leading role.

The Magic was Never Only about Him

But there was another question, and it was more uncomfortable still.

Why had it mattered so much to me to believe that another person would flourish specifically with me?

There was an attractive answer: because I loved him. Because I knew how to encourage people. Because I could see something good in him before he could see it himself.

All of that may have been true.

But it was not the whole truth.

My belief in his potential was also a belief about myself.

I liked the idea that my love had transformative power. That people became more confident, freer, braver around me. That my energy, curiosity about life, social world and encouragement could set something in motion inside another person.

It was an appealing role.

I was not simply someone who was loved.

I was someone people became better beside.

Today, I find it harder to explain that position entirely as generosity. There was an overestimation of my own influence in it. Perhaps a little grandiosity. More importantly, there was an incomplete respect for another person’s autonomy.

Because respecting someone’s autonomy does not mean merely allowing them to choose the life we think is good for them.

It also means accepting their right to keep choosing a life we believe wastes their possibilities.

If I see talent in someone and they have no desire to develop it, whose unrealised potential is it?

Theirs?

Or has it somehow become mine?

I may even be right that certain choices would make someone I love healthier, more engaged or more successful.

But my being right does not create their desire.

That, perhaps, was what I failed to understand.

Who Is Changing Whom?

There was another error in my thinking.

I had become so preoccupied with the other person’s possible trajectory that I rarely examined my own.

While I was thinking about how the relationship might change him, the relationship was indeed changing someone.

Me.

I entered it with one way of living and gradually found myself inhabiting another: more parties, more alcohol, more of that endless celebration I had once regarded simply as part of his life.

I had assumed I was the more powerful agent of influence.

Influence turned out to be mutual.

Perhaps there is already a peculiar asymmetry hidden inside the thought, I will help him realise his potential. We imagine ourselves as a stable point of reference: I will remain myself while the other person gradually moves towards the development I can see for them.

But relationships do not work that way.

We do not observe one another from a safe distance. We create a shared environment, and that environment acts on both of us.

So today, whenever I ask, “Who could this person become beside me?”, I would add another question:

Who am I becoming beside them?

That question may tell us more about the future of a relationship than our ideas about another person’s potential ever can.

Putting the Future Back in the Future

I do not think the answer is to stop seeing possibility in the people we love.

That would mean giving up one of the beautiful capacities of intimacy.

Sometimes we really do see talent before the first achievement, courage while someone is still afraid, the possibility of another life when the person we love can barely imagine it themselves.

Our faith can become part of someone else’s growth.

But influence and authorship are not the same thing.

I can create an environment in which it is easier for you to grow. I can support a direction you have chosen. I can remind you of possibilities that you once told me mattered to you.

But I cannot want your future on your behalf.

And I cannot make decisions in the present as though that future has already arrived.

This is where, for me, the distinction between potential and mutuality begins to matter.

Potential points towards the future. Mutuality can be observed now.

It exists not in who each of us might eventually become, but in what is already happening between us: whether we remain curious about one another; whether we can listen, respond, take each other into account, negotiate, and move towards each other.

So if I were choosing a relationship today, “Who could this person become beside me?” would no longer be my first question.

I would ask different ones.

What is happening between us now?

Do I like the life that emerges when I am with this person?

Who am I becoming beside them?

And finally:

If this person never changed in any fundamental way, would I still choose them?

The question does not assume that people never change. They do, sometimes profoundly. And love can be one of the forces that helps make such change possible.

The question serves another purpose.

It puts the future person back in the future.

And the person who exists today back in the present.

I once believed in my own magic. I thought love, encouragement and the right environment could unlock another human being.

These days, I prefer a less magical version of love.

I no longer need to be the person beside whom someone inevitably becomes better.

What matters more is whether, beside each other, we both do.