38. The Expectation Trap: Why Your Partner Isn’t a Mind Reader (and How to Fix It)

Ever silently fumed because your partner didn’t do something you never actually asked them to do? (Yep, we’ve all been there!)

 This episode is pulled straight from one of our amazing weekly Support Sessions in the Facebook group, where we dove into the three sneaky types of expectations—explicit, implicit, and covert—that can really mess with your relationships. Get ready for some fun, real-life examples and actionable tips to help you communicate your needs clearly and avoid the frustration of unmet expectations! 

You might want to listen if:

• You’re done feeling frustrated by unmet expectations
• You wish your partner just knew what you needed
• You struggle with expressing your needs (without it turning into a fight)
• You want a fun, relatable guide to handling communication issues
• You’re ready to create stronger, happier connections

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DISCLAIMER: Speak Honest podcast content is informational, not professional or medical advice. Jenn is an ICF relationship coach, not a licensed therapist. Consult health professionals for specific concerns. Client opinions do not reflect Speak Honest’s stance. We aim for accuracy but are not liable for errors or outcomes from this information.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Speak Honest. I am your host and certified relationship coach, Jennifer Noble. It has been my passion for over a decade to help women like you heal what's been holding you back from having the relationships you deserve. Are you struggling with a relationship where you can't seem to voice your emotions, needs, and boundaries without having it blow up in your face? Then you’ve found the right podcast, my friend. Get ready for practical tips, empowering truths, and honest conversations. Now let's dive in.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Speak Honest.
I am Jenn Noble, your go-to relationship coach, and on today's episode, I have a little special treat for you. We just recently had a weekly support session in the Facebook group. You can always join our Facebook group at any time by finding the link in the show notes—we would love to have you there! What I wanted to showcase to you was the learning lesson from this week’s support session.

I received tons of feedback about how great it was this week, and it was all about managing expectations in relationships. Specifically, what are the three main types of expectations? We have explicit, implicit, and covert. And what do those all mean? Well, that's what I wanted to share with you today and give you a little taste of what our free weekly support sessions are like.

At any time, you can join our Facebook group and get access to these support sessions. Now, I do want to give you a heads-up that eventually, these will be part of a paid membership program. But for right now, until that happens, and while I'm getting my footing with everything going on here, I’m really enjoying connecting with all of you beautiful women in the Facebook group—these sessions are completely free for anyone in the facebook group.

So, I would love it if you took advantage of this opportunity and started attending these free weekly support sessions. Here’s what goes down in one of these sessions: It lasts for an hour and always takes place on Wednesdays. For the first 15 minutes, there’s a learning lesson—some sort of topic that someone in the group brought up, or that I have scheduled in advance. Right now, I have the rest of the topics scheduled out for the year. If you ever want to know which one is coming up, just let me know.

For about 15-20 minutes, I do a bit of a learning lesson. Then, it’s all about you. This is the time when you come in and ask your questions. Do you have a question about a relationship that’s going on right now? Or maybe someone texted you, and you don’t know how to respond? This is what the Q&A session is for. We can talk about the learning lesson, of course, but the goal of the Q&A is to give you the opportunity to ask those nuanced questions.

Because I can give you as much advice, I can do as much coaching, I could teach you anything, but it's not gonna really hold in your heart. Unless you understand it from your perspective, from your lived experience, from your perception of what's going on, because, yeah, it's all great and all to say, hey, don't have any covert expectations with your partner, but if your partner is also doing this and then you're doing this and then they're doing that, you could see how it becomes a little bit more difficult and complicated, and that's what I'm here for.

So, I would love to see more of you in our weekly support sessions. They happen on Wednesdays, and they bounce between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. Pacific, which is what? 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. Eastern. So it just kind of depends on my schedule, I put one there. Always ahead of time you’ll see an event in the Facebook group, you go in there and RSVP, and that’s how you can get access to the Zoom link where you can come on.

It’s a members-only event, so you have to be a member in the Facebook group in order to attend. And then, if you did miss out on the support session for any reason, I always put a post in our Facebook group afterward, where you can come and get the replay. You just have to reach out and ask me for it, and I will send it to you via DM.

It’s an easy way to always get the replay. You get the full learning lesson and the Q&A session at the end. And because there is a Q&A session, I have to keep it a little bit locked down, meaning I don’t put it directly on YouTube—it has to be a bit more of a subscription-based thing. But for right now, that subscription is completely free. So, you should take an opportunity to utilize this as much as possible. With all that said, I would love to go ahead and get started with the support session.

