If you’ve ever been disappointed or frustrated in a relationship, your expectations were too high. Think about it. Disappointment is what happens when you expect one thing and get another. Your own expectations don’t seem unrealistic to you, even though they often are, because you’re usually not aware you even have them. Most of them started out as preferences, you know, the way you like things done. But then, somewhere along the way, they turned into “shoulds” that are just facts everyone is supposed to follow.
Today you’ll learn why you don’t realize you’re setting expectations for other people, what happens when a preference turns into a “should,” and three steps to turn your expectations back into preferences you can ask for, let go of, or get met somewhere else.
18-minute read
Why Do Expectations Make You So Unhappy?
I’ve been telling people to have high standards and low expectations for about 25 years now. The problem is that most people have low standards but high expectations. You’ll accept all kinds of inappropriate or bad behavior from other people (low standards), but then you’re upset that you’re being treated that way (high expectations)!
Here’s why that hurts so much. We know from the research that people’s happiness in the moment depends less on what they get and more on whether it was better or worse than they’d expected. So, when your sister doesn’t text back, or dinner out is just okay, or the birthday gift turns out to be a scented candle, how you feel has more to do with the picture you had in your head (what you were expecting) than with what happened.
Why Can’t You See Your Own Expectations?
Most of the time, you don’t even know you had an expectation until it isn’t met. Brené Brown calls these stealth expectations, and she describes catching herself feeling mad, realizing that what she’s feeling is disappointment, and then asking herself whether there was a stealth expectation behind it. For example, you might go all out for your best friend’s birthday, the dinner, the card, and the thoughtful gift, and then feel hurt when your birthday comes around and she sends a text, even though you never once told her you were hoping for the same fuss. It’s just expected that she’ll match what you did. These are gives with strings attached and definitely stealth expectations.
I had a client, we’ll call her Dana, who came in furious at her best friend of twenty years. Her friend hadn’t called her in almost three weeks, and to Dana that meant the friendship was falling apart. In her head, a best friend calls at least once a week, checks in, remembers the thing you mentioned on Tuesday, and asks how it went. When I asked her whether her friend knew about this weekly-call rule, she looked at me like I had two heads and said, “Of course she knows, she’s my best friend.” Except when I explored this further with her, it turned out her friend didn’t know, because Dana had never once said it, and her friend’s mom had gotten really sick, so she hadn’t called anyone in three weeks.
That’s how most expectations work. They feel like common sense to you, like “any decent person would” or “everybody knows that” so it never occurs to you to say them out loud. Then, you’re shocked when the other person doesn’t live by a rule they’ve never heard. Your partner is supposed to know that cleaning the kitchen floor means you have to mop it, your date is supposed to know that texting back the same day is just what polite people do, and your kid is supposed to know that “clean your room” includes under the bed.
Now, you might be thinking, “But I did say it out loud. I’ve asked him a hundred times to bring the toilet paper upstairs, but he steps over it on his way to the second floor!” That’s a different problem than a stealth expectation, and it needs a different answer, so hang onto that thought, because I’m going to walk you through exactly what to do with it a little later on.
In the 12 steps, we say that expectations are premeditated resentments, and I think that’s the best description of a stealth expectation you’ll ever hear. You set the resentment up ahead of time; you just don’t know you did it, and when the other person doesn’t do the thing, the resentment is already sitting there waiting for them. The good news is that this makes resentment a clue, a signal, because when you feel it, there’s usually an expectation underneath it that you never said out loud.
What Happens When a Preference Turns Into a “Should”?
You think there’s a right and a wrong way to do things and forget that this is just your opinion. Now, you have every right to your opinion, but so does everyone else. My favorite example (that I think I’ve shared before) is a client of mine who was upset that her husband said he’d clean the kitchen after dinner, but when she came down the next morning, she found crusted jelly on the counter and was furious. She started talking about weaponized incompetence and how he didn’t care about anything but his work. Now, it’s possible those statements were true, but I also pointed out that there’s no one right way to clean a counter. To her, it clearly meant wiping up every crumb or stain from the countertops, but to someone else it might mean taking everything off the counters and then wiping it down. Or using bleach or also wiping off every appliance. One person’s clean is another person’s dirty, and who’s to say who’s right?
And it happens with family and friends all the time. I worked with a woman who was hurt that her sister didn’t offer to host Thanksgiving last year, because in her mind, she hosted every year and it was tradition. Never mind that her sister had a brand-new baby and wasn’t sleeping, and nobody had ever said out loud that she had to host no matter what. Or you had a doctor’s appointment you were nervous about, and your friend should have texted to ask how it went, except she didn’t know how scared you were, because you played it down when you told her, or because your friend was caught up in her own life.
