Boundaries
Expecting less of somebody is not the same as giving up on them
Adjusting your expectations of a friend or relative sounds like a defeat. In practice it is often what keeps the relationship alive and stops the resentment.
What follows is an argument about adjusting expectations of a person, and about where the received version of it stops being true.
The argument in brief
- Resentment tracks the gap between what you expect and what arrives.
- Lowering an expectation you were never going to get is not a concession to them.
- The alternative is usually not a better friend but no friend.
Where the resentment comes from
Disappointment is produced by a gap between an expectation and an outcome, so it can be reduced from either end. Most people only ever try to move the outcome, which requires another person to change and is therefore largely outside their control.
The expectation, by contrast, belongs to you entirely and can be adjusted without anybody's cooperation. This sounds like capitulation, and it feels like it for about a month, after which it usually feels like relief. The test is whether the expectation has ever been met by this particular person in the past decade.
The friend who is unreliable about one thing
Many people are excellent in one dimension and consistently poor in another, and the pattern is stable across years. Somebody who is wonderful in a crisis and hopeless at remembering a birthday is not being selectively thoughtful; they are being consistent. Expecting a birthday card from them each year manufactures an annual disappointment that could simply be switched off.
Between old friends, this is not the same as accepting bad treatment, since the distinction is between a capability gap and a pattern of harm. A capability gap can be planned around; a pattern of harm should not be.
Doing the adjustment honestly
Write down what you actually want from the relationship, then mark each item according to whether this person has ever supplied it. The items never supplied are candidates for adjustment, and the exercise usually reveals that you have been asking a plumber for legal advice.
The unglamorous truth is that ask separately whether the thing you want is available elsewhere, since many needs assigned to one person could be spread across three. Be clear about the things you are not willing to adjust, since a relationship where everything has been lowered is not a relationship. The result should be a shorter list of expectations that are actually plausible rather than a general resignation.
Saying it or not saying it
Most adjustments do not need to be announced, since telling somebody you have lowered your expectations of them is an insult rather than a conversation. There is an exception where the expectation was explicitly agreed, in which case renegotiating it openly is fairer than quietly withdrawing.
Where you are reducing what you give in response, that is worth stating plainly, because unexplained withdrawal is read as a punishment. The tone matters enormously, since the same adjustment can be delivered as an accommodation or as a verdict.
Delivered well, it often improves the relationship, because the other person stops sensing an unmet demand they cannot identify.
When lowering expectations is the wrong move
If the expectation is basic, being spoken to civilly, having confidences kept, not being humiliated in front of others, then lowering it is not adjustment. Repeatedly reducing what you will accept from somebody who keeps taking more is a pattern worth examining, ideally with somebody outside the situation.
In the long run, the difference is between accepting that a person is limited and accepting that a person is harmful, and those require opposite responses. If you find yourself explaining somebody's behaviour to friends more often than describing it, that is usually a signal worth noticing. Where the relationship involves control, fear or coercion, this is not an expectations problem and support services exist for exactly that.
Some ties are worth keeping and some are worth setting down, and only you can weigh which is which.
What you get back
The immediate return is the disappearance of a recurring irritation that you had been re-experiencing several times a year. The second is that the relationship becomes visible for what it does provide, which is often more than it looked like under the shadow of the deficit. You also stop transmitting a low-level disapproval that the other person was almost certainly picking up.
Many long friendships and most family relationships survive precisely because somebody quietly did this without ever mentioning it. It is not a lesser form of love; it is the form that lasts.
The takeaway
Ask whether this person has ever done the thing you keep expecting, and if not, stop scheduling the disappointment.
The apology that works is specific, unhurried and free of the word but.
Questions readers ask
Is it not dishonest to lower my expectations without saying so?
No more than any other private adjustment. Announcing it usually reads as a rebuke, and the point is to remove your resentment rather than to correct them.
How do I know if I am lowering standards too far?
Ask whether the thing you have given up is a preference or a basic decency. Preferences are negotiable. Being treated badly is not, and no adjustment fixes it.
