(Can you tell I love quotes?)
I remember back in October of 2000 being SO excited for my 16th birthday....getting my drivers license, having a party that evening, it was going to be great. I had an expectation in my mind of what it was going to be like before it even happened. Then came my birthday. And guess what? It was a good day, better than most days. I went to the DMV to get my license with my mom. I got flowers delivered to me at school from my parents. My close friends threw me a small party that night with a few of our friends. And then it was over. And sadly, I couldn't help but be a little disappointed.
I don't know exactly what I expected. It's not like I expected my parents to pull up in the driveway with my dream car and a big red bow around it, or get a kiss from my latest crush, or have hundreds of people at my party. It wasn't like that. But for whatever reason, the build-up to that day in my mind didn't match what happened.
Expectations set us up for disappointment. Of course when you expect something to be great, even if it ends up being okay or even good, you feel disappointed. This got me thinking about why we have expectations in the first place. I think, for me, expectations are a way of coping with uncertainty and exercising some control. It also gives me something to look forward to. Those aren't necessarily bad things, but how do we prevent expectations from getting in the way of our happiness? I've been trying to figure this out for myself for a while. Especially in my marriage. Because let's face it, expectations play a huge role in marriage.
I came up with three ways that I feel we can keep our expectations in check.
1. Be realistic.
There's two different ways that we need to be realistic about expectations in marriage. The first is about "falling in love". I came across THIS really good article that was going around on facebook called "I Didn't Love My Wife When We Got Married" by Pop Chassid. The title caught my eye, so I read through it. It talks about how we have unrealistic expectations of what marriage is supposed to be like. You "fall in love" with someone....can't stop thinking about them, get butterflies when you see them, spend all your waking hours with them, talk on the phone until 3 am, can't keep your hands off each other, etc. (This time period usually involves overlooking all that person's faults, too). You date that person, get married, and the first few months are wonderful. You can't imagine life without that person! Then a couple of years go by and reality sets in. That "twidderpated" feeling wears off. A few more years go by and suddenly you're thinking, "Who is this person I married?! I don't love him/her anymore." We think that maybe our spouse wasn't "the one" after all and maybe "the one" is still out there. Well what REALLY happened is....you were never "in love" in the first place. Love is so much more than that. We get unrealistic expectations through movies or books or whatever that being happily married means that everything comes easily, that you never fight or have disagreements, that everyday is blissful. When really, marriage is HARD. It takes A LOT of work. A LOT of sacrifice. A LOT of compromise. And there are times when you might feel like you don't "love" that person anymore. But "real" love means being committed to that person despite all those hard times. It means putting up with all their faults and forgiving them when they make mistakes. "Real" love is not glamorous. It's exactly that....REAL.
The next one is the expectations we have of our spouse. A lot of the expectations we have of our spouse stem from watching our own parents' relationship. Imagine a young man who grew up with a mom who always had dinner on the table when his dad got home from work. Then he married a young woman whose mom worked full-time and didn't make dinner very often, if at all. Her version of dinner is picking up a pizza on the way home. You can imagine that there might be some difficulty in this relationship. Or imagine a young woman who grew up with a father who was a great provider and did well financially. Then she married a man who struggled financially and kept moving around from job to job. Naturally the young woman would feel like her husband was not filling his "role" as a husband. Not only should we not compare the expectations our parents had of each other to the expectations we have of our spouse (although it can be difficult not to), we also need to be realistic of what our spouse can do. Maybe the young woman in the first example isn't a good cook or doesn't enjoy cooking. We can't expect her to suddenly be a whiz in the kitchen. Or maybe with the second couple, the wife can't expect the husband who struggles financially to suddenly become a millionaire. We need to be realistic about the expectations we have for our spouse. And we need to make sure they know what those expectations are. That leads me to the next one.....
2. Communicate.
I remember the first Valentine's Day after I got married. I was building up in my mind this amazing, romantic evening that my husband was going to plan for me. The day came, aaaaand.....it didn't happen. Not only is Valentine's Day my husband's birthday (which makes it a little complicated) but I had unrealistic expectations about what it would be like. The silly thing about it is, I expected him to be a mind reader! He didn't know what I wanted. I've even heard girls say (and I'll admit I've been guilty of this before too), that "he should just know". Yes, of course it's more romantic when a guy does something we don't expect and we don't have to ask. But realistically, most guys are just normal guys who love their wives but aren't always savvy when it comes to romance. I've had to learn over the years that I have to TELL my husband what I want. And ever since I figured that out he's gotten better and better each year.
The same is especially true of the expectations husbands and wives have of each other when it comes to their roles in the home (as I touched on earlier). I realized after years of marriage that one of the expectations I had of my husband was to be way more hands-on with chores around the house than what he was actually doing. I EXPECTED HIM to know this, and after years of him not meeting that expectation, I became resentful. It seems almost embarrassing now looking back at it. I was getting mad about something he didn't even know! Then one day we sat down together and wrote out what our expectations were of each other, and rated them on how important they were to us and the likelihood of our spouse being able to meet that expectation. Then once we knew what those expectations were, we started doing them. Boy did our marriage improve! It's amazing how something as simple as communicating improved our marriage exponentially.
(I'm sorry, I couldn't resist!)
Then the next step is:
3. Be grateful.
We need to learn to be grateful for what we do have, so that we're not disappointed by unmet expectations. Instead of thinking, "boy, my spouse didn't clean up the house as well as I would have liked him to" (or as well as you would have done it), we should think instead, "wow, I know my husband really hates cleaning and yet he worked really hard on this because he knows it's important to me. I am so lucky." It's amazing how that shift in perspective makes such a huge difference. On my 16th birthday, instead of being disappointed, I should have thought, "my mom went out of her way to take me to get my license today and to send me flowers, and my friends planned this whole party just for me because they care about me....I must be really special." We should think about what we have as always being BETTER than the alternative, not WORSE.