What happened with my client in that kitchen is that a preference turned into a “should.” I’ve talked about Albert Ellis on the show before. He’s often referred to as the grandfather of cognitive behavioral therapy because he created Rational Emotive Therapy (RET), which is, more or less, the basis of modern CBT. Ellis believed that we experience emotional distress and upset because of demands, the “shoulds,” “ought tos,” and “musts.” But he didn’t say you should ignore or throw out your “shoulds”. In fact, his thinking was that those shoulds usually have something you value inside them, so they’re worth looking at. He recommended noticing these shoulds and respecting them by turning them back into flexible preferences. Some examples would be: “I want this, but there’s no reason you should,” or “I like the counters cleaned a certain way, but that doesn’t mean you have to,” or “I’d love it if you called me on Sundays, but there’s no rule that says you’re supposed to,” or “This is something I like, but you don’t have to like it.”
What we’re talking about here is what we psychologists call rigid thinking, which is another way of saying black-and-white or right-or-wrong thinking. You probably don’t think of yourself as a rigid person, and you might not be, but any time you’re sure there’s one right way to wipe a counter, you’re in it, and that’s exactly where preferences turn into “shoulds.”
And being this way isn’t good for you! Research shows that people who think this way tend to be more stressed, anxious, depressed, and angry. A great tool I grabbed from the studies is that people who said one certain phrase were consistently linked with having the most problems with rigid thinking. And that phrase (drum roll please) is: “I can’t stand it.” Yup. So, if you catch yourself saying something like “I can’t stand it when he leaves the jelly out,” that’s your signal that a preference has hardened into rigid thinking, and it’s time to check yourself.
So how does this look when you’re dating? Research on dating couples shows that the further your partner falls short of your ideal, the less happy you are, which makes sense. But if you’re flexible about what you want, you stay happier even when they fall pretty far short. The least happy people are the ones whose partner doesn’t measure up and who won’t bend on it. Having ideals isn’t the problem, but sometimes you’re with someone who just isn’t that person, and you keep trying to squeeze them into the picture in your head instead of accepting who they are. When that happens, it’s time to either let go of the ideal or let go of the person.
The takeaway I want you to have is that you don’t have to pretend you don’t care; you just have to call a preference a preference, which means seeing it as the way you’d do it, not the way it should be done.
Does Low Expectations Mean Expecting the Worst?
So, I want you to have low expectations, but does that mean you should assume the people you love are going to let you down? No. It means you stop holding them to unspoken rules, while still hoping for the best from them.
When you and your partner are kind to one another in a disagreement and give each other the benefit of the doubt, that’s great. But if you’re also bracing yourself for disappointment, not only are you not protecting yourself from anything, the research shows that things will go downhill faster, so it’s like you’re canceling out all that initial good intention.
That research was on couples, but I see the same thing with friends and family. When you walk into a family dinner already braced for your dad to say something about your job, it doesn’t protect you; it just means you show up with your guard up, and everybody can feel it.
When I tell you to have low expectations, I mean that I want you to understand that people are human. I want you to expect that they have things going on in their lives too, so they won’t be perfect, and sometimes they won’t show up, even though they show up most of the time. You still hold people accountable, of course, but you give them some grace and room to be the messy living beings that they are, because if you’re looking for perfection, nobody is ever going to get there. My rule of thumb is that if your standards are being met about 80% of the time, you’re in a healthy relationship, and the other 20% is two people being people.
All of this works because you keep your high standards. I’ve written a ton about how to identify your standards because I’ve written many blogs and a whole book and workbook on boundaries. For now, let me give you a quick definition. Your standards are the three to five things you need to see consistently from the people in your life to know you’re respected, valued, and safe. These include things like your friend or partner having your back when you disagree or sharing their real feelings with you. To be clear, these are more than preferences, which are things you like to see but don’t need to feel safe (you’d like to see the toilet paper roll replaced, but you don’t need that to feel safe). You should also pay attention when someone can’t or doesn’t meet your standards, because that tells you something about whether they belong in that role in your life. Again, I walk you through finding your standards so you can create healthy boundaries in my book Boundaries Made Easy.
Why Can’t One Person Be Everything to You?
No one person should be everything to you, and I see this issue come up the most in romantic relationships. Over and over, I speak to people who think their romantic partner should be their everything. It’s the whole “you complete me” thing (thanks, no thanks, Jerry Maguire), and I hate to break it to Tom Cruise, but nobody completes you. You don’t have a better half or another half. You’re a whole person all on your own.
