I had not had the opportunity to see the commentary – great interaction and insight!

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.