Greater Good - The Science of a Meaningful Life

I asked my 10-year-old daughter to help me make dinner the other night; soon after that, I got caught on the phone. When I finally emerged from my office 40 minutes later, I found that Fiona had already prepared our whole meal—the table was set, and dinner was waiting. I was beside myself with delight.

Few things are more satisfying than having someone exceed our expectations. But around the house, it seems like more often we’re annoyed or disappointed when someone fails to meet those expectations—when, once again, our spouse is late, or the kids didn’t take out the garbage, or someone failed to help clean up, or wasn’t really listening while we were baring our soul, or doesn’t really “get” us. Living with others is, in many ways, living in a constant state of unmet expectations.

I think we expect too much from our spouses these days. But that doesn’t mean it would always be better to lower our expectations so that we can feel happy or grateful when our spouse surprises us. If we lower the bar too much, especially for our spouses, how will any of our needs ever be met?

So what else can we do?

We can develop constructive ways of responding when our needs aren’t being met by our spouses and our children—techniques that increase the odds that they will be met in the future. Here are three alternatives to nagging—or harboring resentment—when your expectations aren’t met.

1) Do nothing. Sometimes we just need to acknowledge a disappointment, then let it go without taking further action. When Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist with loads of first-hand experience and scientific knowledge about real-life ecstasy, feels upset or uncomfortable, she just looks at her watch and waits 90 seconds before letting herself think about whatever upset her. Loads of research on “rumination” suggests that people who dwell on some hurt or distress are way more likely to feel depressed or dissatisfied with their lives. Sometimes we make ourselves feel worse—we prolong pain and frustration—by thinking too much about our disappointments.

2) Inspire the person who disappointed you. Even though we sometimes really want to unleash on a spouse who left the house without so much as clearing his or her breakfast dishes, whining and criticizing (or yelling, as the case may be) is not going to make your partner (or teenager, or pre-schooler) really want to help the next time. Negativity rarely inspires others.

The “ERN” method, something I devised long ago from piles of academic journal articles to motivate my kids to do boring but necessary tasks, also works well with adults. The gist of it is to use Empathy, Rationale, and Non-controlling language to get what we want, as those are the things that research shows are most motivating to people. It might go something like this:

Empathy: “I know you are anxious about your upcoming review and need to get into work earlier these days.”

Rationale: “I need more help on school days because Max has been late to school three times this week. I won’t be able to shake this cough if I keep getting up so early. I’m doing my best, but I can’t do it all by myself.”

Non-controlling language (or “not-being-so-bossy”): “It would be great if you could help me tomorrow morning. Is that a possibility?”

Admittedly, this is much harder than nagging your spouse and kids. But think about it: Would you rather someone insist you do something (“You HAVE to help me with the lunches in the morning!! I have a cold and a full time job, and I can’t wake up any earlier or I’ll just get SICKER!!!!”) or gently enlist your help?

3) Pick a Fight… but in a constructive way. Again, this is about finding more constructive ways to express what you want. So even though you might want to punish that guy who didn’t get you so much as a card last week on Valentine’s Day, making him feel as bad as you do won’t make you feel better, and it won’t make next Valentine’s Day more promising.

Make your disappointment known by starting off on a positive note. Yes, you read that right. In fact, begin with a statement of appreciation.

“I really appreciate how much time you’ve been spending with me in the evenings. I love going for a walk with you at night.”

That gets your cardless-wonder’s attention, and makes him or her open to listening to what you have to say. Then, staying as calm and positive as possible, make your feelings known with a good ol’ “I” statement.

“I felt really lonely and disappointed and actually a little bit abandoned when you decided we didn’t need to celebrate Valentine’s Day. It hurt that you didn’t even get me a card.” 

Finally, tell that Valentine’s-Day-denier what you need—really clearly and specifically, explain what he or she can do to make it up to you. What exactly are your expectations? I recommend making it an easy win; go for something more ambitious the next time around.

“Can we reschedule Valentine’s Day for next weekend? I’d love a card and some flowers, and a romantic date night. I’ll help with the planning.”

If we must ask for what we need—which clearly we do, since the people we live with tend to have very poor mind reading skills—it behooves us to ask in a way that will get results. Good luck, and report back with what works for you!

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© 2012 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

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If you find yourself often thinking about whether or not your spouse is really the right person for you, as many married-with-children-types often do, I’ve got bad news: You’re already setting your marriage up for failure.

