A little lesson on expectations

Having expectations was a huge theme in our relationship my brain before we got engaged.

I had been “expecting” Josh to propose for months.
Nine long, excruciating months.
(You can read more about the proposal and the waiting game here).
Thanks a whole heck of a lot movies and magazines and Nicholas Sparks for contributing to expectations when it comes to proposals.
Nevertheless, I survived and my patience paid off.

Before we got married, I was warned by a friend to try to go into to marriage with no expectations.

No truer words have ever been spoken.

Looking back on that advice now, I'm so appreciative of it.

Controlling my expectations has been the life lesson of our first year of marriage.

As hard as I tried not to, I still had a lot of expectations going into marriage.

I expected to be cooking homemade dinners every night.
That's what good wives do, right?

Even our pre-marriage book made us discuss that topic and we agreed that we would only go out to eat twice a week.

HAH.

I started off the year cooking often (because I was an unemployed housewife for two months, remember?)

Upon settling into our new jobs I didn't calculate for us both getting home at 6:00 most days and being entirely too drained to even consider cooking dinner, much less cleaning dishes.

Insert nightly pizza night here + freshman 15 all over again.

I also expected dust to just disappear on its own
. . . but I think that was just wishful thinking.

I expected us to have a billion new friends.

Well, we have made friends, we are just biased to our old friends.

When our friends come to town, which is more often that I expected, thank goodness, we go out; we just don't necessarily have the desire to go out and meet new people.

When we are sitting at home on a weeknight, drained from work and drained from slaving over a hot stove ;) we also don't have the desire to go out and meet new people.
Who would really wanna be friends with two newlyweds who play hide and go seek with their dog and go to bingo weekly, lets be honest.

I am thankful that Josh's new job has put him in contact with a lot of people our age and in our area, who are slowly but surely becoming potentially great friends.

I expected us going to church every Sunday.
Isn't that what newlyweds do? 
Go to church and have small groups and stuff.

The hard part is that we are never, ever in town on the weekends, unless I'm on call.
The fact that we haven't fully settled into a church has been gnawing at the back of my mind lately.
 It's on the to-do list. 

With us both having good jobs, I expected us to have a surplus of funds.

 I never-ever thought we would have to say, "Oh no, we are gonna have to wait a few years to go on that trip to Africa" or "We should wait a while to buy that king size bed."

Ironically, we tried a new church out earlier this year and on the first Sunday Dave Ramsey was starting a new series.

How crazy right?

It couldn't have been more perfect timing.

My favorite part from his sermon was that you've got to come to the understanding that your money is not yours.

It is God's and he blessed you with it, so you can't be selfish or stupid with it.

With that being said, I never expected us to have to cut down on the traveling.

Now, we have been pretty well-traveled over the last year.

Iceland, Charlottesvile, Jackson Hole, Woodstock/Chattanooga, NYC, Seattle/The Gorge.

Our bank account makes that quite evident, but if we are ever going to consider saving enough to mayyyyybe own a house one day then we've gotta stomp that annoying travel bug.

Who really wants a house though? 
I want Canada.

I never expected to want a king size bed, but that's really all I ever think about.

Then I think about the fact that that would require all new bedding, and then I think about that the only bedding I want is from Anthropologie, so there goes two bazillion dollars.

Sleeping with two hairy dudes is a challenge, I tell ya, but well worth two bazillion dollar bedding, right?

I also didn't expect how much I would look forward to getting home from work everyday to spend quality time with these guys.
I thought that the luster would wear off and that I would get annoyed by living with a messy guy and a dirty dog after a while.
False.
It's still just as fun and exciting as it was this time last year, if not more.

Having expectations can send you down two different paths: devastation or getting what you want.
Now, not getting what I want tends to bring out my innermost brat, so it is most likely in your benefit (and the benefit of others) to go into everything with no expectations at all.
There's no way to get let down without any expectations, right?

Our first year of marriage has taught me a lot about myself and dealing with others.
Things may not turn out how you expect them to, but that's ok.
I can't control everything, and things don't have to turn out any certain way.
Throughout this year, Josh has taught me so much about patience and understanding.
I've got a long ways to go in that department, but so far I think the greatest thing about being married is the realization that I am not in this alone.