At the risk (to the possible benefit?) of putting our esteemed colleague O'Dog to sleep, I've done some reading of late on the question of Expectations and relationships. And while I think some of this will be of interest only to the Usual Suspects, there's interesting material here for those who want to unpack things a bit more deeply or who, for example, hope to be future couples' counselors at, say, Retro or in their churches and etc.
I found (too late, alas) some interesting research from the early 1980s by Eidelson and Epstein, who developed a test instrument known as the Relationship Beliefs Inventory, which measures what "you" (i.e., "one") believe about relationships -- what they're supposed to look like, be like, etc. They produced some interesting papers on the results of that instrument, along with another called the Marital Adjustment Test, which measures -- no-brainer -- how well you (one) adapts the pre-existing beliefs and expectations to the actual institution.
They then elaborated their research to use the tests on couples going to marriage counseling on the road to divorce.
In this paper, "Unrealistic beliefs of clinical couples: Their relationship to expectations, goals and satisfaction" (American Journal of Family Therapy, vol. 9, no. 4 (Winter 1981)), they found in an analysis of 47 couples seeking therapy in lieu of marriage that the probability of successful therapy (i.e., prevention of divorce) was negatively associated with "couples' unrealistic beliefs, particularly those regarding relationships."
In English, couples bring their preexisting beliefs and expectations to therapy with them -- even though they have empirical evidence that marriage isn't "what they expected" -- and continue to filter therapy through the lens of those unrealistic beliefs.
So whatever benefit the therapy might offer -- for example, a venue for Wife communicating that "I was unhappy you didn't express gratitude for my hard work around the house" (this was 1981, after all) -- if Husband believed that the expression of gratitude was unnecessary because housekeeping is "woman's work," then there was no therapeutic value-added in the expression -- it simply became one more stressor in the outside-the-therapy-room relationship.
Likewise, if one partner (i.e., Smiley's Person for years) denied that therapy was a good idea or could be beneficial, then for that partner it provided no benefits.
So what does that mean here? It means, among other things IMO, that there needs to be clearly defined discussions of couples' expectations before marriage and, probably, that married couples need to make recurring discussions of expectations (since these presumably evolve as one's status, age, living situation evolves) throughout the marriage.
This ought to be common-sense -- we do it in business all the time, don't we? Let's get the team together for a meeting and see where we're at on the McGillicutty Account.
But we seem -- societally, I mean -- to believe someone that marriage is supposed to be "easy" (by which I mean we know that it's hard but because it's "natural" or "ordained by God" or the "natural order of things" or any of the other terms that get thrown around in the marriage-equality debates we ought to be able to "just do it") we seem to assume that it is also self-sustaining.
Unfortunately we tend to un-learn this when it is largely too late.
What's needed, perhaps, is less romance and more board-of-directors meetings....