We tend to believe that our partners are either right for us, or completely wrong; our relationship is either “meant to be,” or it just isn’t; we’re with our soulmate, or we’ve totally “settled.”

This all-or-nothing model of relationships puts us in a Catch-22. We want to know whether we are with the right mate, but the very act of questioning whether he or she is either right or wrong sets us up to expect way too much from them. These crazy-high expectations lead us to believe that if we notice our partner’s flaws or incompatibilities with us, we must be in the “wrong” relationship. That evokes feelings of frustration, disappointment, and resentment—maybe even contempt, which is a real relationship-killer. These negative feelings aren’t trivial. They are cancers to relationships.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Here is how to release our unrealistic expectations and the toxic feelings they create in our relationships.

1. Stop thinking like Cinderella. You are not with your perfect soulmate; you are with a flawed human-being. The alternative to the all-or-nothing model of relationships is to see that your mate is BOTH ever-so-right for you, at least in some ways, AND at the very same time utterly wrong for you in other ways. Trading our spouses out for newer ones is often a matter of trading one person’s imperfections and irritating habits for another person’s.

I’ve found that releasing my fantasies around my relationship requires acknowledging a loss, and then grieving it. I really, really, really wanted to be with someone who was deeply romantic, in that poetry-writing and song-singing kind of way. But realizing that my romantic fantasies were created by the film industry (and perhaps the flower industry, and the greeting card industry—not to mention the diamond industry) and not by any actual needs of my own helped me release those fantasies. I felt saddened by the loss of my fairytale hopes for a little while. If you’re sad, grieve—but then move on.

2. Love the one you’re with. What would it look like if we truly believed that the grass were already greener on our relationship’s side?

For one thing, we would not compare our relationship to other people’s relationships. What we imagine other people have is pure fantasy, because we don’t really know what happens behind their bedroom doors (see No. 1 about letting go of fantasies).

These kinds of comparisons aren’t just delusional; they’re downright destructive. According to love lab researcher John Gottman, it starts a “cascade of not committing to the relationship; of trashing your partner instead of cherishing your partner; of building resentment rather than gratitude; of lowering your investment in the relationship; of not sacrificing for the relationship; and of escalating conflicts.”

3. Stop blaming your spouse. Although it is easy to blame our partners for our own unhappiness—they are the ones who have the irritating habits, after all—doing so won’t actually make you happier or make your relationship better. It is far more constructive to become what Christine Meinecke, author of Everybody Marries the Wrong Person, calls a “self-responsible spouse.”

Feeling disappointed or frustrated or resentful is a choice. The alternatives? Lower or change our expectations, or take responsibility for what we need and ask for it, even if it makes us feel vulnerable to do so. The key here is to do it in a positive way (see this post  for tips). The upside is that successfully tackling a problem in a relationship with our partner, rather than letting resentment simmer, can make us feel far closer and loving than before the problem arose.

4. Focus on being the right partner instead of finding the right partner. Although it is almost always easier to focus on the ways our spouses should change, it is far less effective to put our energy into changing someone else than it is to change ourselves. How do you need to grow in order for your relationship to thrive? (Bonus Tip: the answer to that question often involves becoming more empathetic and grateful.) What can you do to be a better partner? To nurture the relationship? To build trust?

All of this isn’t to say that all relationship problems can be solved. Some people don’t make good partners to each other, or to anyone—addicts, for example, or multiple-offense cheaters, or violent people, to name just a few—and so lowering the bar, taking responsibility, and focusing on ourselves will not improve or sustain the relationship. Truly, not all spouses are meant to be together. Some people aren’t enough.

But, being the romantic that I am, I tend to believe that most people are good enough. And “good enough” isn’t an insult—good enough is a wonderful state of contentment and love.

—-

© 2012 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

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The ironic thing about this month of love is that the first six weeks or so of the New Year are the busiest time of the year for divorce lawyers (or so they say). Seems that many people are not feeling as much love and romance as Hallmark would hope. Many are actually feeling hate.

I have a theory about this.

If I asked my grandmother if her late husband was her best friend, her provider, her lover, and her partner in parenting and life—her go-to guy for emotional fulfillment, practical help, AND the center of her social universe—she would have laughed uproariously.

