Quotes About Expectations

And I wondered, with mounting anxiety, What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.

We can claim to have begun to know someone only when they have substantially disappointed us.

A few centuries from now, the level of self-knowledge that our own age judges necessary to get married might be thought puzzling, if not outright barbaric. By then, a standard, wholly non-judgemental line of enquiry (appropriate even on a first date), to which everyone would be expected to have a tolerant, good-natured and non-defensive answer, would simply be: 'So in what ways are you mad?' Kirsten

Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough.

By overwhelming consensus, our culture locates the primary difficulty of relationships in finding the 'right' person rather than in knowing how to love a real — that is, a necessarily rather unright — human being.

We take this idea of love (being loved, rather than loving) with us into adulthood. Grown up, we hope for a re-creation of what it felt like to be ministered to and indulged. In a secret corner of our mind, we picture a lover who will anticipate our needs, read our hearts, act selflessly, and make everything better. It sounds "romantic," yet it is a blueprint for disaster.

For many, the point of marriage isn't so much to be in love as to stop having to think of love.

Cynics are, in the end, only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

We place such demands on our partners, and become so unreasonable around them, because we have faith that someone who understands obscure parts of us, whose presence solves so many of our woes, must somehow also be able to fix everything about our lives. We exaggerate the other's powers in a curious sort of homage—heard in adult life decades down the line—to a small child's awe at their own parents' apparently miraculous capacities.

In the end, I've found that it doesn't really matter who you marry. If you like them at the beginning, you probably won't like them at the end. And if you start off hating them, there's always the chance you'll end up thinking they're all right.

Adulthood involves learning to conclusively bury a great many of our hopes.

Though from a position of unrequited love they long to see their love returned, Marxists unconsciously prefer that their dreams remain in the realm of fantasy. Why should others think any better of them than they of themselves? Only so long as the loved one believes the Marxist to be more or less nothing, can the Marxist continue to believe the loved one to be more or less everything.

We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration. He

Contemplating our mortality may give us the courage to unhook our lives from the more gratuitous of society's expectations

It was a reminder that the labeling of others is usually a silent process. Most people do not openly force us into roles, they merely suggest that we adopt them through their reactions to us, and hence surreptitiously prevent us from moving beyond whatever mold they have assigned us. 12.     A

Our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving moments. We have allowed our love stories to end way too early. We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.

A spouse who gets angry at having been betrayed is evading a basic, tragic truth: that no one can be everything to another person.

Despite our best efforts to clean it of its peculiarities, sex will never be either simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be.

One has to go into relationships with equal expectations, ready to give as much as the other

And what excuse was there for this? Nothing but the old line that parents and politicians will use before taking out their scalpels: I care about you, therefore I will upset you, I have honoured you with a vision of how you should be, therefore I will hurt you.

For most of our lives, sex seems fated to remain steeped in longing and awkwardness. Whatever the manuals may promise, there are really no solutions to the majority of the dilemmas sex creates for us.

Hoe machtig onze technologie en hoe complex onze ondernemingen ook mogen zijn, het opmerkelijkste kenmerk van onze moderne arbeid is uiteindelijk misschien wel iets wat in onszelf zit, een aspect van onze mentaliteit: de wijdverbreide overtuiging dat ons werk ons gelukkig moet maken.

Obiectivele noastre hot?r?sc ce anume interpret?m drept triumf ?i ce trebuie socotit e?ec.