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So I want to welcome everyone to today's support session. Today, we are going to be learning and diving into managing expectations, specifically in relationships, but I do find this can kind of be very helpful anywhere. So whether we realize it or not, expectations shape how we connect with one another. They shape how we communicate, how we feel, how we connect, how we relate. And when expectations go unmet, it can lead to frustration, disappointment, and even resentment. Who here, you can raise your hand, you can put anything in the chat—who here has ever dealt with resentment because your expectations did not get met?

I would love to know what you all think about that. Yes. Yes. Stephanie says, "Yes, absolutely." Oh, yes. Yeah. Amanda says, "Oh, yeah." I like that. That felt like the Kool-Aid man coming out saying, "Oh, yeah." I also just showed my age. It’s beautiful. But I want us to not worry about this, though, because today we’re going to break it all down so you can start managing your expectations in a way that strengthens your relationship instead of straining it.

So, I want to ask you all a question. Have you ever felt let down in a relationship because your partner didn’t meet your expectations? You know, yeah, even in your good marriage. Exactly, Ashley, you still are being let down. We're let down at work. We're let down by our children. We're let down by our parents. And this letdown is a part of that expectation. So maybe you thought they’d remember your anniversary without being reminded, or you expected them to comfort you when you had a bad day without saying a word. And when they didn’t do what you thought was obvious, it left you feeling hurt and frustrated.

This happens to all of us, even secure folks. I just want to be very clear here. And in fact, I’m going to share a story later on about myself so you can see that this is very common. It usually just comes down to one thing: expectations. We often assume others will meet these expectations, but the real question is, how often do we actually talk about them?

So, the three main types of expectations that I want to talk about specifically today are explicit, implicit, and covert. Now, what are these? Well, explicit expectations are the ones we clearly communicate. Like saying, "Hey, can we plan a date night on Saturday?" or "Hey, can you pass me that water cup?" These are just clear expectations. These are clear needs being met. It’s direct, and it leaves no room for guessing.

But then we have the two kind of tricky ones, and people often confuse these, so I’m going to explain them. Implicit expectations are the ones where we assume what’s going to happen without saying it out loud. So, like, you're expecting your partner to do the dishes because they’ve done it before, but you’ve never asked; you just assume they’ll know. These are implicit expectations where you know what you’re expecting.

And then we have the hard ones—the covert expectations. These are the absolute trickiest. These are the expectations we don’t even realize we have until they’re not met. So, for example, coming home after a tough day and feeling upset because your partner didn’t notice that you were stressed, but you never said a word. But deep down, you kind of expected them to pick up on it, right? This covert expectation is kind of that, "Oh, we want them to read our minds" kind of thing.

So, have you ever been frustrated when your partner didn’t do something you thought was obvious, like not texting you back right away when you were upset? Maybe you assumed they would check in, but you never actually told them how much it meant to you to be checked in on. That’s the power of implicit and covert expectations—they’re silent but powerful.

So, I want to start with explicit expectations. These are the ones we actually say out loud. They’re clear, they’re direct, which means everyone knows what’s expected. For example, you can say, "Hey, can you help me with the laundry tonight?" or "I need your help picking up the kids after school tomorrow." You’re giving a clear, spoken expectation—there’s no room for guessing or assumptions there.

And actually, I say that, and even then, I could showcase where there might still be guessing even in those. But the idea here is you’ve expressed it, and it’s pretty clear. They feel comfortable asking questions, or you're okay with how it gets done—you just need them to do the laundry tonight.

Explicit expectations are important, but why? Because when we don’t make our needs clear, misunderstandings happen. So, if you say exactly what you need, you give the other person a chance to meet that need, or in other words, to meet that expectation, setting both of you up for success.

Now, imagine you come home after a long day, and you say, "Oh, I am really tired. I could really use some help with dinner tonight," and your partner knows exactly what you need. You’re less likely to feel frustrated. But now I want you to compare that to staying silent and hoping they’ll just jump in and help. You’ve come in, slammed your bag down, and you’re upset, saying, "Oh, I’m so frustrated today," but you didn’t communicate anything. Now you're frustrated that they didn’t help you with dinner.

Clear, spoken expectations make all the difference.