She did love her hubby until the day he died and still misses him so much she weeps talking about him, more than 30 years after his death. But my Opa wasn’t her best friend (her girlfriend Beulah was). She didn’t rely on him for help raising the kids or with the housework (times have changed!), nor did she expect him to understand her feelings. She relied on herself for happiness and fulfillment—and truthfully, she didn’t have high expectations there, either.

But she’d tell you she had a wonderful marriage. When I asked her if she had had a happy life (she’s now 104 years old), she giggled at the absurdity of the question. Clearly she has.

And yet, like most of my peers, I would not sign up for her life—or, in particular, her marriage. Today, we expect our spouses to be our partners in just about every realm. We expect them to be our co-parents, our household running mates, and to help provide for our family financially. We’d think there was something wrong if they didn’t consider us their soul mate, their go-to buddy, and their lover.

Like individuals, couples are increasingly isolated from the outside sources of support that previous generations had, and so our partners have become our primary sources of emotional (and for some, spiritual) fulfillment. When we aren’t happy, it is easy—and quite common—for our generation to blame our spouse for it.

There is an expectations paradox here: The demands put on our relationships have become so great—and our expectations of them have gotten so high—that we are more likely to be disappointed when we don’t get what we want from our partners than we are to feel grateful when we do.

My grandmother expected very little from her husband—only that he provide her with financial stability, and that he be faithful to her. My grandfather delivered on these things, and as an added bonus, shared with her a love of dancing, a social life full of mutual friends and dinner parties, and a muted joy in raising children and grandchildren.

My grandmother was content not so much because of what she had in her husband, but because of what she lacked in her expectations. This is both ironic and instructive for our generation.

Consider the study where Duke professor Dan Ariely, author of the book Predictably Irrational, had research subjects try two different types of beer. One was Budweiser; the other was Budweiser with balsamic vinegar added to it.

The majority of subjects vastly preferred the Bud and vinegar concoction—when they weren’t told what it was. When they were informed before they tasted it, they hated it.

Ariely’s conclusion is that when people believe that something might be distasteful, they’ll experience it negatively, even if they would have liked it otherwise. The reverse is also true.

In other words: Our expectations hugely influence our perceptions, and therefore our decisions, our experiences, our judgments, and ultimately, how we feel.

“Help! I hate my husband!”  a reader recently wrote to Iris Krasnow, author of The Secret Lives of Wives . Krasnow’s reader, Cindy from Dallas, emails her that “[this] hate I feel, it simmers and I wonder if it’s a sign that there could be a better partner out there for me. Little things grate on me every day. My husband chews his food loudly. I hate his father. I hate our domestic hum-drum. This can’t be love!”

Krasnow clarifies that this hated husband is not a philanderer or dead-beat dad. He is not a compulsive gambler, nor is he physically or verbally abusive. He is a warm, hands-on father who makes a good living. Cindy from Dallas clarifies: “My hate comes from this feeling that I’m missing out on something else.”

Ah-ha. We Americans are born and bred to expect, well, everything. The American Dream—which, from a happiness habit standpoint, is a bit more of an American Nightmare—teaches us to always be striving. We can always have it better than our parents’ generation, if only we work hard enough.

More than that, we are entitled to more, and better. We expect that we should have unlimited choice when it comes to shoes, housing, cars, types of jam at the grocery store ... and spouses.

Barry Schwartz’s research shows that this expectation of unlimited choice hurts our happiness for two reasons. First, more choices don’t actually make us happier—they just make us long for what we give up. The more choices we have, the more likely we are to feel unhappy with the choice that we do make, because we see all that we could have had in the other choices.

And second, if we’re constantly gazing over our partner’s shoulder for the next best thing, we won’t be gazing into his or her eyes.  Feeling gratitude for our partners is key to a successful relationship. But we’re unlikely to feel grateful for what we have when we feel entitled to something better, something more. We cannot feel truly committed to someone if we also feel that there might be someone else out there for us.

The abundance of choice in our society—and the advertising and media culture that (quite effectively) makes us feel that we won’t be complete until we acquire that next great thing—is taking its toll on our relationships.

Of course there is someone else out there for you. There always is. The real question is about whether or not you can be happy with the person you are already with. 

All of this raises several more questions for me: How much can we really expect of our spouses and still be happy? How can we let go of unrealistic expectations?  We know that expectations can lead us to relationship-killers, like nagging, contempt, and criticism; how can we respond constructively when our expectations aren’t met?

What questions does this post raise for you?