Great Expectations
What do you imagine would happen to your relationships if you let go of all your expectations?
What do you imagine would happen to your relationships if you let go of all your expectations? Not just your expectations of your partner, but of your friends and families too? What purpose do you imagine the expectations you have of them serve? Do you imagine you use them to protect yourself, to make sure you are respected, cared for, not ‘taken advantage of’? What are some of the expectations you have of others that you imagine you would find really hard to let go of?
“I expect you to treat me with some respect. Look at me when I’m talking!”
“I expect some consideration. Just pick up the phone once in a while.”
“I expect you to care about my feelings.”
“I expect to be consulted before you make decisions that affect me.”
“I expect you to answer my texts with more than just a smiley-face.”
“I expect you to treat us all fairly and equally.”
If these are some of your expectations (or ones you’ve been subject to) how do you feel in your body as you hear the words “I expect you to…”?
How do you feel as you say them yourself?
When I state an expectation I have of someone, I straighten my back and lift my chin, sometimes clenching my jaw. I look the person I am talking to in the eye, so they know I am serious about what I am saying, and in my head I have a story that I am ‘right’ or that I am ‘standing up for myself’. I have all kinds of other stories I associate with my expectations — like ‘I treat others this way so I want the same’ and ‘I would never do that to you so why are you doing it to me’ — and moral judgements like ‘you are being inconsiderate’ also come into my head.
In my experience, my expectations of others always come wrapped in a whole mess of my own judgements about how people ‘should’ behave towards each other, judgements that I have accumulated over a lifetime. How one partner should treat the other, how children should behave towards their parents (and vice versa), how we should treat our loved ones, our family members, our elderly. And I imagine that most of us have…