Next up, I want to talk about implicit expectations. These are tricky because they’re not communicated outright, but we still expect them to be met. See how this works? They live in the world of assumption. For example, you might assume that your partner will plan something special for your anniversary just because they did last year. But you never actually said anything about it—you’re just expecting it to happen again, getting all excited, and then… nothing happens. Ugh… Right?

But why do implicit expectations cause problems? When we don’t communicate our needs and expectations, we set ourselves up for disappointment, and we set our partners up for confusion. They may not even realize you're expecting something from them, which leads to situations where you feel let down, and they feel blindsided by your frustration.

So, let’s say you’re expecting your partner to help clean up after dinner, but you didn’t ask them to—you just assumed they would. When they don’t step in to do this, you start feeling annoyed. We all know that familiar feeling—that kind of bubbling in your gut that starts to happen. It’s like, why aren’t they just picking up the cup that they left there? But from their perspective, they didn’t know you were hoping for help.

That’s why implicit expectations can create unnecessary conflict. They rely on assumption, not communication.

And now, the fun one—I want to talk about covert expectations. These are the most difficult to manage because they’re unconscious expectations—the ones we don’t even realize we have. And if we don’t realize them ourselves, how in the heck can we possibly communicate that to our partners?

So, it makes sense that these are tricky. They live under the surface, and neither you nor your partner is aware of them until they’re unmet. You might not even realize you expected something until you feel disappointed or upset. And that’s where things can get really tricky.

So, remember from the time before when you asked your partner to help with dinner? In your mind, helping meant starting the water for pasta, chopping the vegetables, grabbing the plates, why? Because that’s what you would do. But your partner thought helping meant setting the table and grabbing the napkins from the dryer. I don’t know, right? But when they didn’t start cooking, what happened? You felt upset. You were thinking, “They didn’t even help at all! What the hell?”

The truth is, they did help. It’s just that you had a covert expectation that wasn’t communicated. They didn’t know exactly what you needed help with because it wasn’t clearly stated.

This is why covert expectations can cause tension without us even realizing it. This is why communication conflicts keep happening. This is why you can feel like you’re doing everything right but still lacking in so many areas of your relationship.

Let me tell you about a time in my own life when this happened. And this is where all the dinner conversation stuff is coming from. OK, so there was a time recently—a couple of years back—I wasn’t quite married to my now-husband, but we were dating, and there were definitely covert expectations creeping up on me. I asked my now-husband to help me with dinner after a long day. And in my mind, this meant cooking, cleaning up, and then leaving the kitchen spotless because that’s what I always did.

So when I, you know, I built up all this courage—I remember working with my coach at the time and being like, "How do I do this?" And she’s like, “Yeah, you know, just ask.” So I was like, "Can you help me with dinner?" And he was like, "Yeah, of course, I’ll totally help." And I was like, “Oh my God, this is amazing.” I was out at school, and when I came home, he had ordered takeout, and the kitchen was a mess, and I felt furious. I felt rage. I think I ended up—yeah, I ended up dropping my stuff and didn’t even want dinner. I started rage-cleaning the kitchen.

I don’t know if anyone else is a rage cleaner, but I’m definitely a rage cleaner. I started clanging dishes around and slamming cupboards because he left the cupboards open. Don’t even get me started on that. I made lots of frustrating sounds—very passive-aggressive. Ugh. Yeah.

So, that was an implicit expectation creeping in. I was angry, thinking, "Can’t a girl get some help around here? What the hell?" My husband and your husband would be best friends, yes. And then the house would be a disaster, exactly.

Here’s how things started shifting for me, OK? As I was scrubbing the glass—because I had been doing a lot of work at this point—I felt tears coming up behind my eyes. I had had a day. I had had a day and a half, and it was a lot. I paused, and I started noticing the sensations in my body, and I started thinking, "Whoa, whoa. This reaction is up here, and the situation is here." Right? We’ve talked about this before in terms of overreacting, but what does it really mean? It just means I’m triggered. So I paused, and I thought, "What’s going on here?" And that’s when I realized, "Oh crap. I had a covert expectation."

I expected him to know exactly what I meant when I asked for help without ever really saying it. So I took a breath, and I went over to him and said, "Babes, I tried to clean the kitchen, but I just can’t. I’m mentally spent. Can you please get the dishes tonight?" And he was like, "Yeah, absolutely. I was just going to do that later. Come and eat." His mind was still like, “I don’t understand what’s going on,” but he also knows when Jenn is raging, you leave Jenn alone. So, he was really just like, "She wants to clean the kitchen? Let her clean the kitchen."

