They say love hurts. I say, love doesn’t; disappointments do. Well, love here is not merely confined for SRK’s movies or a couple getting enthusiastic to celebrate February 14. It symbolizes every relation starting from mother-child relation to big entities like nations. (Yeah! For this post, it is for two human entities) Love and care, two sides of the same coin. Although I am not addressing the love failures or careless relations, I will talk something tangential. Very often, I get pings from people who belong to my inner circle, saying, Every time I get to know a person, I fail as a friend. I always feel the betrayal. And then every time I try to come up with a new theory of expectations.
A cliché — no expectation leads to no disappointments — is easier said than done. No expectations also mean no closeness, no hopes and may be sometimes relationships drifting apart. Having said that, too many expectations ensue disappointments (most of the time). Both the situations are extreme; aren’t they? Let’s have a way out. Remember the physics class in intermediate, the law of conservation of energy. Don’t hate me for forcing you to recall those studious days (if at all ;)). Anyways, so the law goes something like this, ‘Energy can neither be created nor be destroyed’. And in addition to this, ‘Energy can be transferred from one form to another.’ 🙂 (I wish, I could have recalled the law when it was really needed. sigh!) I can see the smile on the faces of those who understood my purpose of reiterating a commonplace law. But for the sake of baffled yet angry (Thinking, why physics again!) faces, here goes a theory.
Expectations can neither be created nor be destroyed. As human beings, we are born with expectations- starting from first sense of emotion to last breath of life. Even while touching a sponge, we expect it to be soft and a needle to be sharp. These are some day-to-day examples, what about people around us. Clearly, facts become expectations, however, facts do have exceptions, and those are us. We meet someone with a basic set of expectations. Those are accrued moving ahead. And a time when disappointments are unraveled, expectations get destroyed? Suddenly? All of them? Sounds disagreeable. I think they don’t get destroyed. Why? Second part of the law.
Expectations can only be transferred from one form (read as a person) to another. If someone fails to fulfill your expectations, you lose hopes and eventually expect a little less. If you are expecting less from someone then somewhere you are expecting more from someone else, then again a disappointment at some point. And the vicious cycle continues. Where would it stop? No one knows. Would it even stop? Everyone is bothered. Can we control? I think we can. How? With every disappointment, you are lessening expectations from someone and increasing with someone else (or in this world someone (whom we don’t know) is expecting equivalently more from someone else or may be someone else’s expectations from you have increased.) Well, then let that latter someone be yourself. Let’s not get disappointed. Put yourself in his/her shoes and now expect the same thing from yourself (I know it’s hard to do. At least try?). Trust me! You will not become a victim of disappointments due to unfulfilled expectations. I say, push yourself hard to set expectations from yourself. Have disappointments from yourself and not from others, because, it is easier to forgive yourself than others.
This is just a resemblance to a theory. People may differ with my opinion. But overall, having expectations is like social drinking, in either case ‘how much?’ is the concern.
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