Expectation is destructive in dating for two reasons:
1. It tends to crowd us into a corner, looking for certain outcomes.
2. It focuses attention in the wrong place viz: on the other person.
Knowing yourself isn't easy. We are bombarded by fear-mongers (aka advertisers, tv, magazines etc) whose job it is to make us feel inadequate. Buy their product though, and your life will blossom.
Written like that, the idea is preposterous, and yet it must work, otherwise you wouldn't covet that Beemer. Or that Burberry coat. Or that girl who drinks DiSaronno.
Knowing yourself isn't about acquiescing to your ego either. I might harbour desires towards Giada De Laurentiis, but that's pure ego. A of all, she's a superstar and I'm a peon; B of all, the chances of us actually being compatible in real life are vanishingly small. It's my ego talking, telling me that I have a shot at the impossible.
Trouble is that our egos like long-shots. Disregarding odds, statistics, probabilities, facts and truths is what our egos do, with self-evident results. We focus on the lottery winner, rather than the hundreds of millions of losers. We say to ourselves "What if it works?" when starting a high-risk business. Or we ogle impossible partners (like Giada) and wonder why no-one else measures up. That's why I say unrealistic expectation is destructive, and its main driving force is ego.
Dragging ourselves back to ourselves is an exercise in killing our ego for a while, and getting real, man, as hippies used to say.
Photo from here [link]
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