“Love doesn’t hurt. Expectations do.”
– Pushkaraj Shirke
We set ourselves up for heartbreak when the people we love ultimately fail to live up to our high expectations. Learning how to love without expectations is a beautiful experience that raises your vibration and teaches you what it means to truly love. Love in its purest form, unconditional and without expectation, is the highest vibration to resonate in.
Emotions are how we express the energetic state that we are currently in. When we feel the love and joy of unconditionally loving someone, our emotions are in a very high-vibe state. On the other hand, when our expectations in love ultimately lead to disappointment, resentment, and sadness these emotions lower our vibration.
To be successful in love, one must place aside the desire to control the actions and feelings of others. We are ultimately only responsible for our own actions and emotions. Consistently practicing loving others without expectations helps us to enjoy more joyful and fulfilling relationships with others.
Understanding Desires vs. Expectations
When you love someone, it is natural to desire them to reciprocate the feelings and actions that go along with that. There is nothing wrong with wanting the people that you love to love you back and to express their love in ways that make you feel appreciated, but it is important to differentiate our desires from our expectations.
The definition of “desire” is a strong feeling of wanting something or wishing that something would happen.
An “expectation” is a strong feeling that something will happen or be the case in the future.
See the difference?
What we want and how we feel is our responsibility, and when we set expectations of others in love we believe that our feelings are their responsibility. When they fail to meet up to our expectations, we believe that they hurt us, but really we hurt ourselves by setting expectations in the first place. Learning how to love without expectations delivers us from the suffering of expecting something to happen, that may or may not ever happen. Just as you are the sovereign being of your own reality, the person who you love is also at the center of their own universe and we can not control how others feel or behave.
All we can do is be in control of our own emotions, and when love takes the wheel, we resonate at a higher vibration which ultimately helps us to attract the love that we want for ourselves. Energetic frequencies synchronize with resonate vibrations, which means that by being in the vibration of unconditional love we attract more of that loving energy into our lives. Set aside your expectations of others and watch how the universe unfolds in front of you to reveal love hidden in unexpected places.
5 Tips for How to Love Without Expectations
Practice these tips to learn how to love without expectations in all of your relationships.
1. Think of What You Can Do For Others, Not What They Can Do For You
Instead of focusing on what you wish and desire from other people, focus instead on what you can do for them. To truly love someone is to do so without the expectation of reciprocation. When you expect others to do for you as you would do or have done for them, that is a transactional relationship. True love is far more special and pure than a business transaction.
When you give love, give love freely without expectations of receiving anything in return. Trust in the power of the law of attraction to effortlessly bring love into your life, simply because you resonate with the vibration of love.
2. Practice Gratitude
When we are absorbed with our expectations of others and how they are not meeting up to our standards, we may miss out on all the little ways that people show us love and make our lives better. Are you being grateful that the people that you love are in your life or are you constantly wishing for more out of your relationships?
Removing expectations helps us to make room in our hearts for gratitude. Instead of wishing that others would do x,y,z for you, focus on all of the things that they are doing to show you that they love you. People have different ways of expressing their love for others, which leads us to our next tip for how to love without expectations, practicing good communication.
3. Communicate Your Desire to Learn How to Love Without Expectations to Your Partner
The book The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman breaks down the way that people express love into five different “languages” such as acts of service, words of praise, and gift-giving.
Reading and taking the love languages test can help build healthy, loving relationships free from unrealistic expectations. Understanding that the way that we express and receive love differs from others can help us to gain a deeper appreciation of how others interact with us. It can also help us to express our love for others in ways that they are open to receiving.
“People tend to criticize their spouse most loudly in the area where they themselves have the deepest emotional need.”
– Gary Chapman
Learning the love language of your partner can be beneficial in your journey to learn how to love without expectations. The love languages can be applied to any relationship, not just romantic partnerships. Communicating how you give and receive love can help others to better understand how to meet your needs in a relationship.
For example, a girl I once knew felt hurt that her father never expressed words of praise. She complained that he bought her expensive gifts constantly, but never expressed his love for her verbally. This made her feel as if he did not truly love her, and was buying gifts to compensate.
Perhaps by understanding that her father’s love language was gift-gifting, she could eliminate her own suffering of him not meeting her expectations. Practicing good communication, putting expectations aside, and showing gratitude can help healthy relationships flourish.
4. Love Yourself Unconditionally First
Beware of overvaluing superficial romantic gestures to validate your own self-worth. When you love yourself unconditionally, it begins to matter a lot less what others think about you. Our expectations are often tied up in our own sense of self-worth. When our romantic partners, friends, and family members fail to live up to our expectations of how we think they should treat us or feel about us, it may cause us to doubt our own value in their lives. At the core of human suffering are ego and a sense of attachment to who we believe we are. Understand that your value and worth are not defined by other people.
Just as you must remove your expectations of others to reach the vibration of unconditional love, you must also free yourself from others’ expectations. You are not responsible for the emotions of other people, and if someone has set unfair expectations on your relationship with them, that is on them, not on you.
Accept that you will not always meet up to people’s expectations of you, and that is okay. You did not ask them to place expectations on you, they made that decision on their own. Everyone is on their own journey to learn how to love without expectations, so be kind while also standing firm in your boundaries. True love is when two people who love themselves, love each other, through each other.
When you love yourself, you are able to see yourself in other people and love them unconditionally just as you love yourself.
5. Do Not Compare
Do not expect someone to be a certain way just because you believe that is how they should be. Comparison is also a root cause of disappointment in love.
Try not to compare people because it can lead to forming expectations of their behavior that is not based in reality, but instead on an imaginary version of whom you think they should be based on your experiences with other people.
“Comparison is the thief of joy.”
– Theodore Roosevelt
To love someone without expectations is to accept them for who they are in every way. Constantly comparing your partner to the romances in Hollywood films or to exes from bygone relationships can lead to disharmony in the relationship because of unrealistic expectations. When learning how to love without expectations, we must also learn to change the way that we perceive our interactions with the people that we love.
As human beings, our conscious reality is formed by the culmination of our experiences. Every interaction that we have can be colored by experiences from the past if you allow it to be so. The past is over. It is nothing more than a story to tell, you do not have to let it have control over your present reality and relationships.
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