In part two of our expectations deep dive, we’re circling back to how expectations can either make or break a relationship. First up, the red flags of unrealistic or uncommunicated expectations: things can spiral into conflict, create a “me vs. you” vibe, lead to disappointment, and even devalue the hard work your partner’s already putting in. Ouch!

But it’s not all doom and gloom! There are some green flags that come with aligned expectations: think teamwork, better understanding of your relationship’s growth, more moments of kindness, mutual respect, and even a boost in honesty and vulnerability. Sounds pretty great, right?

Now, back to that expectations activity from part one. The final step? Find where your expectations overlap. Do you have 10 shared goals? If not, no worries—figure out what you want to add to the list to get there. Ten is a totally doable number! And if you need more—like, say, all 20 expectations—go for it! You can always tweak them as you go along.

Happy aligning, and remember, relationships are a marathon, not a sprint!

About the Host:

Meet Crystal, your relationship and social health coach. Crystal is the founder of Sparked Forever Relationship & Singles coaching. She started her journey supporting the neurodiverse community in navigating this, sometimes frustrating, neurotypical social world. Lessons and inspiration from her earlier work drives Crystal’s passion for bringing couples and singles together through acceptance, understanding and big picture thinking to grow vibrant relationships. Crystal understands that the foundation for our social health and well-being starts with making connections to others. When Crystal is not working with couples, she loves to be out on adventures with her partner and bonus kids or spending time connecting with friends over good food and fun music.

Links:

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https://www.instagram.com/sparkitsocial/