I’ve seen this way too often with women who want their husband to be the person they talk to about everything, and then feel hurt and lonely when he doesn’t have the emotional bandwidth for a two-hour conversation about who said what at the school fundraiser meeting.
And it’s getting harder. In America’s early days, up until about the mid-1800s, marriage was mostly about getting by. The focus was on things like food, shelter, and safety. From the mid-1800s until the 1960s, as more people moved to cities and worked outside the home, marriage became more about love and romance. And since the 1960s, we’ve also come to expect our partner to help us feel good about ourselves and grow as people, which is a much taller order, so more marriages and long-term relationships are falling short.
And it’s mostly women who are walking away from marriages. Here in the United States, women start divorces almost 70% of the time, and those same married women tend to rate their relationships lower than married men do. It seems pretty clear to me that marriage hasn’t kept up with what women expect now, including more equality. I heard someone say recently that men want women who don’t exist anymore, and women want men who don’t exist yet. And it’s not just here, by the way. In England and Wales, wives have filed the majority of divorces every year since 1949, and Australia shows a similar pattern.
And we don’t only do this with partners. Plenty of us expect one best friend to be everything, the one who laughs at our jokes, shows up for every crisis, and never makes plans without us. Or, we expect our mom to be the person we call about every single thing. Women in particular tend to expect more openness and closeness from their friends than men do, so if that’s you, it’s worth asking whether one friend is carrying more than any one person can.
So, what do you do if you’ve been looking at your partner or one other person to be your everything? You widen your circle. The research keeps pointing in the same direction: ask your partner, friend, or mom to carry less by building a bigger support network of friends and family you can turn to for different things.
The research shows that you’re happier anyway when you spread your emotional needs around, with one person who cheers you up when you’re sad and someone else who calms you down when you’re anxious, than when you lean on the same one or two people for everything. Love should expand your world, not shrink it down to one person. Your partner shouldn’t be your best friend, or at least not your only best friend. Of course you should be friends, and I hope you like each other a whole lot, but you still need a best girlfriend, a clergy person, people in your book club or 12-step meeting, folks from your softball team, or a best friend- anyone who isn’t also the person you share a bathroom sink with.
What Do You Do Instead?
So now what do you do? You stop letting stealth expectations run your relationships by catching them, naming them, and deciding what to do with them. Here are my three steps.
Step 1: Use resentment as your clue.
The next time you feel that hot little flash of “seriously?” with someone, stop and ask yourself what you were expecting, not what they did wrong but what you were expecting. Write it down exactly the way it sounds in your head, like “a good friend would have called by now” or “he should know I need help with the kids on Sunday nights,” because the way you say it to yourself is where the “should” is hiding.
Step 2: Turn the “should” back into a preference.
Take what you wrote and rewrite it as a preference, like “I’d love it if a friend called me when I’m going through something” instead of “a good friend would have called.” Then ask yourself this: if this person was meeting my standards most of the time, would I still care about this? If the answer is no, it’s a preference, and it doesn’t make you right or them wrong. You’re allowed to keep it; you’re just not allowed to judge them against it (and be honest with yourself here, because I’ll know if you’re not).
Step 3: Ask for it, let it go, or get it somewhere else.
Once it’s a preference, you’ve got three choices. You can ask for it out loud, because “I love it when you call me on Sundays” is a request, and a request gives the other person a chance to say yes, which the unspoken rule never did. You can let it go because this person is giving you what you need most of the time. Or you can get it somewhere else (like maybe you need a cleaning person to come in once a week instead of nagging your partner), or by calling the friend who loves long phone calls instead of the one who doesn’t. What you don’t get to do is keep the stealth expectation and keep holding it against them.
What If You’ve Already Asked and Nothing Changes?
So, let’s go back to bringing the toilet paper to the upstairs bathroom. Maybe you’ve asked your partner a dozen times to grab it from the bottom of the stairs on the way up, and they still step right over it. Or you’ve asked over and over for help with the bedtime routine, and you’re still doing it alone every night. That’s not a stealth expectation anymore, because you said it out loud. It’s a spoken request that keeps getting ignored, and that’s a different problem with a different answer.
When you’re in that spot, the question changes from “What am I expecting?” to “What is this pattern telling me?” To answer it, you run the standards test on the pattern, not on the single moment.
On its own, the toilet paper is a preference. If your partner is meeting your standards most of the time, you can let it go, or you can handle it another way, like carrying it up yourself when you’re headed upstairs anyway, and then you stop keeping score. I know that can feel unfair, but holding onto it costs you a lot more than the toilet paper ever will.
