Unreasonable Expectations
An inventory of a relationship, grief, and loss
Above: Self creation, the threads of life, that sort of thing.
Three years ago, during Covid, I began a relationship with someone I fell deeply in love with. We hit it off from our initial text exchange, finding similarities in our backgrounds, lengthy first marriages, children’s ages, and interests. He was attentive and sweet, if not a little isolated and maybe somewhat depressed.
As the intimacy between us grew, I realized this is what I’d been missing all of these years. I couldn’t remember a time when I’d had real emotional intimacy in my marriage . . . perhaps during the first few months, but I guess neither of us knew how to create or sustain it. I certainly didn’t and there was something relieving about intimacy that came naturally, effortlessly. There was a spark and a connection. Surely this is the love I’ve been looking for, I thought.
I knew I didn’t want to let it go.
After I lost my job and he decided to sell his house, it made sense for us to live together in my home. And when we did, I was reminded at how much I liked being in a real relationship on a daily basis. I liked waking up and going to sleep together. I liked the ritual of saying good morning or good night. I liked running errands and cramming our bodies onto a too-small couch and simply being part of his day. Above all, I liked having someone in my life who I had strong feelings about. I loved him. I desired him. I wanted our relationship to work, despite the chronic instability caused by his alcoholism and my inability to deal with it. I wanted, so much, to feel like part of a pair taking on life together.
Somewhere in there lay a whole host of unreasonable expectations.
Here’s what I’ve learned after being in a relationship with an alcoholic:
It is unreasonable to expect an alcoholic to tell the truth. An alcoholic has a conflicted relationship with the truth, to put it lightly. I chose to believe words and promises because I wanted to, guaranteeing disappointment.
It is unreasonable to expect an alcoholic to control their consumption of alcohol. Each time there was a sober period, I wanted to think that the problem had gone away forever. Of course, it hadn’t.
It is unreasonable to expect an alcoholic to be rational. While an alcoholic may genuinely intend for their words to have meaning, they are unable to think clearly. Their words can be as contradictory as their behaviour (and regardless of whether they are actively drinking). What they say or do may make little sense, but I listened for and saw what I wanted to hear and see. I let the contradictions cause stress and worry, highs and lows, when I should’ve anticipated them all along.
It is unreasonable to expect an alcoholic to show up as a partner in a relationship. An alcoholic is struggling to show up for themselves, which means their capacity to do so for someone else is limited. While I was not unreasonable in expecting a partner to provide emotional support (or any other kind) as needed, I should not have expected an alcoholic to be a partner. In doing so, I set myself up for failure.
It is unreasonable to expect an alcoholic to be emotionally mature. When someone spends many years numbing themselves instead of feeling their emotions, they fail to develop the sort of emotional maturity that underpins critical relationship skills. I wanted to think the immaturity was something that would fade with time but if anything, it only intensified.
Each time the alcoholic failed to meet my unrealistic expectations, I felt waves of confusion, anger, anxiety, dismay, loneliness, frustration, helplessness, fear, and occasionally even devastation. I experienced more instances of full-body shock in the past eighteen months alone than I have in my entire life. Despite this, I continued to maintain my expectations and deny the reality of my situation. And over time, I became emotionally unstable, too.
I once heard a therapist say we never engage in behaviour that harms us unless there’s a payoff. We must be getting something out of it or we wouldn’t do it.
The obvious answer for why we decide to remain in a relationship is love. But merging two lives into one requires cooperation and partnership, not just love. When I look at why I stayed in a situation where that merging had stalled, actively harming myself by clinging to my expectations, I can see a few obvious payoffs:
The relationship demanded a lot of my time and attention. This gave me an excuse to not make difficult decisions about work and life that I did not want to make, at all, because they triggered the stressors of my young adulthood.
In a way, I wanted to focus on (be consumed by) a relationship. I’d missed out on dating and simply life beyond survival when I was younger, and I wanted to live differently. After some pretty severe burnout, I didn’t want to think about a career or work. I wanted to invest in love and connection. To be honest, I still do.
Remaining in the relationship meant I didn’t have to confront a deep fear of abandonment caused by an absent father. It also meant I wouldn’t have to feel the grief and heartache caused by its loss or the fact that I’d taken a leap of faith and fallen flat on my face.
