I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,

and you’re not in this world to live up to mine

I didn’t expect her to do that at the dinner table

One of the reasons my life was such a mess was that I had some expectations from a relationship that were no longer being met.  I was and am far too attached to a woman, and being in love with a woman always leads to expectations, and in my experience expectations always leads to bitter disappointments.  Those disappointments were making me very confused, is it infatuation, lust, desire, love, an emotional need, or a dysfunctional friendship?  And how does a normal guy find a way through that Dionysian maze?

Expectation is the root of all heartache.  ~  Shakespeare

No matter how hard I tried I could not free myself of the expectation that I deserved an emotional, sensual and sexual friendship where the love I thought I felt was returned freely and fully.  That is the big danger of having expectations, often they are unrealistic, often they lead us to believe that we deserve something or someone, and quite often our expectations are a million miles from the reality of any given situation.

Also expectations are passive, we don’t need to actually do anything to have huge expectations.  Expectations are the result of feelings, and I should know that feelings are often false and the result of twisted programming hard wired into our subconscious mind before we were seven years of age.  Feelings are not real, and our feelings often have fuck all to do with what’s going on in the real world.

We should never blame people for disappointing us, we should blame ourselves for expecting too much from them, or expecting things from them that they can’t give to us, or don’t want to give us.  We should never blame others for our own negative feelings of anger, jealousy, misery, resentment, sadness…..  Our feelings belong only to ourselves, we should own them, and if our feelings are distressing us don’t try to change the world, that’s too difficult, we should change ourselves instead.

Expectations can be as trivial as expecting a nice day, as important as expecting a pay rise at work, or as destructive as thinking you love someone who doesn’t love you.  Unrequited love is incredibly painful, trust me, I know.

We always want what we can’t have, life is so cruel that way.

Some say that if we don’t expect the good things from life then all we will ever get is dross.  And that we have a right to expect to get what we want the most.  All I know is that I’m still trying to find a way to stop loving someone.  You’d think a man would know.

~

jack collier

jackcollier7@talktalk.net

and I expected a great beach-front hotel