It is not possible for one person to meet all of another's needs and marriage partners who expect this soon find each other wanting.

I shall expect my husband to have no pleasures but what he shares with me; and if his greatest pleasure of all is not the enjoyment of my company — why — it will be the worse for him — that's all." "If such are your expectations of matrimony, Esther, you must, indeed, be careful whom you marry — or rather, you must avoid it altogether.

breaking things off, convinced that our partner's psychological issues are making things impossible, or that we're not as compatible as we'd believed. Either of these might conceivably be true in certain cases; people are sometimes guilty of spectacularly bad choices in love, and in other domains as well. But more often, the real problem is just that the other person is one other person. In other words, the cause of your difficulties isn't that your partner is especially flawed, or that the two of you are especially incompatible, but that you're finally noticing all the ways in which your partner is (inevitably) finite, and thus deeply disappointing by comparison with the world of your fantasy, where the limiting rules of reality don't apply. The point that Bergson made about the future — that it's more appealing than the present because you get to indulge in all your hopes for it, even if they contradict each other — is no less true of fantasy romantic partners, who can easily exhibit a range of characteristics that simply couldn't coexist in one person in the real world. It's common, for example, to enter a relationship unconsciously hoping that your partner will provide both an unlimited sense of stability and an unlimited sense of excitement — and then, when that's not what transpires, to assume that the problem is your partner and that these qualities might coexist in someone else, whom you should therefore set off to find. The reality is that the demands are contradictory. The qualities that make someone a dependable source of excitement are generally the opposite of those that make him or her a dependable source of stability. Seeking both in one real human isn't much less absurd than dreaming of a partner who's both six and five feet tall. And not only should you settle; ideally, you should settle in a way that makes it harder to back out, such as moving in together, or getting married, or having a child. The great irony of all our efforts to avoid facing fin

If relationships were hard, mariage was even harder... it seemed like most couples struggled. It went with the territory. What did Nana always say? Stick two different people with two different sets of expectations under one roof and it ain't always going to be shrimp and grits on Easter.

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

Children cannot grow to psychological maturity in an atmosphere of unpredictability, haunted by the specter of abandonment. Couples cannot resolve in any healthy way the universal issues of marriage — dependency and independency, dominance and submission, freedom and fidelity, for example — without the security of knowing that the act of struggling over these issues will not itself destroy the relationship.

An unexamined life isn’t worth living, or so they say. The problem with living up to other people’s expectations too much is that it doesn’t leave us time to have a life. Take a moment. Ask yourself this question, and don’t be afraid to look deeply: Are you allowing someone else’s expectations to control your life? Examine the expectations you’re living up to; then live by your own inner guide.

I think people expect too much from marriage today,' he said. 'They expect perfection. Every moment should be bliss. That's TV or movies. But that is not the human experience.
. . . twenty good minutes here, forty good minutes there, it adds up to something beautiful. The trick is when things aren't so great, you don't junk the whole thing. It's okay to have an argument. It's okay that the other one nudges you a little, bothers you a little. It's part of being close to someone.
But the joy you get from that same closeness — when you watch your children, when you wake up and smile at each other — that . . . is a blessing. People forget that.

A common and traditionally masculine marital problem is created by the husband who, once he is married, devotes all his energies to climbing mountains and none to tending to his marriage, or base camp, expecting it to be there in perfect order whenever he chooses to return to it for rest and recreation without his assuming any responsibility for its maintenance. Sooner or later this “capitalist” approach to the problem fails and he returns to find his untended base camp a shambles, his neglected wife having been hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, having run off with another man, or in some other way having renounced her job as camp caretaker. An equally common and traditionally feminine marital problem is created by the wife who, once she is married, feels that the goal of her life has been achieved. To her the base camp is the peak. She cannot understand or empathize with her husband’s need for achievements and experiences beyond the marriage and reacts to them with jealousy and never-ending demands that he devote increasingly more energy to the home. Like other “communist” resolutions of the problem, this one creates a relationship that is suffocating and stultifying, from which the husband, feeling trapped and limited, may likely flee in a moment of “mid-life crisis.” The women’s liberation movement has been helpful in pointing the way to what is obviously the only ideal resolution: marriage as a truly cooperative institution, requiring great mutual contributions and care, time and energy, but existing for the primary purpose of nurturing each of the participants for individual journeys toward his or her own individual peaks of spiritual growth. Male and female both must tend the hearth and both must venture forth. As an adolescent I used to thrill to the words of love the early American poet Ann Bradstreet spoke to her husband: “If ever two were one, then we.”20 As I have grown, however, I have come to realize that it is the separateness of the partners that

if you don't respect the other person, you're gonna have a lot of trouble. If you don't know how to compromise, you're gonna have a lot of trouble. If you can't talk openly about what goes on between you, you're gonna have a lot of trouble. And if you have different set of values in life, you're gonna have a lot of trouble.Your values must be alike. And the biggest of those values... the belief in the importance of your marriage.

We all will have expectations about how life is supposed to be and how people are supposed to be. But we can’t control the way that others act or whether they meet your expectations. So when we hold on to those expectations and they’re not met we create pain.

What we can control is how we respond. We can choose to let go of expectation and open ourselves to something new.

Even the love for and from our families and friends is based on expectations and conditions.
Inevitably, these expectations and conditions are not met, and the details of real life become the thread that creates a nightmare.

Marriages should be as diverse as the people in them are, which means that some will be one of a kind, and some totally different still. And those who don't want to love, honor and obey, should be able to promise each other anything they choose, without having to ask anyone what they think of that, particularly themselves.

I believe that more women are disappointed in marriage than men ; a woman gives the whole of her heart — the man only gives the remains of his, and very often there is only a little left. Besides his idol is rarely so much the work of his own hands as her's ; at the end of the first year she may ask, where are the picturesque and ennobling qualities with which she invested her lover? in nine cases out of ten echo will indeed answer “where."