Everyone is familiar with the sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when disappointment hits—when he didn’t call, when your friends act like they couldn’t care less about your feelings.
It makes you feel genuinely alone and underappreciated when the people in your life who you genuinely care about, don’t show you the same sort of respect and love that you exhibit toward them.
My remedy toward these feelings, let’s try shedding our expectations for other people. And what I mean by this is: The more you care about a person, the more you’d be willing to do anything for him or her, right? Naturally, you’re going to begin to assume that he or she would do the same for you.
This is true in both relationships and friendships alike.
You expect that the person who you have invested such a vast amount of time into would be willing to do the same for you. However, this is usually not the case.
This is not to say that this other person doesn’t care about you. Generally they may exhibit some of those feelings toward you in return. However, not everyone is capable of being there for you as often as you’d like, or even as often as you’d expect.
So I’m merely suggesting that instead of sulking, we shouldn’t expect things from anyone.
So many people want attention, want to be loved, want things from other people. And when we don’t get those things, we assume that either there is something wrong with us individually, or there is an issue with the person who isn’t dishing out what we crave most.
The truth is that we can’t expect to gain satisfaction out of anyone, and even if our expectations were met half the time by the people we love, chances are we’d still want more.
When does it stop?
When is enough finally enough?
There is no perfect man out there who is going to make you happy, no perfect friend who will always know the ideal thing to say when you’re in crisis. Your family isn’t going to understand half of the things you do and will most likely keep hassling you even though you’d expect them to stop sooner or later. But at the end of the day, it’s ok. It doesn’t mean that the perfectly imperfect people in your life don’t love you, they probably do. It just means that in general, we have to learn to be more comfortable in our own skin. We have to generate our own happiness, and stop expecting other people to help us attain it.
I can’t stand when people say to each other, “You make me really happy.” Entrusting your happiness to someone else will only lead to heartbreak, 100% guaranteed. Enjoying someone’s company, and being content in their presence is one thing, but expecting to attain felicity from anyone is a huge mistake.
If we shatter those massive walls of expectations and march onward independently full of our own happiness, chances are the relationships we are involved in will be less strained, and most likely a lot healthier.
When you love people, whether your family, friends, guys, whomever, you have to love them unconditionally, flaws included. You can’t make people change for you, or hope that they’ll show you they care for you by doing anything in particular. You just have to embrace those feelings for as long as they’re there and run with it.
The fact is, hoping to gain anything from anyone, even if it is something as simple as confidence, love, or happiness, only leads to broken hearts. No one, no matter how amazing he or she is, can give you that. To really be genuinely satisfied with your life, you have to look deep within yourself.