So, he invited me to come cuddle, watch a show, and eat some dinner. And at that moment, I tensed up a little bit because I didn’t want to watch the show—I wanted a clean kitchen! But again, I checked in with myself and realized, "Well, actually, what did I really want here?" And I realized I just wanted relief. I wanted relaxation. And actually, that means he doesn’t get up and do the kitchen right now. We just go, eat dinner, and cuddle and enjoy it. He can clean the kitchen after when I go to bed because he usually stays up later than me anyway.

So, I let myself enjoy that time with him. And sure enough, when I woke up the next morning, the kitchen was spotless. That was a really good takeaway. It was my favorite Chinese food, and he thought of me so much in that moment. He got my favorite food, and there were extra fortune cookies—I love them. See how much he was thinking about me?

These are the ways in which our expectations can prevent us from receiving the love our partner is giving to us. They’re trying to, even when it’s not done in the exact way our brains are thinking, "This is what I want."

So, as you can see, these expectations creep up on all of us. It’s okay that it happens, even to those of us who feel secure in their relationships. It’s not about never having these expectations—it’s about recognizing them and communicating them before they lead to frustration. Imagine how that whole situation would have played out if I hadn’t been able to calm myself down or talk about anything. I’m pretty sure I just would have slammed a few more things, gone to bed angry, and he would have been so confused. It would not have ended well.

But now, I want to recap. We talked about explicit expectations—what are those again, right? Clear, direct, talk about what we need. Implicit expectations are the ones that are unspoken assumptions, and they often lead to misunderstandings because they’re not being communicated. And then we have covert expectations, the trickiest of them all. These are the unconscious expectations that can cause frustration when unmet needs aren’t recognized or shared.

So, the key takeaway is: communicate your expectations, or be willing to identify them later. Give yourself grace if you didn’t notice it right away, and give your partner grace too—because if you didn’t recognize it, how are they supposed to recognize it, right?

And now I just realized I forgot to put the journal prompts in because I was like, "Hey, here’s our questions for the night, ladies." Here you go—there’s the journal prompt for the evening. The journal prompts are just going to have these three questions as well. So it’s the same ones.

They are questions that we can go over tonight, or I just highly recommend that you incorporate them into your journaling and meditations for this week. They are questions like: What are some explicit expectations that you’ve communicated recently? Have you clearly asked for what you need? And how did you feel about that? How did you feel when you were able to communicate that and they were able to receive it and actually do it? Was it empowering? Did it feel good?

I want you to give yourself some kind of taste of victory, if you will, for this part. And then, I want you to think of a time when an implicit expectation caused frustration. Was there a moment where you assumed someone should just know what you wanted, but you didn’t actually tell them, so they had no idea? 

And lastly, what covert expectations might be hiding in your relationships? Are there any unspoken or unconscious needs or expectations that could be leading to frustration without you even realizing it?

So, yeah, these questions can help you become more aware of how your  expectations play out in your relationships, and give you the chance to improve communication moving forward. So, there you go—there is our little learning lesson for the week on expectations, and I am going to open it up to questions now.

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If you want to hear the rest of the support session and know what their questions are, I would love it if you jumped over to our Facebook group. Again, the link is in the show notes, or you can just search for us at Speak Honest on Facebook. Go ahead and join our Facebook group, jump into the post where I’m asking, “Hey, does anyone need the replay?” You can grab the replay and hear all the rest of the questions.

But I hope that you loved the support session as much as I did, and as much as the ladies did who were on the call—it was absolutely fantastic. It’s such a great reminder of how expectations in our relationships can really cause some of that turmoil that’s happening.

And now I want to be mindful again: expectations in a relationship are not the problem, right? We’re not talking about not having expectations. What we’re talking about here is learning to communicate them, right? To speak up about them—to speak honest about them, as I would say.

And so that’s why I thought this would be a really great episode to bring to you all. If you have any questions at all, please reach out to me via email or in my DMs at any time. Or ask me on Facebook—just go ahead and tag me in there so I see you, and I cannot wait to hear from so many more of you.

I hope you all have a beautiful week. Take care.

As we wrap up today's conversation, always remember that healing is a journey, not a destination, and it is an honor to be a part of your healing journey. If you want to dig deeper into the topics we covered today, be sure to head over to our show notes, where you can find all the valuable information mentioned in today’s episode right there. And please remember to rate, review, and subscribe if you enjoyed today’s podcast. Your feedback means the world to us and helps others discover o