Else
<Understanding>
Our expectations of people are not bad, they are simply part of how human beings instinctively operate. It is natural for us to react badly against people who go against what we believe to be the right way of doing things. However, what is instinctive for us to experience isn’t necessarily what is healthy for us experience.
When it comes to relationships, our expectations are almost always well-intentioned. We think that having expectations in a relationship is good, for without expectations, we will have no standards and the relationship will not improve.
This is absolutely not true.
We can have standards without expectations. Having standards is internal—it’s our own guiding principles. Having expectations, on the other hand, is external—it’s wanting other people to see and do things the way we do and getting upset when they don’t.
Expectations manifest when we impose our standards on the people around us. We often do this with good intentions—we genuinely believe that the person should adopt what we believe because it’s a better standard compared to theirs.
However, having expectations isn’t a suitable tool to use to help a relationship improve. In fact, the opposite happens and the relationship deteriorates.
In the early stages of my relationship with my husband Yuri, I had many, many expectations of him that I thought were good. I was even proud to have them, because I thought they signified that I had high standards—that I had a good code by which to live. I used to think, “I’m not asking anything of you that I wouldn’t ask of myself,” or “I’m not asking anything of you that isn’t normal.”
Similarly, Yuri, too, had expectations of me and his own ideas of what a relationship should be, especially after we got married.
This was why the first three years of our marriage were incredibly tumultuous. We both had a lot of expectations of each other that we brought into the relationship, but we didn’t question why we had those expectations. We just wanted each other to be a certain way—I wanted Yuri to be more helpful, he wanted me to be more giving—and even though we talked about it a million times, we still didn’t receive what we wanted. We felt hurt because we felt like it was a sign that the other person didn’t care enough.
At that time, we didn’t know our expectations of each other were the root of our problems. We were just unhappy with each other, and quiet resentment started to grow. Resentment wasn’t something we addressed, it was just there—running under the surface all the time and reflected in the arguments we had.
We loved each other, but we didn’t feel loved. Even when one party was giving what was expected of them, it was done with defensiveness and resistance. It wasn’t until we were able to let go of our expectations of each other that our relationship started changing for the better, because we could finally communicate with each other without arguing.
Are Your Expectations Helping or Sabotaging You?
<Awareness>
To let go of our expectations, we have to first understand why our expectations are doing us such a disservice.
“Expectations” is just a word, but it is what the word represents that causes problems. Expectations almost always carry the concept of “should” in our minds, which brings with it furious thoughts of unfairness and indignation. When we think something is unfair or “should be different,” we think we have a right to feel upset, so it drives us to hold on even tighter to all the negative emotions that don’t serve us.
Imagine that there is no “should” in your vocabulary. If someone were to do something you don’t understand, that would just be a fact. Your train of thought would be, “He doesn’t understand” rather than “But he doesn’t understand!” which implies that he should understand. In both trains of thought, the situation remains exactly the same—the person doesn’t understand. However, the second thought (“But he doesn’t understand!”) changes the way we feel about the situation or the person—we are more upset and less able to communicate effectively.
Being calm and not getting upset doesn’t mean that we become doormats and let people walk all over us—it means that we are able to go through undesirable situations without our emotions affecting us so badly that it stops us from effectively addressing those situations.
People can certainly be wrong, and we must take action to solve problems, but our concept of how people should be can truly hamper our ability to think clearly and communicate effectively. Expectations sabotage us because instead of addressing the problem, we are addressing our emotions. It’s almost like expectations blind us to solutions to a problem because our minds are too focused on what the situation should be and getting upset over how someone should behave.
At some point in our lives, it helps to ask ourselves what our expectations of people are really doing for us. What do you gain from your expectations of people? What do you lose due to your expectations of people?
Often, we gain righteous anger from our expectations of people and we lose our peace of mind due to our expectations of people.
In my relationship with Yuri, I used to experience frustration over the concept: “Why aren’t you more helpful?” I would always feel so hurt whenever he didn’t immediately offer to help me with simple things like carrying the shopping bags or when he seemed reluctant to lend his time to help me with work or to fix something. In my reality, it was a normal thing to expect that a person who loves you would not only volunteer to help, they would happily help. That’s what I would do.
It was only after a few years into our relationship that I realized that:
a.I was subconsciously comparing what he was doing to what I would do if I were him, which was why I always arrived at the conclusion that his not meeting my expectation must be because he didn’t care enough; and
b.My expectation of “If people love you, they will unquestionably and happily want to help you” is a direct manifestation of my upbringing. I realized that it was because while I was growing up, my parents had helped me so much in my life that to me, it was normal to want to do things for the people you love.
Similarly, Yuri, too, felt unhappy when certain aspects of his ideals weren’t fulfilled; and he had his own discoveries and work to do when it came to his expectations of me as a partner.
All along, our unhappiness with each other was because we had all these ideas of how a marriage was supposed to be. Even though we were not consciously doing it, we were always measuring each other against some kind of standard, which is where all expectations were born.
Without expectations, we see someone for who they are—in all their flawed imperfection—without judgement. It doesn’t mean we have to agree with them, it doesn’t even mean we understand them, it just means we are not upset at them, which allows us to communicate better.
When you have a relationship with someone, it’s often impossible to say who is right and who is wrong, or whose standard works better or who should adjust or change. We all have needs, fears, desires, and preferences, and the best we can do is to take responsibility for them as our personal preferences instead of imposing them onto our partner under the belief that our expectations are universal standards.
When we understand that other people’s realities are different from our own, then we know that it is entirely possible to talk about something that we think is wrong without accusing the other
