The advice arrives from every direction. A friend says it gently over coffee. A book says it with a chapter title. Sometimes a previous therapist said it, and sometimes it is just the voice in your own head at one in the morning: Maybe I expect too much. Maybe this is what marriage actually is, and wanting more is the problem.
So you try it. Maya stops mentioning that Daniel checks his phone while she is mid-sentence, because bringing it up never went anywhere. Daniel stops asking why Maya goes quiet for two days after a disagreement, because asking made it three. Each of them files the silence under acceptance, even maturity. The marriage gets quieter. It also gets lonelier, and neither of them can explain why the thing that was supposed to bring peace feels like a slow withdrawal from the relationship itself.
Whether lowering your expectations helps a marriage is not a matter of opinion. Researchers have followed hundreds of couples across years to test exactly this question, and the answer has a precise shape. It is not the shape the advice assumes. This article expands one of the ten claims examined in why marriages really fail: The myth that expecting less is the path to wanting what you have.
The Couples Who Ask the Most Get the Most
In 1996, the psychologist Donald Baucom at the University of North Carolina, working with Norman Epstein, Lynn Rankin, and Charles Burnett, published a study of nearly four hundred couples built around a new instrument called the Inventory of Specific Relationship Standards. Standards, in this research, are beliefs about what a marriage should be: How much of daily life partners should share, how power and decisions should be handled, and how much each person should invest in the relationship.
The prevailing clinical assumption at the time, inherited from the cognitive-behavioral tradition, was that unrealistically high standards were distorted thinking, the kind of cognition a therapist should help a client revise downward. Baucom’s data ran the other way. The spouses who asked a great deal of their marriages scored higher on every index of marital functioning the study measured. The people with the most demanding standards had the best relationships, not the worst.
The study also surfaced a detail that matters for everything that follows: Two pieces of information carried weight, the standard itself and whether that standard was being met. Asking a great deal was associated with thriving. Asking a great deal and living with the gap was a different condition entirely, and the field would spend the next two decades finding out how different.
The Study That Complicated the Picture
In 2004, James McNulty and Benjamin Karney published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that followed 82 newlywed couples across their first four years of marriage, measuring satisfaction every six months. This study examined a close cousin of standards: Expectations, meaning each spouse’s forecast of what the marriage would actually be like. And it measured something Baucom had not: Skill. The researchers observed each couple’s problem-solving behavior directly and assessed how much each spouse tended toward blame when things went wrong.
The result was an interaction, and it is the finding this entire question turns on. Among spouses with strong skills, positive expectations predicted satisfaction that held across the four years. Among spouses with weak skills, those same positive expectations predicted the steepest declines in the entire study. Optimism was not good or bad. It functioned like a demand the relationship had to service, and what determined the outcome was whether the couple could deliver.
There was a stranger wrinkle on the other side. Couples with strong skills but low expectations declined too. McNulty’s interpretation was that expecting little may have kept those couples from ever deploying the skills they had. The mismatch was the problem in both directions: Satisfaction eroded fastest wherever what a couple asked of the marriage and what the couple could produce came apart.
Maya and Daniel live inside that gap. Her expectation that a fight will end in repair meets his absence of any practiced way to repair. His expectation that she will give him the benefit of the doubt meets her habit, under stress, of assigning blame first. Neither expectation is unreasonable. Each one simply arrives at a marriage that does not yet have the machinery to meet it, and every arrival converts a little more hope into evidence.
The Study That Resolved It
By 2010, McNulty had assembled enough longitudinal evidence to state the pattern as a principle. Writing in Current Directions in Psychological Science, he showed across several studies of newlyweds that the processes usually labeled positive, generous interpretations of a partner’s behavior, ready forgiveness, optimistic expectations, protected satisfaction in marriages with mild problems and accelerated decline in marriages with severe ones. In a troubled marriage, positivity can function as anesthesia: It quiets the signal that something needs to be addressed, and the something grows.
