Dear Tristan: on expectations

Dear Tristan,

I want to write to you today about expectations. I’ve written a lot about relationships, and the things that help or hurt relationships. One of the things that hurts relationships is having expectations of the other person. In my opinion and experience, expectations generally serve to harm….to harm relationship and to harm people.

Parents have expectations of their children, husbands have expectations of their wives, wives have expectations of their husbands. We have expectations of friends, coworkers, employers, pastors…basically everyone in our life!

My violin teacher and mentor, Ronda Cole, once said that it is important not to tell gifted children that they are gifted. As soon as you do, she said, they have nowhere to go but down. They will always feel like they are failing to live up to their potential.

This is true for all of us, I think – “gifted” or not. When we have an expectation of a person, and we make that expectation known, we are putting pressure on that person to “do as we want.” This is true even if what we expect is reasonable, even if what we want is something good or in the person’s best interest.

When we come to a relationship with expectations, we are coming to that relationship wanting to control the other person – because make no mistake, expectations are controlling. We might be nice about it, but we are trying to pressure the other person into behaving in ways that we desire. That is control. For the person on the receiving end of those expectations, it matters little whether the “desired behaviors” are reasonable. They still feel controlled.

In addition to causing someone to feel like we are trying to control them, when someone doesn’t live to our expectations, we get resentful and irritated. Instead of appreciating the gift they give us, we get mad at them for not giving us the one we expect.

Too often, our expectations don’t just control the other person….they control us as well.

Some people have high expectations of others and cause them to feel like they need to “live up to them.” It can also be possible to have extremely low expectations of someone….and create a self-fulfilling prophecy where that someone lives down to those expectations. The thought process is, if you expect me to be lazy, if you expect me to fail, why even try to do something different?

You can see why expectations can be so damaging to relationships.

The problem, of course, is that expectations are one of those things we all have. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like we choose to have them, we just have them. But I can tell you this: you can choose to set them aside so that the relationship can flourish. You can choose to not let your expectations control you, or to use them to control another person. You can choose what to do with the human tendency towards having expectations dictate the course of a relationship.

That’s the great thing about life, one that I’ve come back around to many times in these letters…you get to choose.

So, Tristan, in our relationship, I choose to put expectations on the shelf. I don’t expect you to be a professional musician (even though I will expose you to music lessons, what you do with it is up to you.) I don’t expect you to have the same likes and dislikes as me. I don’t expect you to always make the choice I would in a given situation. I don’t expect you to keep your room clean or to be “well-behaved” or any other thing that people routinely expect of children. There are things I want for you, sure – I want you to be happy, I want you to learn to make wise choices, I want you to be wise. But those wants are different than expectations, I think, because they leave room for you to be who you are, rather than a contrived idea of who I think you should be. 

I guess that’s what expectations are at their core – an idea I have in my head of who someone else should be. We can learn how to set those ideas aside in order to relate to a real person, and that’s what I want to do with you…I want to relate to you, not to my expectations of you.

I will probably need help with this, because I am human and will probably sometimes forget to put my expectations on the shelf. So feel free to tell me when you feel like I have expectations that are suffocating you in some way. I will always be open to how you feel.

love,
mama

other letters in this series:
on failing to live up to ideals
on curiosity
on intrinsic motivation (and why we won’t do sticker charts)
on disagreements and choosing a different path
on being open
you are not what you do
on perspective taking
on the most important thing
when the going gets hard
on falling in love
on feelings and needs
on empathy
on differentiation and self-validation
on insecurity

 

Daddy’s letters:

I love you
I’m sorry
Be Yourself
Not All It’s Cracked Up to Be
Be Powerful
Be…just be
Do it for you
On Rewards and Punishments
Choose Wisely
Hold onto Yourself
Cultivate Empathy
Be Differentiated
an invitation
no expectations
have regrets
what do you want?