Todays blog I am dedicating to a good friend of mine. You know who you are and I felt that this was just what you needed to hear today. Look deep inside and learn from the lesson.

A lot of times when a woman meets a new man and she feels like everything just “clicks,” she will immediately start to have all sorts of expectations about him. These are not things she expects him to do, however, but rather things she starts to expect that he is (or might be).

She starts to think to herself “This guy could be ‘the one.’ This can be the guy who gets rid of this annoying single binge I’ve been on for so long. This guy is different from all the rest.” She starts building all these expectations about a guy she’s just met.

Then she goes out on another date with that guy which also goes really well and, all of a sudden, she builds the expectations even more. She starts dreaming a little bit and thinking about how that guy might be her soulmate. She may start to think about how this guy could be someone with whom she can spend the rest of her life (and possibly have children).

By the next date, if things are still going really well, she will build the expectations further and already be picking out her wedding dress, thinking about their first vacation together or thinking about what kind of house they are going to eventually buy together. Who knows where the fantasy side of her mind may be going.

What happens every single time you build up expectations on a date or go into expectations mode, is that you become less present to what he really is (and is not) all about as a man. You stop noticing some of the little things, especially some of the little things about the guy that may not be right for you.

You stop noticing some of the behavior patterns that he may be showing you and, because you are lingering in expectation mode, you may go six months into a relationship that will ultimately self-destruct. Because you blinded yourself to what kind of guy this was due to your expectations, you will spend that six months thinking you are having an amazing relationship instead of seeing things through non-expectation colored glasses.

What happens here is you miss every single verbal and visual clue that is right in front of you which told you that this guy was not right for you. He was not right in so many ways, but you didn’t see that because of the fantasy expectations you put on the relationship.

I actually recently dated someone for six months who had much higher expectations of the relationship than I did. She had a whole different version of the relationship in her mind, even though my behavior was very consistent for the entirety of the relationship. She had all these high expectations that we were “meant to be together forever and ever” when, in reality, my expectations were just about being present in the moment and seeing where things took us.

You have to realize when you’re doing this that you have to dial back the whole expectations mode. You need to start paying attention to little things and start evaluating relationships on what is happening in the now.

Don’t think about the future so early in a relationship, and don’t think about the expectations you have for a particular guy (or a particular relationship). Instead, keep yourself present in the moment and think about what is going in a relationship right now.

It’s not that I want you to not be optimistic about a relationship’s possibilities, I just want to make sure that you don’t ignore its warning signs. Take a look at the guy and the relationship and evaluate them both on what is really there, because a lot of times when you think you’ve had the “perfect relationship” that has crashed and burned, the warning signs were there the whole time but you just chose to ignore them.