What You Never Said Is Costing You Everything

Most marriages aren't struggling because of a lack of love. They're struggling because of a lack of honesty, specifically, the honesty it takes to name what you actually expect from each other.

In this episode of Marriage, Family & Mandate* I talk about the most overlooked forces in any marriage: expectations. I highlight why having expectations is not the problem, what healthy and unhealthy expectations actually look like, the damage of unspoken and unchecked role expectations, and how to build a marriage where hope is alive without resentment quietly taking root.

I also spend time in the Gospels, with Judas Iscariot and what his story reveals about what happens when an expectation becomes so rigid it turns into betrayal.

If you've ever felt disappointed by someone you love without being able to explain why, this episode is for you.

You’ll find in this episode:

- Why expectations are the language of hope — not selfishness

- What unspoken expectations are really costing your marriage

- Role expectations and why they cause so much friction

- A biblical framework for navigating expectations in covenant

- The Judas lesson, and what it has to do with your relationship

- How to hold healthy expectations and release the ones that are hurting you

Leave a review if this episode helped you. Share it with someone who needs it. And if you're ready to stop listening and start doing the work, my coaching info is in the show notes.

 Contact me @lifeandleadership.solutions@gmail.com

Transcript

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Have you ever been disappointed by someone you love? Not because they did something terrible, but because they didn't do something you expected them to do. That silent, invincible tension is one of the most destructive forces inside a marriage. And today we are pulling it out of the shadows and placing it right on the table before us. Hello and welcome back to Truth Talk about Life and Leadership Solutions, a place where I help you navigate life, family, and work in a way that gives you peace and maximizes your potential so you have good success. If you are here and you are new, you are welcome. I'm so glad you found your way here. This series is called Marriage, Family and Mandate. And we're walking through what it looks like to build a life, a home, and a legacy that actually holds together using the creator's blueprint. Here's the thing about expectation: everybody feels them and has them. It's a constant thing. They're in the room, they are at the dinner table, they are in the bedroom, in the argument you had last night, they sit in silence after a difficult and sometimes heated conversation. Marriage counselors will tell you that one of the top reasons couples end in crisis is unmet expectations, not infidelity, not finances, but unmet expectations, invincible standards that one person set that the other didn't even know existed. We need to talk about expectations because silence hasn't served us. A lot of us are having struggles, not because we don't love each other, but because we walked into our marriages carrying a bag of assumptions that we never unpacked. And over time, those unspoken expectations became resentment. And resentment is slow poison. Let me define what expectation is. Expectation is a strong belief that something will happen or that someone will behave in a certain way. So it's rooted in hope. It's rooted in value. When you expect something from someone, you are saying consciously or unconsciously, I believe in this relationship. I believe it's worth something. I believe you are capable of giving me something real, or I believe you have something worthwhile to offer. So hope is not bad. Expectation is not really selfish in itself because God Himself operates with expectations. The issue is not that you have expectations, the issue is whether your expectations are healthy, whether they are communicated correctly, and whether they are anchored in truth and love, or whether they are anchored in control, fear, or something that's broken inside of you. In marriage, expectation shows up in almost every area. And most of them come with us from somewhere before the marriage. So you expected your spouse to manage money a certain way because that's how your parents did it. You expected intimacy to look a specific way because of what culture told you or what you experienced before this marriage. You expected holidays to feel a certain way, house responsibilities to be divided in a certain way, affections to be expressed in a certain way. Now, some of these expectations you knew you had, but a lot of them you didn't know you had until they were violated or trampled upon by your spouse. Now, there are at least three major categories worth mentioning when it comes to expectations, and I want to look at them. The first is emotional expectations, how you expect to feel valued, seen, heard, and loved. This is the I just want to feel like I matter to you expectation. And for each of us, this plays out differently according to your different love languages. A touch, a hug or a kiss, a word of affirmation. That's having your spouse say, I love you, or I miss you, or you look great, or thank you. For some, it's a helping hand with the chores or the kids, a gift for some of you, whether it's on a special day or not, or for some of you, it may be just stepping away now and then to have some quality time together. The second is the role expectation: who does what? Who leads, who handles the finances, parenting, household, and all the rest. Now, this one especially tends to carry a lot of cultural and generational weight, depending on where you are from and your orientation, that's your thinking about roles in a marriage. This will reflect that. I did speak about these and the effect they have on balancing your marriages in our last episode. If you have not listened to that talk, I would encourage you to please do so. I had a colleague years ago who told me about a year after she was married how disappointed she was with her husband. And this was because while they were courting, her then fiance had told her that when they got married, he would make sure