Great Expectations, Managed

"Don't put all your eggs in one basket."  It applies to lots of stuff, least of all marriage.  But young girls are silly, with great expectations of how one single human being is going to some day swoop in to fulfill all their dreams.  Friend, lover, confidante, sharer of dreams.  One egg, two egg, red egg, blue egg.  Into the basket you go.

It's a recipe for disaster, but a small one that's easily fixed.  Broken eggs are pretty easy to clean up, and after the first few, you realize that maybe filling the basket to the top was a bad idea in the first place.

I've given this advice to countless married women over the years.  "Lower your expectations.  It's not healthy to put all of your dreams on one person's shoulders."  Their husbands are grateful as these lovely women stop smothering them with neediness; supportive, even, as their wives stretch beyond the bounds of marriage to develop friendships and nurture their hobbies with friends.





A good marriage is a balance of things shared and things individual.  What joy when your passions overlap, and what relief when you're no longer bugged to share every single interest.  Overlapping circles create a whole other color, an exciting new dimension of a relationship, without swallowing up one member by demanding sameness.

Great expectations, managed.




The trouble comes when one member is destructive.  Unreliable, critical, controlling and harsh.  You start taking eggs out of the basket on a daily basis.  No support?  Goodbye, egg.  No encouragement and one more drops to the floor.  Untrustworthy and a full dozen fall away.  A half full basket can still maintain a relationship, but an empty one?  Eventually, after all needs have been outsourced to loving and trustworthy friends, you're left staring at an empty basket, thinking, "Why am I still carrying this around when it plays absolutely NO PART in my life anymore?"





So I set it down.  Not out of anger, but filled with the steady assurance that dragging around an empty basket is only draining my finite resources of love and perseverance.  It's a tragedy, all right, but not my tragedy.  After all, I'm free of the burden of carrying it around, constantly determining what it can hold and what's too precious to risk putting in.

Great expectations are troublesome, but there's still hope to manage them.
       Realistic expectations are amazing, because they give freedom to both people.
               No expectations are sad.  Laying down the basket is liberating.