Editor’s Note: This post is by Simple Marriage contributor Mary Ann Crossno.
If a good working definition of expectations is planned disappointment, then the outcome of expectations will be unhappiness. When what we expect to happen does not happen, we are disappointed and we suffer pain at some level. The greater the expectation, the greater the pain we will suffer.
Surprisingly, we are likely to be unhappy even when our expectations ARE met! Let me explain.
We are most grateful for the good things that come our way that we did not expect to happen. If you expect your partner to help with the housework, you will be disappointed, mad, sad, or angry when your partner does not help you with the housework, but you won’t necessarily be grateful when your partner does help with the housework. Depending on your history together, you may be
- Pleased – “I’m glad we’re doing this together.”
- Surprised – “I can’t believe you actually mopped the floor!”
- Justified – “I do my share and you need to do your share.”
- Vindicated – “It’s about time you started pulling your weight!”
When you are dog tired at the end of the day, and you walk in to find your partner cleaning the kitchen, or putting the kids to bed when you expected her to be home late – that’s when you feel truly grateful – because you were not expecting the help! When we are truly grateful for something, we cannot help but feel happiness.
Dennis Prager says it best:
Gratitude is the key to happiness and anything that undermines gratitude must undermine happiness. And nothing undermines gratitude as much as expectations. The more expectations you have, the less gratitude you will have.
Expectations and gratitude are opposite sides of the same coin. Where do our expectations come from?
Our expectations are the confused result of our reactions, our thoughts, and our emotional heritage. We confuse wants with needs, anticipation with expectation, loneliness with emptiness, touch with sex, talk with communication, ideals with reality, and self with relationships.
We confuse what we can get only from within ourselves with what we can get only from a relationship.
This confusion drives us to continually
- try to get from someone else what we can get only from ourselves,
- or try to get from ourselves what we can get only from a relationship.
No matter how hard or long we try, we will never be complete in this life. We cannot be complete as an individual, and we cannot be complete by marrying or having children. We cannot be completely secure emotionally nor can we know everything about any one thing. When we are fixated on finding completeness in this life, we become so anxious that we either aim for absolute safety or we stay paralyzed for fear of not getting it [completeness].
The expectation that we can be complete and the desperate search for it leads people to attempt the impossible. The fantasy world is full of the illusion of completeness – which leads people to drugs, sex, alcohol, money, conflict, helplessness, power – all of the world’s ills. We’re all a little lonely, we all feel some sense of inadequacy, some fear of failure – in other words, we all feel some emptiness.
This is a natural state of being, and in my Christian worldview, designed by God to draw us to Him.
Growing up – becoming emotionally mature – is all about how we handle the uncertainty – the incompleteness – of life. When we are able to accept and understand that this emptiness is a natural part of being human, we are on the path to a better life.
The less aware we are of our own emptiness, the more unrealistically we raise our level of expectations on others. High expectations become hypersensitive and emotionally reactive. So much focus is placed on what others are or are not doing that there is little time left for self-focus. The more successfully we can lower our expectations of others, the more time we have to develop our personal sense of responsibility – and the more effort we put into living up to our personal responsibilities, the more we experience responsibility as joy and fulfillment.
Unhappiness is trading what we want most for what we want now. We want whatever makes us uncomfortable – our anxieties, our insecurities, our challenges – we want that discomfort to go away RIGHT NOW. But deep down, what we want most is to be more – more loving, more forgiving, more compassionate, and more grateful.
Make gratitude a habit.
- Write down three things everyday that you are grateful for –– and see how many days you can come up three things to be grateful for – without repeating yourself!
- Get a copy of The Simple Abundance Journal of Gratitude by Sarah Ban Breathnach and write in it everyday for a year.
- Write your gratitudes on post-it notes and stick them around the house, in the car, in your spouse/kids’ lunch bags . . . surround yourself with reminders of what you have to be grateful for.
- For your Christmas cards, send a note to everyone that helped you in some way this year – and start with those closest to you – your spouse, your kids, your parents, and your siblings.
Whatever you focus on, grows.
Grow your happiness by lowering your expectations and growing your gratefulness.
Prager, D. 1998. Happiness is a serious problem.
Fogarty, T.F. 1978. On emptiness and closeness. In The Family, Compendium I.
Photo courtesy suvodeb
Mary Ann is a marriage and family therapist, and a writer. She returned to college at the ripe age of 52, completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in four years, and is Cajun thru and thru. If you're not sure what that means, come by her house whenever family is around - you'll figure it out.
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Mary – This is a great post. So many words of wisdom…I need to come back several times to really make this message sink into my thick</dm> skull!
Gary Smalley talks about lowering his expecations in life, and of people – he says it was such a profound impact – it helped him overcome serious disease – like heart issues (I believe – I may have the details wrong!)
Thanks again. WOW!
Thank you for yet another wonderful post that refocuses my mind and energy on what I should focus on. Expectations are such a dangerous thing……gratitude can truly make a difference!
Stu, Thanks for the thumbs up. I absolutely believe that we can improve our health by lowering our expectations and growing our gratitude. Think about the physical reactions we experience when we are disappointed, angry, upset – sick to our stomach, tight chest, headaches, etc. When we are filled with gratitude, we are filled with energy, we smile, we laugh, we cry cleansing tears of joy – these are healing reactions.
We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong – the amount of work is the same!
