Great Expectations

Expectations can be a real drag on a relationship. Worse, they can be a real drag on your psyche.

You buy your S.O. something— a token— just to let them know that you were thinking about them. The gesture makes them happy. All good so far, right?

But let’s extrapolate that scenario: in your mind (at least those with an inner monologue), you figure, “I got blah blah blah just to get a smile and a nice hug. Why wouldn’t they reciprocate the gesture?” Particularly if they actually do feel the same way that you feel.

The next day comes, and then the day after, and then a week later— with no return

gesture. Your disappointment is palpable, and tastes bitter like the taste you get when you chew aspirins. Your expectations have not been met in this situation.

Now here’s the rub: exactly whose fault is it that your expectations weren’t met? Them, for not meeting them, or you for setting your expectations too high in that instance for your partner to meet.

And you don’t know what their time was spent thinking / feeling / doing. Maybe they were distracted, and had every intention of returning the gesture, but got side-tracked.

Maybe they were happy with your gesture, and didn’t want to equalize it by returning the action. After all— more special if only one person does it.

Or, maybe they’re just not that kind of a person, and they don’t feel any obligation to show you they care.

You have some choices to make.

For some, it would be a deal-breaker. For them, they might have done whatever they did in the first place in order to get their partner to respond, because they needed the gesture; they needed their ego massaged, and so they created a situation where that could happen. But since it didn’t happen, they will take the “scorched earth” response: “You don’t care about me. I got blah blah blah for you, and because you Just Don’t Care you couldn’t even appropriately respond.”

Maybe that will prompt a contingency response from them: “I’m sooo sorry! I was going to blah blah blah back, but work called and a huge issue blew up, sucking away my attention away! Let me make it up to you.”

Fat chance, but I had to mention it as a possibility, unlikely as it may be.

Then there’s the annoyed response, maybe augmented and/or initiated by the fact that they seemingly have no clue what you’re talking about (aka the disproportionate allocation of expectations); what you’ve been stewing over for the whole week, didn’t even give them the slightest pause for thought.

Your fault, or theirs? Was your expectation too high, or their reception to it too low? What I have discovered over the long years is that you have (almost) no control over how someone else acts/reacts. What you do have control over is how you act/react.

How many times do we attribute a negative to a person where it’s actually our issue, not theirs? For instance, I used to think that this one friend of mine growing up was harsh towards me playing guitar; turns out he wasn’t actually being harsh— rather, it was my interpretation of his responses— I thought “harsh” when he wasn’t trying to send “harsh.”

Hence the overarching theme of this essay: a lowered expectation is generally a met expectation. Oh, it’s okay to have a “base level” set of expectations— you should be able to expect generalities like kindness or freedom from being intentionally hurt— from interpersonal relationships. Where we get ourselves in trouble is when we have that floor set too high.

How about this as a paradigm? Work on the things you are capable of changing, not the things you aren’t capable of changing, like someone else.

© Ray Cattie