Why Your Expectations Might Be What Is Sabotaging Your Love Life

Let me be clear: expectations are not wrong.

In fact, a certain idealism is where all love begins. In his book on Our Lady, The World’s First Love, Bishop Fulton Sheen writes, “Every person carries within his heart a blueprint of the one he loves. What seems to be ‘love at first sight’ is actually the fulfillment of desire, the realization of a dream. . . we already have an ideal in us—one which is made by our thinking, our habits, our experiences, and our desires.”

This is normal and natural. We have a yearning in us toward a certain ideal of the man or woman we wish to marry, and it is tied up with our desire for happiness. For some of us, that ideal is quite specific—we might even have a list of precise traits that compose it. 

So why does this article suggest that expectations may sabotage dating?

Two problems may arise. First, we may place too much emphasis on expectations. Second, we may fail to sacrifice our ideal for the sake of the far better reality at hand.

If we focus too much on our ideal, our set of criteria, when dating, rather than on the real, living, breathing person before us, we prevent ourselves from falling in love. Expectations and criteria get in the way of encountering another human soul in all its richness, complexity, and depth.

We forget that one does not truly fall in love with a set of character traits, or a series of statistics. One falls in love with a person. And a person is always infinitely more than the sum of their parts. Who among us can be fully described by a mere list of traits?

Of course, having some criteria can be a good starting point when dating.

But it is only a starting point. No one will meet all of our criteria. That’s simply a fact. But once we know that someone meets the essential points, we have to take the leap and forget about the list, at least long enough to truly know the person for who they are.

This can be very hard. But at some point in a relationship, it is necessary to tune out the background noise—your lists, your expectations, your anxieties, your future predictions, all the pressure you are putting on yourself and the other person—and simply be present in the moment with your date. Hold your heart and mind still and simply ask, Who is this person? Shift the focus from yourself and your desires to the other and their needs.

You may be surprised to discover how attractive the person really is in their own right, even if they don’t check all the boxes, once you give “the list” a break.

Moreover, a willingness to work at creating a good relationship (and eventually marriage) is a greater predictor of marital success than the personalities or traits of the people involved. In other words, your “list” of traits matters less than how hard you and your future spouse are willing to work to maintain and grow the relationship.

Finding the exact “right” person with the perfect “match” for your temperament who checks all the “boxes” is less important for the overall success of the marriage than simply the constant effort to maintain and improve the relationship, regardless of what the spouses’ personalities are. 

The type of relationship you have is what matters most.

I’ve written about this before on Catholic Match, but it’s worth mentioning again the research that has been done on this. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed over 11,000 couples and showed that the overall quality of your relationship is a stronger predictor of relationship satisfaction than individual differences that might distance you.

The study’s lead, Samantha Joel, observed, “The person we choose is not nearly as important as the relationship we build…It really seems that having a great relationship is less about finding the perfect partner or changing your current partner, and more about building that relationship itself—setting up the conditions that will allow the relationship to flourish.”

When we do find someone to love, something must happen to that ideal we described at the beginning of the article. There is a sense in which a man loves womanhood, as an abstract, perfect, and ideal concept. There is a sense in which a woman loves manhood in the same way. But when you choose to date and then marry, that abstract ideal must become particular and concrete. You no longer love woman or man in the abstract and perfect, but rather this woman or this man, this particular, unique, wonderful, and flawed human being, and only this one. 

To a degree, the ideal must be sacrificed in the process of dating and marriage, though not in order to be destroyed, but in order to be transformed. The person you are dating and ultimately, perhaps, marrying does not have a perfect body or all the right skills or genius intelligence or moral perfection (at least, they don’t have all these things).

And it is necessary to let go of the ideal in favor of the real.

For, in the end, the real person you are marrying (or dating) is in a very true sense better than your idealized version of manhood or womanhood. They are far more real and complex (and, yes, flawed) than the ideal you carry in you, and yet, at the same time, they are a true though partial embodiment of that universal manhood or womanhood you are in love with.

There is a richness and depth to them you could never have dreamt of. God has not loved them in the abstract—He has loved them in the particular, for who they are. And you can do the same. Our “ideal” must conform to God’s ideal, which is expressed in the real-life circumstances He presents us with. 

Transforming our ideal means two things, then: first, finding the beauty and goodness in what is actually there, and second, understanding that perfection doesn’t exist on this side of heaven. This is true in dating as in other aspects of life.

If we fail to transform our ideal, either by missing the beauty in what is there or by expecting perfection in an imperfect world, we will end up bitter and disappointed. During dating and during marriage, we discover faults and flaws in the other that we did not know about before.

In some sense, everyone is a “let-down” because all of us are longing for someone who can perfectly fulfill us. But that does not mean that we become bitter and disappointed with our boyfriend/girlfriend or spouse.

Nor does it mean that idealism is all lies.

As Bishop Sheen says in Three to Get Married, “If ideals are not high, if the blueprints of love are not beautiful, then the marriage itself will not be beautiful.” But our hope for the perfect must be in the right place. Our love for another imperfect human being is meant to lead us to love the perfect: God, Who alone can perfectly fulfill us.

If we find someone to marry who understands this, then we have done well.

Let me conclude with one more quote from Sheen’s Three to Get Married. “Marriage is a vocation to put God in every detail of love. In this way, the dream of the bride and groom for eternal happiness really comes true, not in themselves alone, but through themselves. Now they love each other not as they dreamed they would, but as God dreamed they would. Such a reconciliation of the tension is possible only to those who know that it takes three to make love.”