Accept… Not Expect!

After a few days of getting married, my wife and I travelled to Bangalore where I was working. She had decided to join me in the Garden City and we started setting up our house. After the initial days of settling down, she started experimenting with her culinary skills. As ‘customary’, my mom had told her about all my interests and being a loving wife she tried to cook some of those dishes which I like. Many of them were quite tasty but living the life of a proverbial husband, I immediately applied a benchmark of my mom’s cooking.

Words of expectation floated around. She tried to change some of the cooking styles to meet the expectation, but soon enough I realized a major fact. My mom cooked in ‘her own’ style which she developed that our family loved. The same logic should really apply in my wife’s case as well. She has a style of cooking which should be supported by giving her a freehand. This alone will help us as a family than having to perform under pressure of expectations. As soon as she was made comfortable with this acceptance, our kitchen exploded with never-before experienced flavours! I now have a new benchmark for taste.

I mentioned the above instance just to highlight the importance of acceptance than having expectations which many a times become unjustified. This is not just true in case of a couple, but equally important for the extended family members as well. I’m not quite sure how much have the male of our species experienced this pressure tactics in our society which still heavily leans towards its patriarchal nature. At the risk of being biased, let me highlight the case of girls this time.

From the day a proposal comes to a family, followed by seeing the picture of the girl, this expectation game starts. The family starts discussions about how the girl is, how she should be etc. Once the wedding gets fixed, these discussions become even more intense. More such conversations take place among the relatives as the wedding date approaches. Expectations hit the roof as soon as the bride sets her foot in the house. Everyone has something or other to say, irrespective of any trace of logic present in their statements. Most often the groom is oblivious to these conversations and the bride is left at the mercy of a bunch of strangers who will be showering her with an avalanche of these expectations. The ordeal has just begun!

Life goes on and just like how performance reviews happen in the corporate world, the new bride gets reviewed time to time based on the expectations that were set up for her. The relatives seem to have quite an uncanny ability to judge the new bride on every possible occasion. The discussions go from her choice of dress to the style of ornaments and many more such topics which suddenly seem to take an elevated level of importance. What could be surprising in some families is the fact that this performance review does not stop even after many other ‘new brides’ join the family. The show goes on.

One of the possible psychology behind this behaviour is that historically the family would’ve built an expectation about how the girl for a guy should be. By virtue of seeing the boy grow up from childhood they want their would-be daughter-in-law of the family to have certain traits to match the guy. What they do not realise is the fact that the girl who is coming into the family comes with a definite personality which she developed in most cases over a period of three decades or less.

While some families realise the importance, what many still don’t practice is the art of ‘accepting’ instead of ‘expecting’. You should be able to accept the new member of the family with all her positives and negatives. The more you try to mould, at times even break, her personality to induct her into your boundary of expectation, you’re potentially pushing her to a point of no return where she either snaps or develops an attitude of indifference!

May the good God bless you with the providence of acceptance than setting expectations! Let the family be blessed with the young new mind who comes in with hopes and prayers. May you all experience the bliss of a soul that can rejoice in your acceptance than having to constantly live under your X-ray eyes of expectation! God bless!