Someone did something reasonable last month and you were disproportionately hurt by it. Examined afterwards, they broke no agreement. Nothing had been promised. You could not have quoted a commitment, because none had been made. And yet the feeling was unmistakably the feeling of having been let down, which is the feeling that follows a broken promise.
Something had been promised. Not by them. By you, on their behalf, silently, some time ago, and then filed as though it were an obligation they had entered into.
Three states that look identical
They arrive in the same clothing, which is why almost nobody separates them.
A desire is a movement toward something. It is simple, it has energy in it, and it is what gets anyone out of bed. It carries no assumption about outcome.
A wish is a desire with a picture attached. Now there is a specific version of the future, in some detail, which would satisfy it. The picture is pleasant to hold and mostly harmless, and it is at this stage that something begins to change, because a picture can be compared against reality and a desire cannot.
An expectation is a wish that has been quietly reclassified as owed. The picture has stopped being one possible future and become the baseline. And because it is now the baseline, its arrival produces nothing at all, and its non-arrival produces injury.
The mechanism of conversion
The thing that performs the conversion is attachment, and attachment does its work through repetition rather than through any decision.
You return to the picture. You return to it again. Each visit makes it more detailed and more vivid, and vividness is indistinguishable, to the part of you that feels, from reality. After enough visits, the imagined version has been experienced so many times that its absence registers as a loss rather than as a thing that simply has not happened.
This is why the sharpest disappointments are almost always about the things you wanted most and thought about most often. It is not that the world is crueller about those. It is that you had already lived in them, repeatedly, and were therefore evicted rather than merely refused.
An expectation is a debt you have entered into on somebody else's behalf, and then resent them for not repaying.
What expectation does to the good outcome
The obvious cost is the pain when things go otherwise. The subtler cost, and the one that ruins more of a life, is what happens when things go exactly as expected.
Nothing. That is the whole result. An outcome that merely meets the baseline produces no experience at all, because meeting a baseline is not an event. So the entire upside is removed: if it fails you are wounded, and if it succeeds you are level.
Look back at the things you expected and received. You will find that almost none of them registered. The house, the offer, the appointment: each arrived, was noted, and was absorbed within days, because by the time they came they had already been counted as yours for years.
Expectation between people
Where this does the most damage is not in circumstances but in relationships, and it does it invisibly.
Silent expectations of other people have a particular cruelty in them, which is that the other person is being marked against a standard they were never shown. They are failing an examination they do not know they are sitting. And when the resentment eventually surfaces, it arrives with the accumulated force of every previous unnoticed failure, and it seems, to them, to have come out of nowhere, and they are right.
Notice too what it does to your capacity to see them. A person you hold expectations of is no longer being observed; they are being assessed against a picture. Every time they behave in a way the picture did not contain, which is most of the time, since they are a separate human being, the behaviour registers as a deviation rather than as information about who they actually are.
Why it cannot simply be dropped
The usual instruction is to have no expectations, and it does not work, and it is worth being honest about why.
Expectation is not a policy you adopt. It is what happens when the mind visits a picture repeatedly, and it will keep happening as long as you keep visiting. Deciding to abandon expectations is itself usually a wish, and it converts within a month into an expectation of yourself, at which point you are disappointed in your own inability to be free of disappointment.
What is available is not the abolition of expectation but the ability to recognise one while it is forming. Which is a matter of noticing, in ordinary moments, that a hope has begun to be held as a certainty, and that the certainty was never agreed with anyone.
Sitting with it
Nothing to renounce, and no equanimity to manufacture.
Only one question, worth asking the next time something lands harder than the facts of it warrant. Not what did they do, which will produce a long and persuasive answer. But what had I already decided was going to happen, and when did I decide it, and who else knew? The answer to the last part is almost always nobody. And there is something quietly clarifying in discovering that the injury was real, and the promise was not, and that both of them were yours.