https://www.tiktok.com/@sparked_forever

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Welcome to our love space today. It is so great to have you here making expectations great again. I hope you listened to part one of this from last episode of You know, realigning our expectations and for some of us, even discovering our expectations for the love of our life and for each other, some of us maybe even discovering that we have expectations for our relationships. Maybe we didn't even know we did, right? So I hope that you had a moment, took a moment to walk through the exerciser, to walk through the what a blame way to say that, to do to do the exercise from last week, and to really get into it and take that moment to pause if you haven't paused this. Now, stop your binge listening and go back and take a moment. You can listen to this tomorrow. You can listen to this after dinner at the gym. You can listen to this whenever go back and take a moment to do the expectations exercise. Okay, so I've given you your opportunity to pause if you haven't done it, just to recap, so that we're all on the same page with our expectations. But what we learned from last episode is that, right, we're going to get rid of our horrible words always and never, because those don't help any relationships out. They don't help out our talking or speak about our partners or to our partners about the things that are going on in relationships. So we're getting rid of those. We're getting rid of always and never. Okay, the next thing I had you do was, I had you actually concretely write down what your expectations were of your partner and your relationship, maybe even of both of you in that relationship, hopefully, if both of you think expectations would be shared. But again, that might have been something we discovered on this expectations journey so and the reason why I wanted you to take that moment to actually, literally type it out in your phone somewhere, or to write it down on a piece of paper, is because making things concrete is so beneficial for our little silly human brain. So remember I said that these activities were going to be so simple that your brain was going to tell you they were either not worthwhile or even though they've been beneficial, like, let's just stop doing them. Okay? So that's because they're too easy, and they make too much of a difference, so we've got to try them. So putting things in writing makes it so much real for our brain. If we're visual learners, it's even more beneficial because it will really get in there. When I work in the neuro spicy community, this is something that I teach to everyone, is that you know whatever you can put into a drawing or into writing to help people that are visual learners, or to help things be make ideas, or make what we say more concrete to people, so that they'll remember it and internalize it, that that's going to be so much more helpful, right? And in this way too, when we did this exercise, you get to actually see your thoughts in black and white. That's why so many people do journaling, right? Journaling can be such a growth activity for so many people, because you're actually putting all those worries, fears, wonderings, thoughts down in black and white into a concrete form, and it really helps you process them. I also think this is why, you know, so many people love the idea of marriage, or really invested in the idea of getting married. And it's not just all the societal norms that stop just the romantic piece. It's not just the commitment piece. It's more that the commitment piece, because you could have just a commitment ceremony and not have a piece of paper go with it. But there are many people where whose brains need that piece of paper, that need that contract, right? They need it in writing that we are committed and we're loved, not just words that kind of melt away into the atmosphere. So that's fine. Our so little human brains really benefit from things being in writing. Super cool. So we're going to help our brains out by putting this list in writing. That's right, writing out our expectations for each other. Okay, we were also going to trade them right. If we wanted to get next level with it, we were going to trade our list with each other and read them out loud to each other and really have that experience of hearing our words and hearing our expectations come out of the love of our life and vice versa, and go through that process. Fantastic. Okay, so now the next part I'm going to tell you is really super simple. Okay, so we're going to delay it a minute, because I know your brain will not trust me on this. So one of the things that we want to think about is those things, is that the this activity is taking away the red flags from our expectations, right? So the red flags about expectations are that they cause disappointment, right? We may have unreal expectations of how relationships work, or how the love of our life should behave, or. Act or what they should be responsible for, what they should do, right? We might even think that they're responsible for our own happiness, right? That's a red flag, okay, right there. That's a red flag for sure. And so having these unreal expectations that causes disappointment. So that's a red flag, right? It causes having these expectations that we haven't talked about, we haven't shared, and that we hold each other to, it creates more conflict in our relationship, because we have this imaginary rule of this is how this person's supposed to act, and they're not acting that way. I don't know if that was in the marriage contract that they signed that. And number two, you have to act this way every day. And number three, you need to do this every day. Number four, you need to do this. Maybe, if we did that actually, might be a good idea. Maybe we should add this activity to a marriage contract, and then it would be perfect. You know, it creates a lot of conflict because we have this imaginary rule the person's not living up to it. Also, you know, creates that expectation in another person that might be beyond their own capabilities, right, that might be beyond their ability to do on a consistent daily basis or on a consistent enough basis, you know, to check off that little checkbox of doom that we are talking about in last episode. And if this is true, if they're actually just not mentally, physically, emotionally capable of checking off this imaginary box that we have created for them, right? It's beyond their capabilities, then we are setting themselves up. We're setting up both of ourselves up for disappointment. We're setting our, you know, we're devaluing our partner's action set right now. Think of the thing, if our little checkbox of doom says that they need to take out the garbage 100% of the time, and there's a few days they forget, or maybe physically, they're not capable to do it every time the garbage needs to be taken out, oh my gosh. Well, then if they can even do it 70% of the time, we have devalued that. We've made that unimportant because they're not hitting the 100, they're not checking off that box. That box doesn't say 70% okay? That's because that gets tied in with our always and nevers All right? So that's another red flag of having these expectations that we haven't shared, we haven't talked about, and we haven't aligned with each other. So we want to get rid of these red flags now, by doing the this activity we have put in, we're going to create so many green flags for our relationship. So my green flags for our expectations with each other, right? Because just by doing this exercise, we're doing some collaborative work, because step two, this next step after we've traded the list, we've read them to each other, maybe you did that yesterday, maybe you did last week, on your Mega moments of love, right? I always love giving you guys relationship homework for your Mega moments of love, because that's the time to focus on your relationship. So what a great time to try some of these fun activities. And they can be fun. They all have to be super like dull and boring. Have a laugh, have a glass of wine, have a glass of kombucha, whatever your jam is, and sit down and, you know, do it in a kindful way, right? Do it while you're snuggling, I don't know, do it while you're watching that sunset, whatever you like. Okay, so the next super easy stuff we've traded. We know each other's expectations are. We've reworded them in that kind, super, kind way, right? It's important to me that we, and then you guys, filled in the blanks. Fantastic. The next thing is, is now, if we are in a in a scenario like, again, you know, if you did this and you overlapped all your five expectations, gold star for you guy, and that's only gold star, because then that means that, because your expectations are aligned, things in that realm are going to flow smoothly for you already, and that this was just a great check. Wow. Look, look at this connection and bond that we already have, that we didn't realize we had, that we didn't realize we have this foundational piece in place already. And that's, you know, that's what causes some of or that's what helps us create some of our love and connection and wonderfulness together. Okay, gold star. Now, what if you both came up with a list of 10 and they're both 10 different ones. Now we have 20 expectations in our relationship. Oh, goodness, wow. Okay, so there's going to be two steps here. Step one is to go through and look at both lists together and see, is there anything you guys agree on that you're already sort of doing for each other and are together consistently? Right? Those ones we can all give some green check marks to. Great. We're already doing it consistently. Now,

