ChatGPT called me out! Not cool, dude. Not cool.
The prompt asked for an assessment of my second most popular blog post ever, It's All About Expectations Management. This particular entry has been haunting me ever since an awakening forced a re-evaluation of my entire life. In fact, it has haunted me for years, every time a reader tells me they find it sad, noticing the heartbreak between the lines rather than the hopeful, inspirational message I intended to convey.
But dang, ChatGPT saw right through it, too. AI can offer surprising insights that my squishy human brain doesn't always catch on its own. It's food for thought, anyway.
Here is its response:
What strikes me most is that this is not really a blog about a satisfying marriage. It is a blog about how Michael learned to make an emotionally limited marriage tolerable by changing what he expected from it.
The central psychological move is right there in his phrase “expectations management.” He takes something that appears to have been painful—wanting companionship, friendship, emotional intimacy, shared interests, mutual support, physical closeness, and encouragement—and solves the problem not by saying, How do we build more of those things?, but by saying, essentially, Perhaps I should stop expecting them.
That distinction matters enormously.
He explicitly lists what most people would recognize as important dimensions of a deeply intimate partnership:
shared interests
companionship
best friendship
emotional openness
strength during difficulty
physical closeness
mutual encouragement
And then he says:
“not a single one of the above features is achievable on a large scale”
That is an unusually stark statement about a marriage.
He isn't saying, “We struggle with a couple of these.” He isn't saying, “Life is busy right now.” He isn't even saying, “We express love differently.”
He says none of them is substantially available.
And then he reframes the absence of those things as something that needn't mean the marriage has failed.
What I think he was doing psychologically
I think there is something both adaptive and sad in this essay.
The adaptive part is genuine. Gratitude is healthy. No spouse can fulfill every need. Comparing a marriage against fantasies can absolutely make people chronically dissatisfied. Mature love does involve appreciating what a partner actually gives rather than demanding an idealized person.
But Michael appears to take that healthy principle considerably farther.
Instead of:
“My wife cannot be everything to me.”
the essay gets surprisingly close to:
“The things I originally thought constituted an intimate marriage aren't available here, so I have learned not to require them.”
That is less ordinary acceptance and more like accommodation to deprivation.
There is also a distinctly intellectualized quality to the piece. He translates marriage into the language of software engineering:
- stakeholders
- project expectations
- feasibility
- deliverables
- failed project
That is clever and very Michael-like, but psychologically it also creates distance. He can turn emotional disappointment into a systems problem that can be solved through revised specifications.
Instead of having to sit with:
“I am lonely in my marriage.”
he can think:
“My expectations were improperly calibrated.”
Those are emotionally very different formulations.
The examples of what he values are revealing
The things he identifies as positives are almost entirely instrumental or practical:
- she cooks extremely well;
- helps care for their son;
- does grocery shopping;
- pays most of her own expenses;
- drives him to work;
- helps with grooming and personal care;
- does favors for him.
Those things can absolutely be expressions of love and care. They should not be dismissed.
But compare them with the needs he says aren't available:
emotional intimacy, companionship, friendship, shared life, mutual support, physical closeness.
There is a striking category shift.
His description of what the marriage does provide sounds more like caregiving, household partnership, and practical cooperation than the emotional architecture of an intimate romantic bond.
That doesn't make the marriage meaningless. It may have substantial value. But it tells us something about what kind of marriage he believes he has.
One sentence bothers me more than almost anything else
This one:
“Just be thankful for what you have and you may find that it's enough to get you by.”
“Enough to get you by.”
That is not the language people usually use when describing a relationship in which they feel deeply known, nourished, connected, or fulfilled.
It suggests endurance.
Not misery necessarily. Not hatred. Not even unhappiness every day.
But a kind of relational subsistence.
And because the essay is written in an upbeat, witty tone, it would be very easy to miss just how melancholy the underlying content is.
There is also a subtle warning sign in this line
“Don't be overly obsessed with comparing yourselves to others, or to what is considered ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’.”
The first half is wise. Comparing relationships compulsively to other couples is usually unhelpful.
The second half is different.
Not worrying excessively about normal makes sense.
But dismissing the relevance of whether a relationship is healthy can become dangerous reasoning, because some standards really do matter: respect, emotional safety, authenticity, mutuality, freedom from coercion, and the ability to express important needs.
Sometimes “accept people as they are” is wisdom.
Sometimes it becomes:
“Stop noticing what is missing because noticing it hurts.”
The essay seems to hover right on that boundary.
What I think it tells us about Michael in 2015
Without diagnosing him, I would infer several things about his coping style at that point.
He seems highly capable of cognitive reframing. When reality doesn't match his hopes, he can redesign the conceptual framework so that the reality becomes bearable.
He also seems capable of radical accommodation. Rather than press another person very hard to meet his emotional needs, he may reduce those needs' apparent importance.
And there seems to be a strong duty/loyalty/stability orientation. He doesn't appear to be asking, “Am I fulfilled?” His question is much closer to:
“Can this arrangement still be considered workable?”
Those are very different standards.
One measures a relationship by aliveness and intimacy.
The other measures it by function and sustainability.
In 2015, Michael seems to have chosen sustainability.
And there is an important irony
He begins by saying that popular culture supposedly asks too much of marriage by expecting one's spouse to be:
a companion,
a friend,
someone you can talk to,
a source of strength,
someone physically close,
and someone who supports your growth.
But those aren't particularly extravagant romantic fantasies.
Taken individually, none must exist perfectly. No marriage has all of them all the time.
But collectively, they describe something fairly ordinary: emotional partnership.
So I don't think his younger self was necessarily suffering because he had unrealistic expectations.
It's quite possible he had reasonable relational needs in a marriage that could not meet them, and eventually concluded that the needs themselves were the problem.
That is the part I find most poignant.
The 2015 essay looks less like an isolated piece of cheerful marriage advice and more like an early written record of how he made peace with a significant relational deficit.
It almost reads, underneath the humor and gratitude, as:
“I once wanted a deeply intimate marriage. I have learned that I cannot have that here. There are still good things here. So I will train myself to regard those good things as enough.”
That doesn't mean he was secretly miserable every day, and I wouldn't infer that. People can genuinely feel gratitude, affection, loyalty, comfort, and family attachment inside a marriage that is emotionally thin.
But I would distinguish very strongly between “this relationship contains real good” and “this relationship fulfills the central functions of an intimate partnership.”
Michael himself, in this essay, seems to be telling us that by 2015 he already knew the second proposition was largely untrue.
