Guest Post by Chris Keepes

My husband, Chris, offered to write a post for my blog this week, so I could spend some extra time preparing material for a speaking engagement I had last night. Wasn’t that a nice gesture?

I hope you enjoy reading his perspective on expectations and how to overcome them.

This is the first time he has written content for a blog, so please feel free to leave an encouraging comment if you enjoy his post.

Expectations

We are all surrounded by expectations. How true and realistic are these expectations? Where do they come from? Why are people so quick to put their expectations on others?

When my wife and I first got married, we both had expectations about what marriage was supposed to be. It’s almost comical to look back and think about some of those expectations in that first years of marriage and to see how we came to believe them to be true. So where did our expectations come from? I think it was a combination of learned behaviors from our parents, conversations with friends, societal and generational norms, and our personal desires. Crystal grew up in a household where her father worked, and her mother stayed home to took care of the house. I, on the other hand, grew up in a single-parent household where my mother worked. It is my belief that what we see modeled in life and who we believe is in charge of us determines the expectations that we develop.

Immediately following our marriage, we were stationed at a small base in Maryland that had predominantly high-ranking individuals. The mothering women who my wife interacted were always encouraging and quick to pass on valuable life experiences. In all of their love, this created a problem. You see, because all of these women were from the same generation as our parents, when we got married Crystal traded one mother for about five. These women came from a generation and a social class that allowed and encouraged them to be stay-at-home wives and mothers. We, not even 20 yet, were not in the same place. Even though it was feasible for Crystal to go to work, these women encouraged her to stay home, make sure the house was spotless, and that dinner was ready when I got home from work. This was the same on my side. I had a bunch of male mentors telling me that I needed to be the provider and the protector and there was no reason my wife needed to work outside of the home. Even though these wonderful couples had the best intentions, their advice was wreaking havoc in our household.

Over the years, we have learned that other people’s expectations seldom work for us. My original intent for my wife was not for her to stay home; she gets stir crazy when she is stuck there. In reality, I barely made enough to cover the essentials of supporting the family, and we needed the extra income from her working. In the first year of our marriage, we only had one child and it was feasible for Crystal to work, so she did. The unrealistic expectations placed upon us by these well intentioned couples created unneeded strife. My wife felt like she was not being a good enough wife and mom when she was working, but once it was beneficial for her to stay home to care for our home and kids, she struggled to be happy there too. So how do we deal with unrealistic expectations?

For starters, you need to look at yourself. You have to decide what is important and realistic for your life. You can choose to accept others’ expectations for you or choose to create your own. Unfortunately, it took me a long time to get over some of the expectations that were placed on me those first few years of our marriage. One of which was that child rearing was a woman’s job. I went along with these expectations mostly because of selfishness, work schedule, and just plain ignorance. I look back now and see that I missed a lot of opportunities with my children. I know I can never get that time back, nor do I try. Instead, I take it one day at time and try to be the best dad I can be now.

The second is speak with people intimately involved in the situation. Crystal and I finally reached a point where we had to sit down and discuss what we needed to do to stop the havoc. When we sat down, we realized that the generational differences between our mentors and us made some of their advice irrelevant. In those situations, we took in the good and discarded the bad.

The third is to find peers and mentors that are willing to agree to disagree when it comes to expectations. I currently have people who I allow to speak into my life but I am always able to say “I don’t think that will work for me.” With friends like this in your life, it makes it easy to get other perspectives without the condemnation for doing it different than they suggest.

Ultimately, we have to live our own lives, and we have to account for our successes, as well as our mistakes. No one else can do that for us. Instead, we can consider our own and others’ expectations, but we don’t have to take them as law. Expectations need to be traded for realistic goals and what works for those directly involved.