potentialities

Oh, no problem! I could talk about Tolkien and LOTR and rewriting stories and stuff, like, forever.

So, at first, when Tolkien hadn't even invented Arwen or Faramir, he intended for Aragorn to fall in love with Éówyn and for their marriage to unite Gondor and Rohan and everything to make lots of sense. ;) In this draft, Galadriel tells Aragorn that he's going to fall in love, and lo, when he sees Éowyn, he does.

Then Tolkien second-guessed himself, and decided that maybe Aragorn was "too old and lordly and grim" for her (!), and maybe he would have Éowyn die avenging Théoden instead, but that possibly Aragorn would still be in love with her anyway, and that he wouldn't marry after she died. Obviously things were kind of up in the air at this point.

He came up with the idea of Aragorn already in love with Elrond's daughter fairly late, and I guess he couldn't figure out how to work it into the rest of the story at all, which is why he gave up and put it pretty much entirely in the appendices (total cop-out in my opinion). I think he was really in love with the idea, so much that he couldn't possibly give it up even though he couldn't work it into the story very well, because it was a parallel of the story of the human Beren and the elf-maiden Lúthien that he related really closely to his own marriage to his childhood sweetheart whom he'd been forbidden to marry. He even had their put on their tombstones, I believe. And I don't blame him for wanting to be Aragorn. :D But he still should have held out for Éowyn.