The bedtime routine is probably a different story. Being a real partner in raising your kids is likely one of your standards, and when a standard keeps going unmet after you’ve asked clearly, you’re not dealing with a preference anymore. That’s a boundaries conversation, because a boundary is a standard with teeth, meaning you decide ahead of time what you’ll do if it keeps happening. I walk you through exactly how to do that in my book Boundaries Made Easy.
And here’s a tell to watch for. If the toilet paper doesn’t feel small to you, if it makes you furious every single time, it’s usually standing in for a standard that isn’t being met. It’s never about the toilet paper; it’s about what the toilet paper reminds you of. Maybe it’s that you don’t feel important in your partner’s life. Maybe you think your partner chooses their own wants/needs over yours too often. Whatever it is, you want to be talking about that, not the toilet paper anyway.
There’s one more piece, and it’s a big one. If you’re the one who has to notice, remember, ask, and then ask again every time, the asking itself is the work. That’s mental load, and “just ask” doesn’t solve it, because asking is the job you’re tired of doing. I’ve talked about mental load and emotional labor on the show before, and if this is you, go back and listen to those, because that’s a different conversation about who carries the thinking in your house, not only the doing.
And underneath all of it, the relationship you most need to get right is the one with yourself. When you’re always looking outside yourself to feel better, you’re asking someone to do something nobody can do, which is to keep you okay. The more you can calm yourself down and come back to your own center (your Higher Self, as I like to call it), the fewer stealth expectations you’ll be handing out.
So, keep your standards high, call a preference a preference, and say your expectations out loud, because the people you love can’t meet expectations they’ve never heard.
Therapy-to-Go Bundle
- Find Your Stealth Expectations Assessment: A Quick Assessment to See Where Your Hidden “Shoulds” Are Causing the Most Resentment
- Should-to-Preference Rewrite Worksheet: Catch the Hidden “Should,” Turn It Back into a Preference, and Decide What to Do with It
- Who Do You Go To for What? Map: See Whether One Person Is Carrying Your Whole Emotional Life
- The “Should” Spotter: Where Your Stealth Expectations Show Up in Your Life
- Script Sheet for Turning a Stealth Expectation into a Request
- Journaling Prompts to Uncover Your Stealth Expectations
Resources
You’ve Got to Have High Standards and Low Expectations
Stop Feeling Overwhelmed: The Four Steps to Set Healthy Boundaries with Family
The Workbook: Boundaries Made Easier
Boundaries Made Easy: Your Roadmap to Connection, Ease and Joy
What’s Your Mental Load? Why You’re Exhausted Even When the Work Gets Done
References
- Rutledge, R. B., Skandali, N., Dayan, P., & Dolan, R. J. (2014). A computational and neural model of momentary subjective well-being. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(33), 12252-12257.
- Brown, B. (Host). (2021, December 1). Brené, Ashley, and Barrett on Atlas of the Heart: A sisters book club, part 1 of 3 [Audio podcast episode]. In Unlocking Us with Brené Brown.
- Mneimne, M. (2013, January). Demandingness or “The rules of life: Perceived abilities and $0.02.” Albert Ellis Institute.
- Vîslă, A., Flückiger, C., grosse Holtforth, M., & David, D. (2016). Irrational beliefs and psychological distress: A meta-analysis. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 85, 8-15.
- Campbell, L., Simpson, J. A., Kashy, D. A., & Fletcher, G. J. O. (2001). Ideal standards, the self, and flexibility of ideals in close relationships. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(4), 447-462.
- McNulty, J. K., & Karney, B. R. (2004). Positive expectations in the early years of marriage: Should couples expect the best or brace for the worst? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86(5), 729-743.
- Finkel, E. J., Cheung, E. O., Emery, L. F., Carswell, K. L., & Larson, G. M. (2015). The suffocation model: Why marriage in America is becoming an all-or-nothing institution. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(3), 238-244.
- American Sociological Association. (2015). Women more likely than men to initiate divorces, but not non-marital breakups [Press release on research by Michael J. Rosenfeld].
- Office for National Statistics. (2020, November 17). Divorces in England and Wales: 2019.
- Australian Institute of Family Studies. (1993, August 2). Family facts: Divorce trends.
- Hall, J. A. (2011). Sex differences in friendship expectations: A meta-analysis. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 28(6), 723-747.
- Finkel, E. J., Cheung, E. O., Emery, L. F., Carswell, K. L., & Larson, G. M. (2015). The suffocation model: Why marriage in America is becoming an all-or-nothing institution. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(3), 238–244.
- Cheung, E. O., Gardner, W. L., & Anderson, J. F. (2015). Emotionships: Examining people’s emotion-regulation relationships and their consequences for well-being. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 6(4), 407-414.
