On dating men with “potential”

I have some advice for women younger than me, advice I hope they listen to. I’m 48 years old and only recently learned to run for the hills as fast as I can as soon as I hear the following spilling from my mouth or forming in my head: “But, he has so much potential.”

Mark my words, this is the same as saying, “He’s a loser.”

I know this now, all too well.

And yet, there’s a part of me — a soft part, a tender part, a part of me I like and protect— that falls for men “with potential.” The ones “with potential” were always the hardest ones to get over.

They were also the ones that were completely impossible and inappropriate to date, beginning with James, the freebasing coke addict I fell for when I was 16. He was 18, a freshman at UC Berkeley, an actor, a fantastic writer. He was brilliant. Once, he came by my basement window to take me out. I said I couldn’t go because I had an English paper to write. He laid on my bed while I sat at the typewriter and dictated a perfect five-paragraph English paper to me in the space of half an hour so we could go. It got an A.

Of course I was in love with him.

He was crazy, flamboyant, boyish, nuts. He took me skiing once. He’d relapsed, but I didn’t suspect that until we were driving very badly in his battered VW bug on curvy…