Being in a relationship at all enabled me to avoid fully confronting the sense of loss I felt from divorce. It allowed me to side-step my fear of putting my child in the same position I was in as a young adult, feeling the structure of my family crumble around me, because I was at least building what could eventually be a new family. It also cushioned the losses of close friendships, homes, identity, and family connections that I’d accumulated moving from place to place.
“If we don’t confront our grief or our feelings towards our accumulated losses, they find a way of resurfacing in mid-life and firmly attach themselves to other losses such as illness, redundancy, divorce … If we can truly feel the grief and find a way through the discomfort and the uncertainty of unravelling, we have the possibility of reemerging stronger, more authentic and ultimately, liberated.”
Life does have a way of bringing unprocessed grief to the surface. In the past six months alone, I’ve given up my home, seen my time with my child plummet from every day to every other week to weekends only, and watched my relationship fade as the person I loved slowly exited. I started to feel unseen and unheard as I lost, lost, and lost some more. As I actively experienced my life coming apart at the seams, the long-buried grief attached to these losses sometimes felt like more than I could bear.
In the end, I’m deeply grateful for my relationship with an alcoholic. I thought it would yield a midlife transformation, a do-over that created a new life with a new partner I actually connected with – someone I looked forward to seeing at the end of the day, someone I felt for as we experienced life together. He had made me feel alive.
But this is not what resulted. Instead, the relationship gave me love when I desperately needed it. It brought me to study the lessons of Al-Anon, to recognize and begin moving through grief and loss about the fracturing of my family of origin. It showed me that even when all my fears come true, I am okay because there are people who love me. It showed me that I am enough, I can grow, things can become less difficult, and I am not alone even when I am thoroughly single.
It led me to create a higher power for myself, an external sense of security that ironically comes from within. It motivated me tackle my relationship to stress and anxiety. It taught me the critical importance of stating my needs, of feeling and expressing my emotions, of setting boundaries and respecting myself. It pushed me to let go of resentment and take responsibility for my own choices, behaviour, and unreasonable expectations. It continues to help me learn to forgive, have compassion, and become more humble by examining my failings.
And I’m grateful to have had such a strong connection with someone. I can still look past his alcoholism and self-absorption to see a beautiful spirit filled with pain from the accumulated losses in his life. I see someone struggling to acknowledge and process those losses, someone undergoing his own unravelling and slowly learning to sit with the discomfort for probably the first time. I see someone with so much love to give yet afraid of the commitment it could require, someone working hard to grow yet frustrated and often overwhelmed by the emotions growth compels him to feel.
In this, he and I are the same. It can take years to recover from the unravelling of your life, from the loss of core relationships and the grief that follows. For me, it certainly has. But I’ve made it through the most overwhelming, immediate feelings and arrived at a place of acceptance. I’ve become more emotionally resilient. And I have hope that as I slowly knit my life back together, I’ll emerge stronger, more authentic, and ultimately liberated from the dynamics that shaped the first half of my life.
Our lives are not simply a series of events that happen to us or situations we find ourselves in. Rather, our life experiences are constructed from our responses to events and situations. At the very least, we are the co-creators of those experiences. Here, then, I have tried to unpack my responses to what was happening in my life.
By identifying and taking responsibility for our emotional and behavioural responses to what occurs, we gain the capacity to respond differently in the future. This is a capacity we won’t even become aware of if we don’t push ourselves to think through our roles as co-creators.
It’s easy to see how someone else’s behaviour might be unacceptable to us or all the ways it could be negatively shaping our daily lives. After all, an internal monologue about the impacts of that behaviour or the rationale for our response unfolds in real time in our heads. If someone is behaving in an unacceptable way, of course we would then be upset . . . right? This is only natural. But when you find yourself having the same experiences more than once in your life – whether enduring loss after loss or feeling the same fears again and again – it’s probably time to take a step back and turn an inquisitive eye inward.
It was not so easy to unearth my unreasonable expectations from behind someone else’s behaviour and determine how I created my own emotional instability. But the reward for doing so is the ability to re-gain an element of control in my own life. This is because my responses come from me: I can change myself by processing my grief over loss, adopting a new perspective, and making different choices. And unlike all the rest of it, that is a reasonable expectation.
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