Managing expectations is not just for the office

We treat managing expectations as a work skill. Something for kickoff meetings and project briefs — set the scope, agree what "done" looks like, avoid nasty surprises in quarter three. Then we go home to the person we love most and skip the brief entirely.

I've never been good at skipping it. I'm direct to a fault, and it's served me. When I re-entered dating after my divorce, I had one non-negotiable I wasn't willing to discover three dates in. So I'd ask about it almost immediately — before the official dating stamp, before intimacy, sometimes before a first date had even been agreed. Awkward? Often. But I'd rather an awkward early honesty than a tender misunderstanding that costs both people a year. Some of those men are still good friends — precisely because the question got answered early and we both knew, cleanly, what this was and wasn't.

That instinct turns out to be the whole job, in love and in my consulting room.

Because here is what I've come to believe after enough hours with couples: most of the disappointment people carry isn't caused by what their partner did. It's caused by the gap between what happened and what they had quietly, often silently, expected. The expectation was never said out loud. Sometimes it was never even said to oneself. And then reality arrives, fails to match a brief no one ever wrote, and it lands as betrayal.

We don't fight about the dishes. We fight about the unspoken agreement we each thought we had — about who notices, who carries, who reaches first — and the quiet certainty that the other person should have known.

So I do with couples what I do in my own life. We manage expectations from the very first session, and then we keep checking them, because the brief changes as people change. I'm not perfect at it. But it's the move I trust most, and I'd rather get it slightly wrong out loud than get it perfectly wrong in silence.

Which brings me to you, reading this — because the same honesty should govern what you can expect from this space.

Here's what you won't find. You won't read "10 ways to improve your sex life" or "5 things to avoid for a happy marriage." The internet is drowning in that, and I don't believe a list of tips from me will change your relationship. Most relationship advice is too clean for the actual mess of being human, and I'm not interested in adding to the pile.

Here's what you will find. My own experience, used honestly — not as confession, but where it's useful to you. What I notice in the room with couples, anonymised and composited so no one is ever identifiable. The reading and research I disappear into, translated back into something human. And the questions I think are worth sitting with — usually more questions than answers, because my work is to widen what you can see, not to hand you a verdict.

We'll deconstruct before you reconstruct. I'll offer perspectives; you'll keep the ones that fit and leave the rest. And I'll change too — so don't be surprised if, somewhere down the line, I have to re-manage the expectations I'm setting right now.

That's the brief. If it's the kind of conversation you've been looking for, you're in the right place.

Before you go, three questions worth carrying into your week:

1. Where do you sit, honestly, on saying what you expect — closer to I assume people should just know, or to I name it plainly? And where would you rather be?

2. The last time you felt let down by your partner, what was the expectation underneath it — and had you ever actually said it out loud?

3. If you got one thing better about naming what you need, before the disappointment rather than after, what would change?