Quotes About Expectations

Now that these men and women and the generations who have followed can have as much sex as they want, they seem to have lost their desire for it.

Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance. Excessive monitoring can set the stage for what Stephen Mitchell calls "acts of exuberant defiance.

In this setup, the pressure is always on the non-talker to change, rather than on the talker to be more versatile. This situation minimizes the importance of nonverbal communication: doing nice things for each other, making attentive gestures, or sharing projects in a spirit of collaboration.

When you pick a partner, you pick a story, and then you find yourself in a play you never auditioned for. And that is when the narratives clash.

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When we imbue our partner with godly attributes and we expect him or her to uplift us from the mundane to the sublime, we create, as Johnson puts it, an "unholy muddle of two holy loves"4 that cannot help but disappoint.

We live in a culture that continually lures us with the promise of something better, younger, perkier. Hence we no longer divorce because we're unhappy; we divorce because we could be happier.

It's not our desires that are different today, but the fact that we feel we deserve—indeed, we are obligated—to pursue them. Our primary duty is now to ourselves—even if it comes at the expense of those we love. As Pamela Druckerman points out, "Our high expectations for personal happiness might even make us more likely to cheat. After all, aren't we entitled to an affair, if that's what it takes to be fulfilled?

Monogamy is the sacred cow of the romantic ideal, for it confirms our specialness. Infidelity says, You're not so special after all. It shatters the grand ambition of love.

When we channel all our intimate needs into one person, we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable.

predictability is a mirage. Our need for constancy limits how much we are willing to know the person who's next to us. We are invested in having him or her conform to an image that is often a creation of our own imagination, based on our own set of needs.

Affairs have a lot to teach us about relationships—what we expect, what we think we want, and what we feel entitled to.

Affairs have a lot to teach us about relationships—what we expect, what we think we want, and what we feel entitled to. They offer a unique window into our personal and cultural attitudes about love, lust, and commitment.

Home, marriage, and motherhood have forever been the pursuit of many women, but also the place where women cease to feel like women.

We interpret the lack of sexual interest as proof that women's sexual drive is inherently less strong. Perhaps it would be more accurate to think that it is a drive that needs to be stoked more intensely and more imaginatively—and first and foremost by her, not only by her partner.

I've been a sexual underachiever my whole life, and I resent Warren for feeling entitled to something that I won't allow for myself!

Marriage has become a mythical castle, designed to be everything we could want. Affairs bring it tumbling down, leaving us feeling like there is nothing to hold on to. Perhaps this goes some way toward explaining why modern infidelity is more than painful. It is traumatic.

Romantics value intensity over stability; realists value security over passion. But both are often disappointed, for few people can live at either extreme.

For those affairs that do stay alive past the altar, there is the pressure to "make it seem worth the cost

When you ask people if they are monogamous, I suggest you ask them first what their definition of monogamy is.

monogamy should be an "opt-in." If people were given more opportunity to choose, he offers, maybe some of them wouldn't have opted in and then they wouldn't be in trouble for adultery. Rather than penalize those who fail monogamy's standardized test, we should recognize that the test is disproportionately difficult.

She is to take a break from the idea that pleasure must be paid for, in advance, by the performance of duty. We chisel away at this complex system of fairness and merit, where everything has to be perfectly equitable in order to neutralize selfishness.

It is no longer a sin against God, a breaking of a family alliance, a muddying of the bloodline, or a dispersion of resources and inheritances. At the core of betrayal today is a violation of trust: We expect our partner to act according to our shared set of assumptions, and we base our own behavior on that.

What is different is that modern life has deprived us of our traditional resources, and has created a situation in which we turn to one person for the protection and emotional connections that a multitude of social networks used to provide. Adult intimacy has become overburdened with expectations.