to lock up the house every night before they went to bed. So as a young bride to be, she was excited and moved, you know, by such a show of protectiveness and security from her soon-to-be husband. But after the wedding, however, as they settled into the home, she was the one having to lock up the house every single night, even while she was pregnant. He had not kept any of his promises. She felt he had lied to her. Her expectations were violated. Now, the third expectation is a spiritual expectation. It involves our spiritual life. Now, before you got married, you probably dreamed of your spouse, you and him praying together, you and her living for God, serving him together. And as a wife, you looked forward to your husband leading the home spiritually, taking the family to church, and being spiritually active. Now, all three of these expectations are very, very serious and can cause great damage, okay, if not worked on. But crossing all three of these categories, you will find the most dangerous kind of expectation there is, and it's the unspoken one. An unspoken expectation is one that lives in your head and in your heart, but has never made it out of your mouth, and it is just waiting like a landmine for your spouse to step on it. Now, this is the truth about an unspoken expectation. Your spouse cannot meet a standard they don't even know exists, and yet when they fail to meet it, you hold it against them as if you had said it out loud. So you've been penalizing someone for not meeting a standard that only you knew about. That's not fair, and deep down you know it isn't, but the emotional pain you feel is just as real, which is why it is so hard to address. Healthy expectations, on the other hand, are spoken, they are brought into the light of conversation. That doesn't mean your spouse has to agree with them or that he or she can even meet them, but it means they have a chance at those expectations. Silence is not protection, silence is actually sabotage. One of the places this shows up is in the role expectations. Maybe you grew up believing the husband handles every financial discipline. Your spouse grew up in a home where both parents had equal financial authority. Neither of you is necessarily wrong. But if you don't talk about it, you're going to crash into each other over and over and not understand why. A healthy role expectation is discussed, not assumed. It's built on mutual respect, gifting, and agreement, not on who can assert their position the loudest. Now, here again, the kind of marriage you are building will determine how this works out. But if you are deciding to follow the creator's blueprint, then you know that the best way to handle this would be based on who's gifted or more inclined or available to handle what. Because the goal is for things to work out in the best way possible so that the marriage continues to move forward in a good way. Now, one of our leaders in the school of parenting that my husband and I belong to is a group on parenting, told us this story that when their children were young, he and his wife realized that they were both out of the home for too many hours, leaving the children alone most of the time. They were both lawyers in the corporate world. And so they sat down together, discussed, and decided that since he had a private practice, he could operate from home and stay with the children while she goes out. So at that stage in his life, he became a stay-at-home dad. Staying with the kids and working with them, doing all the things while she went to work. And that was what they did for years until their children grew. Now, they believed that raising the children was a priority for them as a couple, and that is why they pursued it that way. This is where the biblical framework becomes very important in our marriages. In Ephesians chapter 5, Paul lays out a picture of marriage where both partners are operating the God kind of marriage. The husband loving his wife as Christ loved the church, and the wife respecting and partnering with her husband. That's the framework of a mutual obligation, which means it's a framework built on expectations as is designed by God, the author of marriage. Now, this marriage is the picture of Christ and the church. Christ expects his bride, that's the church, that's us, to respond to his love in wholehearted submission and honor. The church is called to expect love, nurturing, and protection from her head, who is Christ. These expectations are clear, they are well articulated and they are rooted in love. We find in 1 Corinthians 13 what love looks like: patient, kind, not keeping record of wrongs, bearing all things, hoping all things. Now notice that word hope. That is expectation. Love does not become indifferent. Love hopes. Love expects good because it believes in the person is committed to. So the biblical framework that we have for expectation in marriage is this that with love and respect, we lay our expectations before our spouse, talk about it, and become willing to negotiate where we need to in the presence of God. Now, during this process, we both consider all the angles of these expectations and come to a common and realistic workable ground. Remember, it's for the good of the union and for the fulfillment of God's purpose for the marriage. It's not about you or me, it's not about you or him. It's about the purpose of God and the glory of God. So, what happens when we refuse to follow this pattern? Can we really afford to do that? I must say it becomes detrimental. Let's look at Judas's cariot. Judas was not just a greedy man who sold Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. That's this simple version. When you read the gospels carefully, you begin to see a man who had an expectation of Jesus. And when he waited and waited, and Jesus didn't fulfill that expectation, something inside of him died. What many scholars believe is that Judas, like many of Jesus' followers, expected a political messiah, someone who would overthrow the Roman rule and raise a powerful kingdom for the Jewish nation. Judas expected Jesus to be a particular kind of king, the kind that takes the throne by force, not by sacrifice. And when it became clear that Jesus