Then in 2016, McNulty ran the direct test, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. This four-year study of newlyweds measured standards themselves, Baucom’s construct, alongside two markers of a couple’s capability to meet them: The severity of the problems spouses reported, and the amount of destructive behavior observers coded during the couple’s actual conflicts. Among spouses with milder problems or less destructive conflict behavior, higher standards predicted higher satisfaction over time. Among spouses with severe problems or more destructive conflict behavior, the same high standards predicted satisfaction that fell.
McNulty framed the study as reconciling the two competing perspectives, and that framing is the right one. Baucom was not wrong. High standards genuinely characterize the strongest marriages, and his own data had flagged that whether the standard was met carried independent weight. What the later work added was the boundary condition: A high standard is a demand on the relationship’s capability, and its effect depends entirely on whether the capability is there. The identical standard that pulls one marriage upward grinds another one down.
The Variable Worth Changing
Put plainly, chronic disappointment in a marriage involves two variables: The height of what you ask, and the skill available to deliver it. When the gap between them persists, you can move either one.
Lowering the standard narrows the gap by shrinking the ask. The research is honest about what that buys: For couples without the skills, it mainly slows the rate of decline. It does not produce the satisfaction Baucom documented, because that satisfaction belonged to couples who asked a great deal and got it. Lowering expectations is containment. It is also the only lever most people are ever told about.
Raising skill closes the gap from the other side and keeps the upside. And skill, in this research, is not a personality trait or a level of devotion. It is observable behavior: How a difficult conversation opens, whether escalation gets interrupted before it does damage, whether blame gets replaced with a complaint the other person can actually respond to, whether a fight gets repaired afterward instead of archived. Every one of those is learnable, which is the practical difference between the two levers. Maya cannot practice her way into wanting less from Daniel, and Daniel cannot practice his way into wanting less from Maya. Both of them can practice their way into delivering more.
High Standards Need a Structure That Can Hold Them
This is why lower your expectations fails as advice for most couples: It treats the standard as the defect when the gap is the defect. The couples thriving in Baucom’s data were not thriving because they wanted little. They wanted a great deal from marriages that could produce it.
That capability is what I build with couples through structured approaches that develop the specific skills in a deliberate sequence, because some of them have to be in place before the others hold under pressure. As a Certified Gottman Therapist, I have yet to meet a couple whose real problem was wanting too much. I regularly meet couples whose wanting has outrun their tools, and that is a solvable problem.
If the gap between what you ask of your marriage and what it currently delivers has become the marriage, start with a consultation.
Common Questions About Expectations in Marriage
Are my expectations in my marriage too high?
The research suggests that is the wrong measurement. Donald Baucom’s work found that people who ask a great deal of their marriages score higher on every index of marital functioning, and James McNulty’s studies found the same standards predict satisfaction or decline depending on the couple’s skills and problem severity. The useful question is not how high the standard is. It is whether the marriage currently has the capability to meet it.
Should I lower my expectations to be happier in my relationship?
In the longitudinal research, lowered expectations mainly protected couples with weak relationship skills, and only by slowing decline rather than producing satisfaction. The couples with the highest satisfaction held high standards inside marriages that could meet them. Lowering the ask is a containment strategy. Building the skills that close the gap is the strategy associated with actually being happy.
Do high standards ruin relationships?
Not by themselves. McNulty’s 2016 study found high standards predicted rising satisfaction in marriages with milder problems and less destructive conflict, and falling satisfaction in marriages with severe problems and more destructive conflict. Standards amplify whatever capability exists. What damages relationships is the standing gap between what is asked and what is delivered, not the asking.
Selected research
- Donald Baucom, Norman Epstein, Lynn Rankin, and Charles Burnett, “Assessing Relationship Standards: The Inventory of Specific Relationship Standards,” Journal of Family Psychology, 1996.
- James McNulty, “When Positive Processes Hurt Relationships,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2010.
- James McNulty, “Should Spouses Be Demanding Less From Marriage? A Contextual Perspective on the Implications of Interpersonal Standards,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2016.
- James McNulty and Benjamin Karney, “Positive Expectations in the Early Years of Marriage: Should Couples Expect the Best or Brace for the Worst?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2004.
