My last sentence was a reflection of the fact that I enjoy perfect strangers more than my H, that I can be more certain of receiving basic courtesy from them than I am from him.
You have a great way of phrasing.
After reading your post, I decided to look up the dictionary definition of trust, and it is "confident expectation of something; hope." So I see this jibing with your comments on expectations, but I thought I understood your comments to be indicating that expectations (of others) was bad. In that case, there can be no trust of anyone else if we can't expect anything from them. (Expectations are a whole other animal that I've read both sides argued. I've heard don't have expectations because they're bad, and I've heard that not having expectations of something better causes people to settle and life (marriage) becomes stagnant/complacent.)
Some things I want from my H are things that I want my way (not using me as the brunt of his jokes, for example.) Most things I really don't care. I can't even imagine having an issue about when/where/how the trash is taken out. Ironically, this is the one thing that I could say he does and is very good about. Unfortunately, I can't build a marriage relationship on his taking out the trash.
And on that note, that's exactly the problem. We never get past the "little" things, because he usually doesn't deliver. For example, he'll drop S off at school occasionally, but inevitably leaves his lunch in the car. Or he picks up S and then leaves with his schoolbag in his car so that S can't do his homework. The resulting inconvenience is not worth the small benefit. I'd rather just do it myself, not because it has to be done MY way, but because there are ramifications to other areas if he fails. And honestly, he just fails so often on the little stuff, I can't imagine how to move on from there.
Besides taking out the trash, the things I can trust him on aren't positive. I can trust that he's going to fall asleep 5 minutes after the start of a movie or 5 minutes after he picks up a book. I can trust that he'll be snoring 10 minutes after that. I can trust that what he says has little relation to what he actually does. I can trust that I will come out figuratively bloodied after any conversation with him regarding my differing opinion of his family. I can trust that anything he promises will be completely forgotten 3 days later. All these things, I have a "confident expectation."
I was just asking myself the difference in trust in these things, like does it affect my trust of him if H falls asleep, or does it change for me if he occasionally doesn't fall asleep. I think in that case, the answer is no because it simply doesn't impact me, except that I won't sit down with him anymore to watch "his" movie. So even his staying awake doesn't change whether I watch "my" movie. It used to annoy me that he would rent a movie that wasn't something I was interested in and ask me to watch it with him, then fall asleep 5 minutes later. Since I don't do that anymore, I've simply removed the problem, but of course that creates a different one (another 'pseudo' shared activity lost.) So in a sense, it seems like pretty much the same thing -- he's taught me what to expect and I've adjusted my life to accommodate it. The one expectation that I don't carry anymore is expecting that he'll change.