was walking towards a cross and not a crown, at least not the kind of crown that Judas was expecting, Judas's disappointment turned into betrayal. Think about that for a moment. Judas was so certain about who Jesus was supposed to be that when Jesus showed up differently, Judas couldn't receive that. His expectation had become so fixed that it left no room for the truth that was standing right in front of him for three years. The God reality, which was Christ. This is what I want you to draw for your marriage from today's talk and from this story. An expectation that becomes a demand will eventually become a betrayal. The moment your spouse exists only to satisfy your internal or external script, the moment they are no longer allowed to be real, living, and growing human beings, that's the moment your expectation becomes a prison for them and for you. Judas couldn't let go of the expectation long enough to receive the miracle of eternal salvation that was far greater than what he had on his mind. And that was what Jesus brought. Don't let that be you. Don't be so married to the idea of who your spouse should be that you miss who they actually are and becoming. That's one thing I'm learning. You are not here to fix anyone. Let God do his work in each of our lives. How do you have expectations without having the expectations have you? One. Speak it out before you suffer over it. If you expect something from your spouse, say so. Have that vulnerable conversation before that frustrated one starts coming up. It is far easier to discuss an expectation when you are calm than to address a violation when you are hurt and heated. A genuine need, a biblical value, or is it coming from a wound, a fear, an unresolved issue with my past? Not everything you expect has earned the right to be expected. 3. Be willing to revise. Some expectations will need to be adjusted over time. Marriage is not a static thing. No, it grows, you grow, shifts, evolves. Your expectation needs to grow with your marriage. Also, pray together about the things you expect. When you bring your hopes for your marriage before God as a couple, you stop making each other the final authority in that marriage. You submit the whole thing to someone, to the only one who actually knows and who can help both of you work out the modalities. That's what God wants. And for some of you, the work isn't just learning how to hold healthy expectations. The work is recognizing that some expectations yours or your spouse's are genuinely unhealthy and need to be let go of. An expectation is unhealthy when it requires your spouse to earn your love through performance. So when it's rooted in fear or abandonment or the need to control, and when it has no basis in reality or when it is designed, whether consciously or unconsciously to keep the other person small, such expectations are not healthy. And some of our expectations are dressed up in spiritual languages and they are actually manipulation. For example, when you hear a Christian wife should do this, or a Christian husband should do that, or if you love me, you will do that. That's not really biblical expectation. That's guilt with your bow tied around it. So you walk away from unhealthy expectations by first honestly owning up to them, write it down, pray about it, talk to a trusted friend, a mentor, or your pastor, or a counselor about it, even your spouse. Releasing an unhealthy expectation is not resigning yourself to a lesser life, it's making room for the real thing to come in and grow. It's making room for health. I want to sum up today's talk with this. Expectations in marriage are not the enemy, they are the language of hope. But uncommunicated expectations can become resentment. Don't let your expectations become rigid. Don't let them come out from that wound that has been festering for years. Don't let it end up like Judas' expectations. Expectations can be dealt with and handled with wisdom so they yield the right results. Don't stop expecting. Just become intentional about what you are expecting. Talk about it, examine it, and ensure they are coming from a place of love, grace, and truth. Remember to be ready to negotiate and hold those expectations with open hands. When you've been married for a while, like I have been married. You learn to hold expectations with open hands and be ready to change. Let's pray together. Father, thank you so much for the gift of marriage. Thank you because marriage was designed to reflect your love, your faithfulness to us. Thank you for all those who are listening right now, Father. Where there are unspoken expectations that are just sitting in silence between husbands and wives. And where expectations have become weapons, Father, I ask for repentance and I ask that you bring healing into that union. Where hope has been abandoned, Lord, I ask for restoration. Teach each of us, Lord, how to hold to each of our spouses with grace and to expect the best, to learn to forgive and to keep choosing each other and our marriages, even when it's hard. Thank you, Lord, for hearing our prayer. Thank you, Father, for doing more than we've asked in Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you so much for listening to today's talk. So if this resonated with you, I want to hear from you. Leave a comment, send a message, or share this episode with someone in your life who really needs it. Reviews and shares are how we grow in this community, and every one of them genuinely means something. So if you're watching on YouTube, please hit subscribe, ring the notification bell, and drop a comment below telling me the one thing from today's talk that has hit you in a different way. If you and your spouse are in a season where the weight of unspoken things is getting heavy, we all face that once a while, and you don't only want to listen to a podcast, but you actually want to do the work. I want to invite you to step into a one-on-one coaching with me. Now, this is not therapy, it's a space where we get intentional, honest, and we get moving forward. You can reach out to me directly through the link that is in the description below. Until our next talk, take care of yourself and take care of each other. Bye bye for now.