Managing Expectations: Why Expectations Lead to Disappointment

I have often thought that expectations are the mother of disappointment.

And perhaps that is really what managing expectations is about: recognising how quickly we create a very fixed idea in our minds about how we think something should go. We imagine the outcome, we imagine how another person should behave, how an evening should unfold, how a conversation should go, how somebody should respond to us, and then we become attached to that version of events.

The problem, of course, is that life very rarely unfolds exactly as we have imagined it, and other people very rarely behave exactly as we would.

And when the reality doesn’t match the picture we created in our heads, we feel disappointed.

Expectations come from perfectly understandable places. They are built on past experience, on our values, on what happened last time, on what we ourselves would do in the same situation, or simply on what we hope somebody will do. But somewhere along the way a hope or a preference can become something much more fixed. It becomes, “this is what should happen,” or, “this is how you should behave.”

And that is where expectation starts to become rigid.

We become so focused on the outcome we have imagined that there is very little room left for possibility. There is no space for another person to behave differently, for circumstances to change, or for something completely unexpected to happen. It is a little bit like walking around with blinkers on. We are only looking for the version of events that we have already decided is the right one.

But of course, not everybody has the same expectations.

What feels obvious to me may not be obvious to you. What I consider polite, respectful, loving or thoughtful may be completely different from what somebody else believes those things look like. And yet we can walk around assuming that other people will somehow know what our expectations are, without us ever actually telling them.

Expectations in Relationships

This happens all the time.

We expect somebody to remember something because we would remember it. We expect them to know that something matters to us. We expect them to call, or arrive on time, or notice that we are upset, or understand that we need support. And when they don’t, we can feel really let down.

But sometimes the other person has absolutely no idea that there was an expectation there in the first place.

Take something as simple as somebody being late.

You arrange to meet somebody for dinner at seven and they arrive at half past seven. They haven’t messaged, they haven’t apologised, they have simply turned up late.

The actual fact is that they were thirty minutes late.

But very quickly we can add an entire story to that.

They don’t care about my time. They don’t value me. They think their time is more important than mine. I would never do this to them. They have let me down.

And suddenly the whole evening can change.

We might become irritated, cold, withdrawn or angry, and the evening that we had been looking forward to is ruined because the other person has failed to meet the expectation we had of them.

Once we are disappointed or activated, we can very quickly move into reaction rather than response, particularly if the situation touches an old pattern or something that feels important to us. And then we are no longer dealing only with somebody being thirty minutes late; we are dealing with everything we have made their lateness mean.

And this is where we put ourselves in positions where somebody else’s behaviour becomes responsible for our whole experience.

That doesn’t mean that being late is okay. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t say anything, or that we shouldn’t have standards about how we want to be treated. I think that is an important distinction.

Expectations, Standards and Boundaries Are Not the Same Thing

There is a difference between having no expectations and having no boundaries.

We can still say, “When you’re going to be half an hour late, I would really appreciate you letting me know.” We can still communicate what matters to us. We can still decide what we are and aren’t willing to tolerate in relationships. We can still have standards.

But perhaps the question is whether we can do those things without also becoming completely attached to another person behaving exactly as we think they should.

Because the only part we are ever really responsible for is how we respond.

And that is where curiosity becomes so useful.

Instead of immediately deciding what somebody else’s behaviour means, perhaps we can leave a little bit of space around it. What happened? Is there something I don’t know? Did I ever actually tell them that this mattered to me? Am I responding to what has happened, or am I responding to the meaning I have attached to it?

That doesn’t mean making excuses for people. It simply means not rushing to fill in all the gaps ourselves.

And I think the same thing applies far beyond relationships.

We do it with holidays, birthdays, work, our children, our partners, our friendships, our bodies, our lives. We create a picture in our minds of how something should look or how we thought it was going to feel, and then we judge the reality against that picture.

The higher and more fixed the expectation, the greater the potential disappointment.

Perhaps then, we can loosen our grip on the outcome.

We can hope for things. We can plan. We can have preferences. We can ask for what we need. But perhaps we can leave a bit more room around all of it.

A bit more room for the unknown.

A bit more room for somebody else to be different from us.

A bit more room for life to surprise us.

For me, expectation feels quite solid. It has corners and edges. It says, “This is how this should be.”

Curiosity feels much more like water.

It moves around what is there. It adapts. It responds. It doesn’t necessarily know exactly where it is going, but it doesn’t need everything to be a particular shape before it can move forward.

And I think there is something really freeing about approaching life a little bit more like that.

Not with low expectations, necessarily, but with less attachment to a particular outcome.

Because when we are not quite so fixed on how something must unfold, we are much more available to what is actually happening.

We can respond rather than react. We can communicate rather than assume. We can ask rather than decide that we already know. We can be disappointed by something without allowing that disappointment to take over the whole experience.

And sometimes, of course, the outcome we hadn’t expected turns out to be much more interesting than the one we had planned.

Perhaps managing expectations is really about leaving a little more space for life to be life, for other people to be themselves, and for us to meet what happens with a little more openness, curiosity and choice.

A little less concrete.

A little more water.