That’s Not What I Ordered

Audio By Carbonatix

Everybody has expectations. It’s almost impossible not to. If you order a cheeseburger at a restaurant, you expect to receive a cheeseburger. If you attend school and get passing grades, you expect to graduate. If you get married, you expect to stay married for life. 

In the right context, expectations are a marvelous tool. They are used in business to let employees know how well they are expected to perform the job. As parents, we outline expectations for our children so they understand how we want them to behave. In marriage, we have expectations about how we think our spouse should act or show us love. 

At this point, you can probably agree that expectations are good. So, what’s the problem? The problem, as you might have already guessed, is that expectations can be a stumbling block when our expectation is not met. This probably happens more in marriage and family relationships than we’d like to imagine, but these are the people we probably have the most contact with and spend the most time around. 

Just think back over the last argument you had with your spouse or your child and see if you can trace the root cause back to some kind of unmet expectation. It’s easy to remedy an unmet expectation when you’re in a restaurant and you don’t get what you ordered. The server simply removes the incorrect item and brings you what you want. And it probably tastes better because they gave you 20% off for the inconvenience. But when an expectation involves behavior that you can’t change because it’s already happened, there’s a higher price involved. The cost of hurting someone’s feelings. That’s impossible to put a price on. 

The best way to handle expectations is to discuss them up front. If you don’t, the result can be two people approaching the same situation with totally different expectations. Or you can have a person who believes they are showing love to their spouse and it’s not at all what their spouse was expecting. They never talked about it. If you want to know what someone is expecting, you have to ask them. If you do, you can expect to win more often at home.