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This article is part of a series. Read part two here.
Everybody talks about how to have a good relationship.
We stress the importance of trust, respect, good sex, and healthy communication. We examine all the factors that provide a solid foundation for love.
Talking about the good stuff is easy and, in fact, celebrated. But we rarely talk about the hard stuff—the things that threaten our partnerships and throw them off track.
We’re terrified to dig deep into ourselves and examine the flaws and obstructions. Several realizations might come to the surface, and we might not be ready to deal with them.
My husband and I have been together for seven years. The fear of digging deep into ourselves is there every single day, but we do it nonetheless. We plunge into our imperfections and mistakes with bravery—without having any second thoughts.
Every time we take that leap of faith, we discover the root cause of our occasional conflicts:
Expectations.
And our expectations are always different because our needs are consistently changing over the course of our relationship. We are changing. The world around us is changing every single second. So we can’t have the same set of rigid ideas and expect the other person to fulfill, let alone understand them at all times.
I must admit, however, that this realization has saved us a lot of trouble. We are fully aware of the damage that unrealistic expectations can cause. That’s why we try our best to have realistic, healthy expectations that don’t block our vision.
So we constantly ask ourselves: Am I being reasonable?
The truth is most times we are not:
We want things that our partner might not be able to give.
We want to feel things that might be hard to ignite.
We want our partner to be someone they are not.
We want to relive the past or bring good moments back.
We want to hear certain words and actions—no more, no less.
We want so many things. The list is long and our determination is final. But we might not know that being unreasonable blinds us. It hurts the relationship more than anything else and sabotages the so-called unbreakable connection with our partner.
Our false expectations might be hiding behind our false values. We constantly mistake our wrong ideas for values we think we have. If we look deep enough, we’ll discover that our real values don’t match reality; we’re just too scared to admit that our assumptions are false.
In the second part, I will talk about false expectations and how they can ruin our relationships.
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author: Elyane Youssef
Image: cottonbro studio/Pexels
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