Expectations Exceed Performance

• How to be unhappy, married or single

Marriage and love relationships used to be functional. Today they are "affectional". You used to love one another because you needed each other, and now you need each other only because and as long as you love each other.

• You must learn that love and individuals both have their limitations.

• Second marriages, for example, are often a much stronger love than the first marriage.
  
  

  The old myth that there was only one love for each person has brought much devastation to many people over the years.
  

• The idea that if you just marry that certain someone it will cure all your problems is a very cruel hoax.

   

• The idea that all you have to do is find them and they will do the rest will get you nowhere

True love is a sort of form of prejudice.

• You learn to love what is available, what is near, what you meet.
  

   

• You feel you can only love that certain person you found, when in actuality there are ten thousand members of the opposite sex you would love even more if you ever met them, but, of course, you'll never meet them all.
  

   

• You can certainly meet some other you can love more.

However, you have expectations which no one person is ever going to be able to fulfill - no matter how kind, understanding and loving an individual they turn out to be.

• If your relationship does not deliver all the levels you expected, then the negative gap opens and degenerates, a gap that widens as you find that what you expected and what you actually see and feel are two different things.

You need to stop dreaming the impossible dream and having impossible expectations of utopia. Instead you wind up disillusioned, disappointed and crushed by the whole thing. You erroneously feel that your expectations were realistic, but you just had the wrong person.

• This myth is very painful to give up. Reality intrudes.

  
  

• The old fairytale where the magic mate appears at the last moment and solves all the problems and they live happily ever after just does not work out in actuality

  
  

• This has all been reinforced now with TV commercials, advertising, movies, all, in fact, escapes from reality.

• They each blame the other and the dreamers go back to their fairyland world, since they failed to change their lover into the imaginary person they expected.
  

   

• You lose touch with your real self because you are afraid if you act on your sentiments, you will, in fact, lose your "one and only."

   

• You stop being your real self.

You need to develop self-assertion, self reliance, self­development and interest. A realistic lasting love is a " we" feeling.

• You must learn that love and individuals both have their limitations.
  
• To learn to realize the limitations takes real maturity on your part.

You must learn to love life, to learn to grow and change. When you learn to love life, to love growth and aliveness in general, love children, love ideas, and to love a man or woman, you find you can love many things and many times.