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Our Expectations Are Our Standards Imposed Upon Someone 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.