Dealing With Unmet Expectations
Andy & I just celebrated our first year of marriage last weekend, and what a sweet and growing last year it was! A common misconception about your first year of marriage is that it will be the hardest year of your marriage… that wasn’t the case for us! Hard is not a word I would use to describe our marriage, even though we did walk through hard seasons and lots of unmet expectations.
Today, as I am further reflecting on our first year of marriage, I wanted to write a blog post normalizing how marriage can be SO fun, but come with hard seasons, growth, and unmet expectations.
Let’s rewind!! My husband and I participated in a premarital class called Merge where we learned to identify our unmet expectations in 3 categories: unrealistic, unaware, & unspoken. Unrealistic expectations are exactly as they sound - expectations that are unrealistic thus go unmet. Unaware expectations are often where I find myself as I won’t realize that I had an expectation on XYZ until it doesn't happen that way and I am disappointed or discouraged. Unspoken expectations are ones where you don’t say them because you are wanting to “keep the peace” or you assume the other person knows exactly what you're thinking… newsflash! No one can read someone else’s mind. My caveat to this is that not every expectation that is unmet will fit into these categories; sometimes life happens and things just don’t go as you expected.
This is one of the biggest lessons and areas of growth in our first year of marriage. Starting with our wedding day and our honeymoon. As one could imagine, any bride and groom would expect to have the most perfect wedding day (maybe a bit unrealistic). No bride would imagine that her groom would have COVID or some sort of nasty cold and a fever on her wedding day. Nor would she imagine guests would RSVP yes but not come. Nor would she imagine that the speakers wouldn’t work properly for her reception. All these things were true of our wedding day, but at the of the day, I got to marry my best friend. We were joined in oneness to glorify the Lord together for life, and that has been something that has well-exceded our expectations. Looking back, hindsight is 20/20, and we still got married even though our wedding day wasn’t exactly as we expected.
The same goes for our honeymoon. Not all things went as we had expected. Andy was still sick, I got sick later in the week, and we ended the week with my new husband having food poisoning… not the ideal honeymoon let me tell you! Even though the honeymoon wasn’t as we expected healthwise, we were still able to relish in our marriage and enjoy our time together. For most of our time, we were able to push through being sick and go on some pretty cool excursions! We went swimming with whale sharks, scuba diving with sea turtles and sharks, adventuring into underwater caves, and so much more! Our time spent in our resort was nothing short of restful! On days where we weren’t on an excursion, we were 24/7 at the poolside! Regardless of how the honeymoon ended, we cultivated memories as husband and wife that we will never forget & now get to look back and laugh at!
When we tell our honeymoon story, a common response I get from people is, “I’m so sorry!” But honestly, I’m not because I feel like it set us up with the right expectations in marriage that we will have unmet expectations, but that doesn’t mean that our lives are over or that God is any less faithful. Instead, we were able to build a foundation of working through unmet expectations that allowed us to have a better perspective when others came up in the first year of marriage, such as, travel expenses, learning new rhythms, things breaking once you own a house, unexpected health diagnoses, etc. So many things have come up this year that we would both say were not what we expected to experience in our first year of marriage, and yet we look back and are so grateful for how the Lord grew us individually and together.
In every unmet expectation, I am reminded of the sovereignty of God. He is never panicked or caught off guard when things don’t go as we planned. He is all-knowing, and he has every ounce of our lives planned out. He is in control of all things, and we can trust him. A blog post for another day is my struggle with control, but what a gift of a year to be reminded that it is good for God to be in control and not me. “He goes before all things and by Him, all things go together.” Colossians 1:17
XO, Em