if you have five or 10 that you're already doing consistently, you might look at the ones that you. Haven't given little gold stars, two little check marks too. You might think, ah, do we need these ones? How important are these ones to our relationship compared to the ones that we already do? You might actually look at that list, and this is why it's so great again to have it in concrete, black and white writing, or whatever color glitter pen you decide to write in. I always love a good glittery pen, yeah, so it's black and white, and you're able to kind of look at it and be like, Ah, maybe that's not so important. Maybe these 10 are really foundational to us and really show our kindfulness towards each other. Give us opportunity. That opportunity be kindful, and that is enough. That's all we need. Great that 10 let's get, let's keep those other 10 around, just so that when we do this next year at this time. But that's right, you can keep going with this. You can do it more than one time that when we do it next time, we can pull out this list and see, do we even still have any of these same expectations or thoughts for each other? Have we grown and changed that we have completely new ones to write down, maybe even before that point, you're like, Hey, do you know what we've been doing super well with thinking about our new expectations for each other, our new sparked expectations. Okay, maybe let's go back to that list, because I have noticed this is a great thing. I have noticed that actually, when we don't do this expectation, it does irk me. It has been annoying me. I know we didn't give it a green checkmark, but it's, it's actually been on my mind. Okay, perfect. Are there any you know, ones that we've missed out from the green right? That didn't get those green check marks, that didn't get those gold stars, that been irking you or annoying you, or that we actually if it's if it's irking or annoying us, that means that maybe we do need to put them into that active list of expectations that we have for each other. Fantastic, because it gives you that point to talk about it and to talk about it in an open, neutral way. That's another actual I didn't mention that red flag because I did mention the increased conflict with having misaligned expectations. But that other red flag is that it can make your relationship adversarial, right? You can be pitted against each other about whose expectations are the right ones, right? And there are no right ones. Again, this is a big picture idea, and you guys are filling in the details of what are the right expectations for your relationship, and when you think there's a set, societal, cultural, whatever list of expectations that we should all live up to as a couple, that's when we really start to fall apart. That's when we start to get pitted against each other. We're no longer collaborative team. Now we're two people trying to get the promotion to be boss. No, nobody's boss. We're a collaborative team that has started this relationship together. Okay, so we're going to make a list of our go to ones that we agree on. Again, we're going to have that reserve list if you if it's a must, that you must do 20 that's a lot, but we can do, again, that's the detail you want to color in. If you think that's manageable, I might, you know, sort of suggest that we might just do a few at a time and build up to 20. But again, this is your detail. You give it a try. You can always pull back and tweak it right? We can always tweak and change. We can always renegotiate, right? We can always chat about it again. Nothing is closed, okay? So that is going to make right, that that collaboration in trying to decide which expectations we're including, which expectations are getting our gold stars, that's part of our collaboration and teamwork, that moment of being vulnerable and open and honest with with each other is a green flag. It's going to make your foundation so much stronger, because now you're on the same page. You're aligned with how you want to be treated, right, and how that person wants to be treated and how you want your relationship to treat you both, right? That's going to create that open so green flag, having our expectations aligned like this, going through our expectation exercise, right, is adding these green flags. So it's adding our teamwork and collaboration. It is adding respect and value to how each how we both participate in the relationship, right? It's adding respect and value to the capabilities and abilities of each person in the relationship. It's adding honesty and vulnerability that you are displaying to each other, which. It's Oh. Every time we have a vulnerable, honest moment with each other, we're building connection. We're building our bond with each other, right? And we're creating that environment, that space, that love space, right? You're you're in our, you're in my love space right now. You're in our love space right now. You have your own love space that you guys are creating together. Oh my gosh, so fantastic, right? And every act of honesty and vulnerability, right, and teamwork, collaboration, all of these green flag things, right, valuing each other's abilities, valuing each other's strengths, right, realizing what, where, we're all we all have our little blips, our little hiccups, our little weaknesses, where we can support each other, where we can decide that we need support from someone else altogether. You know all of these things, those are all creating that nurturing love space that's going to help you grow. So I know it sounds simple to list out our expectations, read them to each other and decide what's important to us. I know it sounds simple to try to leave out the words always and never when we're thinking about our expectations for each other. I know it sounds simple to reword our expectations into it's important to me that we but these simple things are going to help create that solid foundation piece for you. And if you've been in a relationship for a while and you've never thought of doing this, you've never thought of what your expectations are for each other again, such an eye opening exercise to see where you're both at, to see if you're on the same page, to see if you guys are accidentally doing things and not knowing it, right? To see if there are things now that you sit down and think about it that you would like to add with each other, right? It just rejuvenates and re energizes things and puts you in that love space together to Stay Sparked.