Finding the 'sweet spot' with letting go of rigid expectations

Have you ever noticed that looking forward to something can suddenly feel stressful, or feel bitterly disappointing if it doesn’t happen? Having things to look forward to is healthy for us, but hope, anticipation and expectations have a way of getting all tangled up. It’s very human to want things, and some people feel most alive when awaiting positive judges’ critiques for a favourite contestant on Dragula, or for the guy we met on Saturday to message us back. Yet many of us have an excruciating relationship with the pain of feeling let down, after things don’t turn out the way we wanted.

The pain of disappointment is directly related to how invested we are in a certain outcome before it happens. In a very real sense, we tend to confuse wanting something with believing that it has already happened - that my desire to win Tattslotto is the same as having already won it. If we imagine something pleasant while we are on mental autopilot, it’s very easy to get partially trapped in that imagined reality, and feel soothed by pretending we already have the thing we want before it happens. The pain of disappointment comes when we are ripped away from that imagined reality, and it can create a lot of hurt and anger.

This is especially true in romantic relationships, where if a first date or hookup goes well, you might find yourself imagining the wedding, buying a house together, and going for long walks with the Frenchie you adopt as a couple. Imagining a nice future is lovely, but it’s so easy to confuse this with knowing a certain future will definitely happen, and many of us know the devastation of then getting ghosted and left alone with these expectations crumbling around us.

There’s no easy answer to this, and maybe life is supposed to be a gentle rollercoaster with real ups and downs. But one way of letting go of rigid expectations is to remember that we can never really know anything about the future, and this is as true for positive future events as for negative ones. You might have already worked on predicting fewer future catastrophes, and it’s valuable to practice loosening our grip on future positive predictions as well.

This doesn’t mean you give up on hopes and dreams, it’s about being more conscious to hold them lightly. Think of holding an object in your hand - if you hold it too lightly, it falls out, but if you hold it too tightly, you might crush it. You can hold on to your hopes and expectations in a gentler way, and you still get to experience them, but you also suffer less if they don’t turn out. For example, you could practice acknowledging that the new guy you’ve met does seem amazing and you really hope it goes somewhere, but you know there’s no way of predicting the future, so if it ends at some point you can feel sad but be glad for the good times that happened. (If rejection feels tangled up with shame for you, that's worth working on as well).

Being more open to all kinds of outcomes on a daily basis can feel weird and first, and it takes practice. But the benefit is a less painful and less fearful way to hold pleasant experiences gently, and to tolerate difficult experiences more calmly.