Expectations, communications, and the truces we never meant to make
Expectations, communication, and the truces we never meant to make
Most marriage struggles don’t begin with bad intentions. They begin with unspoken hopes, quiet assumptions, and the slow accumulation of things we stopped saying out loud.
There is a particular kind of marriage struggle that is easy to miss precisely because nobody is doing anything obviously wrong. No one is being cruel. No one has broken a promise. Both people are trying. And yet something keeps not working — a recurring frustration, a quiet distance, a conversation that never quite gets finished — and neither person fully understands why.
More often than not, what’s missing is something deceptively simple: saying out loud what you actually hope for, and genuinely listening to what your spouse hopes for in return. Not assuming. Not inferring. Actually saying it.
We both learned this the hard way. In different ways, through different moments — but the lesson was the same. Neither of us was doing anything wrong. We just weren’t doing one important thing right.
The vacation problem
Bruce
When my former wife and I would go on trips with our young family, we were both hoping for a break — but we were hoping for completely different things. She was hoping for a break from the kids, time to do things she wanted to do, a genuine rest from her normal life. I was also hoping for a break from the demands of daily life, some time to decompress — but I was also hoping for romantic time together with her.
As you can imagine, these expectations didn’t line up. Which meant that no matter what happened on that trip, at least one of us — usually both of us — was going to come home quietly disappointed. And we’d never quite understand why, because we’d never said any of it out loud.
Val and I do this differently based on years of experience and our own best practices. When we go on vacation with our adult children, we always start with a conversation: how does everyone define a successful trip? It takes about ten minutes. It has saved us from countless silent disappointments. I wish I’d known to do it thirty years earlier.
What makes unspoken expectations so persistent is that they feel obvious from the inside. Of course she knew I was hoping for time together — we were married. Of course he knew I needed a real rest — I’d been running on empty for months. Except that obvious feelings, unspoken, are not obvious at all. They are invisible. And invisible expectations, unmet, produce frustration that has no clear address.
The result is a spouse who feels vaguely let down by someone who had no idea they were supposed to be doing something different. Neither person is wrong. Neither person is unkind. But both people are slowly, quietly, accumulating a sense that something isn’t working — without the language to say what it is or the conversation to fix it.
The truces we never meant to make
Unspoken expectations, when they lead to conflict, don’t always get resolved. Sometimes they get buried. The argument happens — or almost happens — and then stops, not because it was resolved but because neither person wanted to keep going. And so a quiet agreement forms: we don’t talk about that.
We call these truces. They feel like peace. They are not peace. They are a pause in a conflict that hasn’t ended — and over time, as more truces form around more issues, the cumulative effect is a marriage where fewer and fewer things can actually be discussed. The relationship becomes a careful navigation of everything that has been quietly ruled off-limits.
Val
I experienced several truces in my former marriage — disagreements that were never resolved, where there was little attempt to really understand each other. After each one, we continued on with our lives carrying a little less respect for each other than before. Not dramatically less. Just quietly, incrementally less.
One that still stands out: our young daughter was struggling with depression and anxiety. I wanted to take her to see a counselor. My spouse was adamantly opposed — he felt that counseling was only for “broken people” and he didn’t want her to feel that way about herself. This, despite the fact that we were both seeing therapists at the time.
I disagreed with him deeply, and I took her anyway. He was angry. I was angry. And then — nothing. We didn’t talk about it. We didn’t find a way to understand each other or agree to disagree. He felt I had shown no respect for his opinion. I felt his opposition to getting our child help was causing real harm. Neither of us said any of that clearly. We just added it to the pile and moved on.
That is what a truce looks like from the inside. Not resolution. Not even an argument that ends. Just a silence that hardens into something permanent.
The insidious thing about truces is that they can look, from the outside, like a stable marriage. No fighting. No drama. Everything seems fine. But the whited sepulchres that Jesus described — beautiful on the outside, full of dead things within — are a fair description of a marriage held together mainly by the things that can no longer be said.
What to do instead
We want to be careful here not to make this sound simple, because it isn’t always. Some conversations are genuinely hard. Some expectations are deeply personal and feel vulnerable to say out loud. Some conflicts involve real differences in values that aren’t easily resolved. We are not suggesting that if you just communicate better, all problems disappear.
What we are suggesting is that most marriages carry an unnecessary burden of things that were never said — and that burden is almost always heavier than the conversation would have been.
A few things that have made a real difference for us, offered not as a prescription but as something to consider:
Name your expectations before the moment arrives. Before a vacation, a holiday gathering, a difficult family visit — ask each other what a good outcome looks like. What do you each need from this? What are you hoping for? Ten minutes of that conversation can prevent days of quiet disappointment.
When a conflict stops without resolving, notice it. Not every disagreement needs a formal resolution — some things genuinely don’t matter that much. But if you find yourself avoiding a topic, or if the same issue keeps surfacing in different forms, that is a truce worth examining. A good counselor can help you find your way back to it.
Try to understand before you try to be understood. This is harder than it sounds. In the heat of a disagreement, the most natural thing in the world is to explain your own position more clearly. The more useful thing is usually to slow down and genuinely ask: what is my spouse actually trying to say? What do they need that they may not be saying well?
Seek counseling early. Not as a last resort — as a first step. A skilled marriage counselor can help you see patterns you are too close to notice, and give you tools for communication that most of us were simply never taught. There is no shame in going before things are bad. There is only wisdom.
Val & Bruce
We are not writing this as people who have mastered communication. We are writing it as people who learned, expensively, what happens when you don’t do it. The disappointments, the truces, the slow accumulation of things unsaid — none of it was dramatic. None of it felt catastrophic in the moment. It just quietly added up, over years, into something that became very hard to undo.
If you are early in your marriage, or even if you are not, we want to offer you this: the conversations that feel hard to start are almost always worth having. The expectations that feel too vulnerable to say out loud are exactly the ones your spouse most needs to hear. And the truces that have formed — however long ago, however settled they feel — can be reopened, carefully and with help, if you both want them to be.
Neither of us were doing anything wrong. We just weren’t doing one important thing right. And that is something that can change.
Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.
Matthew 7:12The golden rule, applied to marriage, is not just about kindness. It is about attention. It is about caring enough to understand what your spouse actually needs — not what you assume they need, not what you would need in their place, but what they, specifically, are hoping for. That requires asking. It requires listening. It requires saying the things that feel obvious from the inside but are invisible from the outside.
It is some of the most important work a marriage can do. And it is never too late to start.
The conversation you’ve been putting off is probably the one most worth having.
When you’re ready, the next post is waiting.
When something is wrong and you can’t name it →Has this been part of your story?
We’d love to hear about an expectation that went unspoken, or a truce that formed without you quite meaning it to. Comments are moderated with kindness.
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