WOW. you are amazing! how do you talk right to me? I had just posted a blog today about expecting the unexpected. Prior to even seeing your post. So then I went back and copied some of your writings (of course giving you publication rights). I just feel like you lifted a lot of wieght. I dont so much have problems in my marriage as much as I do with my outside relationships ie: friends. This totally rested my mind. Thank you.
While I agree that gratitude can help significantly improve our level of happiness, I would like to suggest that perhaps it is not the expectations themselves that cause conflict, but the way in which we react to our expectations being unmet. We have control over what we choose to expect and we have control over how we react when things either go as expected or do not. The nature of a partnership relationship, I think, will always lead to certain expectations simply as a function of sharing responsibilities.
Commitments come with expectations. For example, our marriage vows created the expectation that we will be faithful to each other. If I chose not to expect him to be faithful, then perhaps my disappointment if he were not would be lessened, but if we are solely avoiding expectations in order to avoid being disappointed, then I think we are missing the point.
It all comes down to how we communicate to each other about the expectations we have. My husband is unlikely to meet my expectation of flowers on Valentine's Day if I do not tell him that I'd like to receive flowers. It is then my decision about how to react if I do or do not receive flowers. We need to help each other meet or at least communicate about our expectations so that our relationships can grow, not simply let go of all expectations.
This reminds me of lines from the poem “Gratefulnesse” by George Herbert (1593- 1633):
Thou that hast given so much to me,
Give one thing more, a grateful heart.
Not thankful, when it pleaseth me;
As if thy blessings had spare days:
But such a heart, whose pulse may be
Thy praise.
I am absolutely on board with D&D. I constantly get vibed for my high expectations. All my adult life. But I have very high expectations of character – I value integrity above all else, so when key players in my life fail to be the great and wonderful people they tell me they are, I take that to mean I am not worth the effort. (And I'm talking about simple stuff like telling the truth and keeping promises.) My mother in law actually told me to my face that I needed to lower my expectations of her or we'd never get along – this after she backed out of every detail of the wedding she'd offered to take care of, to include forgetting to attend the rehearsal and leaving the reception early without saying goodbye. I'm going to hang on to those high expectations of being treated with respect.
However, I will gladly give small stuff the heave ho. Household stuff, especially. I just try to be clear with people about where there's wiggle room. “This is very important to me – be certain to write it down and show up early.” “If we don't get to the dishes today, I'm not worried.” D&D makes a great point about communication – be vigilant about it or be prepared to take responsibility. “I'm sorry I didn't make it clear this was so important to me. Next time I'll write it on the calendar.”
DaphneandDonald – Newlywed & Unemployed,
I appreciate your thoughtful response to the ideas about expectations. Your comments give me the chance to clarify the intent I wanted to communicate. My intent was NOT to suggest that all expectations are a bad thing and need to be eliminated. Nor was my intent to suggest that the goal in lowering expectations was/is to short circuit or avoid all together the pain and/or disappointment that comes from relationships. My intent is to focus attention on me – how much energy do I put into changing me versus changing, managing others.
I agree wholeheartedly with the idea that we get to choose how we react to unmet expectations of others – I've written quite a bit on SM about the importance and power of “choice” in our emotional reactivity [do a search for 'Crossno' and you can get a better idea of my thoughts].
My belief is that energy follows thought. I don't think about my husband's faithfulness as an expectation – he has committed his will in action to me. I think often about how grateful I am that I married a person of integrity and character, so that I can rest in his word. At any point in time that his actions made his word a lie, my focus will follow his actions. We are what we repeatedly do – and people show us who they are all the time by their actions, not their words.
I don't think that communicating expectations, however clearly, frequently, or loudly we communicate those expectations, will cause them to be met. I think that often we confuse our expectation of others with our effort to change them – to make them into someone that we want them to be. If I love getting flowers on Valentine's Day and I'm married to someone who does not want to/like to/believe in sending flowers on Valentine's Day, then having my expectation met will fall flat – because what I want MOST is for my husband to WANT to give me flowers. The issue of what my husband chooses to do about the importance of sending me flowers on Valentine's is about HIS growth. Will he make it important because it's important to me? Will he do it as a duty? Will he ignore what matters to me? The issue of my unmet expectations is about my growth – will I find other ways that he shows his love just as much or more than sending flowers? Or will I stay stuck on getting him to live up to my expectations?
Your M-I-Ls actions – not her promises – during your wedding tell you volumes about who she is. If you continue to expect her to live up to her words, you will continue to be disappointed and you will not get the respect you expect – because your expectation is that she be different from who/how she is and she will resist your efforts to get her to live up to your expectations. People in general, are self-deceivers – we represent ourselves more as how we want to be seen than how we truly act. Her actions say that her belief is that grand intentions matter more than actions.
The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise, we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
Thanks for this Dr. Sellick – this one I want to commit to memory!
The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise, we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. – This a quote from Thomas Merton [left out his name in prior post.]
Mary Ann, thank you so much for the clarification. I also completely agree with what you say about expectations often being about trying to change someone else instead of changing ourselves. I like what you said about the difference between words and actions. Thank you for taking my comment one step further. I'm instigating conversation about this topic and others, related to marriage, on my blog. I look forward to continuing the conversation here and elsewhere.
Hi,
Great article! I completely agree, expectations play a key role regarding how happy we are. I recently thought about this too. I invite you to have a look at Role and importance of “expectations” in being happy and tell me what you think!
Thanks, Nick
Great post! I’m reading it again for the 3rd time. I just forwarded it to a friend after talk about marriage and all that goes with it! Thanks for the words of wisdom.