It occurred to me today that our expectations might be a little messed up.

A friend and I were listening to music earlier today and we heard the song, I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) by The Proclaimers.

It was a one-hit wonder song from a one-hit wonder band, to my recollection, and while the song was playing, we commented on the fact that the song was basically a list of several unrealistic promises that the balladeer was making to the target of the love song.

My friend, who is always very astute and observant, made a note that you just don’t hear love songs where the singer promises to do the things that often upset spouses when they go undone.

When he said this, I laughed and thought to myself, “How little we understand about what to expect when we are first starting things out?”

How about this for the first line of a love song: “I will show you my love by picking up my dirty socks.”

Love songs like these, while they would certainly be more honest with respect to what marriage and the marital experience end up being like, they wouldn’t be very “romantic”. They wouldn’t end up at the top of the charts, I don’t think.

The funny thing about the word “romantic” is that it has two definitions –> the definition that is not “an expression of feelings of love” is rather “related to an idealized view of reality”.

Talk about ironic –> romantic means delusional.

And, if you stop to think about it, romantic notions about marriage are idealized views of reality. The woman who marries the husband, thinking that her new husband is going to be the ideal Prince Charming, is being a romantic –> in both senses of the word, perhaps. The man who marries the wife, thinking that her new wife is going to be the ideal, is being romantic.

The truth of the matter is that these expectations are unrealistic, because people are humans. Humans are imperfect and incapable and disappointing.

What you end up discovering is that your wife can’t cook, or your husband can’t remember to put the seat down when he’s done, or your wife doesn’t understand the basics of washing laundry, or your husband is more likely to injure himself with a power tool than to be productive with one.

The major issue here is expectations.

* * *

I partially blame Disney, at least when it comes to all of this ‘unrealistic romantic expectations’ non-sense. While, more often than, it’s quite harmless how young children are affected by any individual piece of programming that they watch early on, the overall effect of all of that programming, piled piece on top of piece on top of piece, is that it starts to lead to an entire set of unrealistic –dare I say, romantic– expectations that we carry into our relationships with other people.

As guilty as Disney might be in peddling unrealistic expectations, specifically when it comes to romance, Hollywood is –in general– another place where we tend to get our unrealistic expectations of the world. When was the last time that you saw a movie where the main character popped a zit? Or lanced a blister to let the puss out? When was the last time that you saw a romantic film where the husband had to help his wife put her anti-fungal cream on her toenails?

We end up with unrealistic expectations when we think that the real world will operate the way that it does in the videos we watch.

It just doesn’t.

* * *

There are certainly many areas of life where unrealistic expectations set us up for disappointment and hurt feelings down the line. You’ve probably heard it said that, “If you don’t expect too much, it’s harder to be let down.”

While this is a cynical way of looking at life, it does work, and I can speak from experience on this. As often as I have been disappointed in the way that things sometimes turn out in life, I have tried to make it my practice to –at the very moment when I realize that I am feeling disappointed– to ask myself to review my expectations, to see whether or not I was being unrealistic or idealistic.

Just earlier this evening, a couple of hours ago, I was significantly disappointed to discover that I wasn’t going to be getting something that I had been looking forward to all day long, something that I was led to believe that I would be getting. At that point, as the disappointment set in, I realized that I wasn’t at all reasonable to have expected the thing in the first place, in light of the circumstances.

When things don’t turn out as I would like them to turn out, it is true
–almost every time– that I was expecting too much or that I was being unrealistic in the first place.

* * *

If Bruno Mars could release his next hit single and the lyrics could go something like, “Baby, I will show you how deeply I love you by taking care of the cat litter every time it should be done”, that would get the world a little bit closer to a realistic understanding of what it really means to be devoted to someone. Or, if Disney’s next Prince Charming could avoid slaying dragons, conquering enemy armies, and traveling hundreds of miles to save the Princess, so that he could instead devote his full energy and whole-hearted enthusiasm to learning how to keep a bathroom clean, then the Princess might be even more impressed by his level of commitment.

What I’m really saying is that we need to be careful when it comes to what we are expecting of each other.