Expectations

Have you ever experienced disappointment when things didn’t go as expected? Maybe it was a relationship, an event, a season of life, school, a job interview, a trip…..

Expectations aren’t necessarily bad. As humans, experiencing emotions when expectations aren’t met is completely valid. I would even say it’s not wrong. How we choose to handle it is what makes or breaks the situation. So, how do we handle disappointment when things don’t go as planned?

I’ve always been the type to want to control as much in my life as I could. I’m very much a timeline type person. As a female, I think I am naturally more likely to have a plan and “ideal” timeline for everything. For example, when Owen (my husband) and I started dating, he told me he wasn’t doing anything in our relationship according to a timeline. Which of course, grinded my gears a bit. I, a planner, started to get very worried about how long it would take him to propose. I feared him getting “too comfortable” in our relationship (as a lot of people do). I feared that he would take years to marry me. As our relationship progressed and time passed, I started to get more and more worried. I wanted to make sure everything was executed PERFECTLY.

You see, I’ve had my kids names picked out since I was in seventh grade. I knew I wanted to be married by 19, have my first kid by 21, and have my second kid by 23. I’ve had my dream home designed since middle school. Even down to the wanes coating wall in the hall bathroom that MUST have the claw foot bathtub. So needless to say, when it took Owen 11 months to propose to me, I was losing my mind. Looking back, I couldn’t be more grateful for how it happened. We needed that time and growth in order to have the successful marriage we have now. But at the time, I was disappointed every time my expectations weren’t met when I wanted them to be.

Once we were engaged, I had a BIG vision of what my engagement season should look like. Most of those expectations are due to the countless wedding groups I was in on Facebook and all of the “Pinterest perfect” engagement and wedding day posts. As I researched for our special day, I had so many ideas and researched all of the venues. Nothing was going as planned. I was studying to take a massive state test for my certification at work and was in the middle of moving back home temporarily. To say our engagement season was traumatizing was an understatement. EVERYBODY had an opinion on how long we should wait or why we were getting married “way too fast”. Their theories broke my heart. I always hoped engagement would be full of love and support from our closest people and unfortunately there were a lot of theories, opinions and bad attitudes. It was honestly so hard. My expectations for engagement were deeply let down. I got so discouraged and at one point just wanted to be married so it could all be over with.

I’ve even struggled A LOT recently with relationships close to me not going as I had always hoped and expected. Expectations aren’t necessarily bad when they’re healthy. It’s not bad to have hopes, dreams, and goals. However, it is so important to remember why. The biggest change I made in the shortest amount of time, was letting go of expectations before our wedding day. Owen and I had a good conversation in the days leading up to our wedding and we agreed to go in having ZERO expectations. And guess what…. it wasn’t “perfect” by societal standards. It was cold and rainy. We had to hike to our wedding spot (and so did our guests/ family). My closest friends and some family members weren’t able to share the memories of our day with us. Our dinner set up was beautiful but the restaurant reserved the wrong space for us. Our cake tasted like actual dry trash. But overall, our day was PERFECT. It was beautiful. It was magical. Everyone who contributed worked SO HARD to make it absolutely beautiful for us and we were so incredibly overwhelmed with gratitude.

So to answer the question asked at the beginning of all of this, how do we handle disappointment when expectations aren’t met and things don’t go as planned? Gratitude. When we focus more on what we do have than what we don’t have, we allow our mindset to be shifted to one of gratitude.

This isn’t always easy. As I previously mentioned, I struggle daily, but I’ve found through prayer and gratitude, a lot of weight of that hurt and disappointment has been lifted.