Great Expectations

I have met people in my life who I will never forget, and not for the wrong reasons.  People who left a profound impression on me.  People who brought out the parts of me I kept hidden so deep inside that I would never let anyone see.  I have had friends who were so close to me that I genuinely could not imagine life without them.

All this I know and all this I have come to expect of people I keep in my life - or rather, the people I make an effort to keep in my life, as I have said before I won't stay where I am not wanted.  I would rather have my close circle of friends that I hold dear than a wide circle of people that I know very little about.  The only exception to that is the Internet where it is so often that case that our online personas become the polar opposite of our real world selves.  Even I am guilty of this, I am much more outgoing online than I am in real life. 

While the expectations grow, fed by our experience the bar we set for people to come into our lives gets ever higher.  Not only for new friends but potential relationships too.  The closer you get to people and the more intense your relationships as friends alone become the greater the expectation you place on an actual relationship.  The bar for a potential boyfriend gets raised the more our friends do for us and the more we do for them the more we come to expect of others, to the point where we expect of someone we just met, the same level of trust, openness, honesty, and commitment.  These expectations inevitably become unrealistic because even the people who could vault the height of the bar you have set won't want to do it from the beginning.  If you expect too much too soon the thought process that follows is that you will raise that bar ever higher.

What if you are not like that though?  What if you aren't the sort that continues to raise the bar but chooses to keep it at a constant height?  In that scenario you are in effect the stereotypical single with great expectations and the notional path your life will take is that which eventually leads you to lower the bar bit by bit until you eventually concede some or all of your expectations.  The alternative however is to set the bar high initially and once you find someone who can vault it then lower it bit by bit for them; the problem with that scenario is that you are in effect having a downhill relationship to the point where you eventually have no expectations from them whatsoever and everything just falls apart.

Ideally what you want is to be able to set the bar high and keep it there never moving it.  The problem of finding someone who will go to that height from the beginning becomes a question of how you can convince someone it is worth it.  Some people do this by presenting a prize that is desirable, a trophy for someone to win.  That works for many people but for me that comes back to the idea of selling yourself which as I mentioned in another post makes me quite uncomfortable.  I don't believe you should ever have to sell yourself to another person, if they can't see your worth for themselves then they don't deserve you.

The only other option you are left with if you want to maintain that height of the bar you set, is to bare your soul for all to see.  I don't mean posting copious amounts of selfies and nudes online for the whole world to see and I don't mean having a mental breakdown on twitter or facebook.  I mean being yourself without limitation.  Forgetting what other people think of you and remembering that while the whole world might be watching, the opinions of most people are irrelevant.  The only people whose opinions you should care about are the people you love and the people that love you - and I do mean love, not adoration or lust or feigned piety.  The people who genuinely love you and care about you and want you to be happy and want you to be you.  In other words the people who despite being the reason you have great expectations of others, actually have no great expectations of you.