Cultivating Healthy Expectations In A Relationship
Listen to this article It’s been said that if you aim for nothing, you’re likely to hit it. If you have no goals, and if you hold no expectations, that might mean that you won’t be disappointed, but it might also mean that what you get won’t be good, either. Having expectations of a given situation can be a dangerous exercise because of the possibility of disappointment and frustration, but without them, it’s also possible to wind up being taken advantage of. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, an expectation is the feeling or belief that something will or should happen. In a relationship, your expectations are typically about the behaviors and attitudes that you believe or feel your partner should have toward you. It’s about how you would want to be treated, and how you want to treat the other person. Do Relationships Need Expectations? Whether we like it or not, we come into every situation with some kind of expectation about how we will be, and how we would like others to be toward us. Those expectations may be low, and they may be either healthy or unhealthy, but they are there. Often, one way to know if you had expectations of some kind in a situation is by noticing if you feel disappointed when something happens or fails to happen. A healthy relationship needs healthy expectations because every relationship carries expectations of some kind. Even a parent-child relationship, in which a parent unconditionally loves their child carries certain expectations. For instance, a parent who loves their child unconditionally can and should expect to be shown respect and kindness by their child. Having expectations in a relationship helps you set a standard for how you want to be treated in that relationship, as well as letting [...]
