Sometimes you don’t realise how your high expectations affect both yourself and the people around you.
It’s important to have standards, and you probably think yours are reasonable. However, there’s a fine line between healthy boundaries and unrealistic demands. Here’s how you know you’ve crossed that line, and you’re asking too much from the people in your life.
1. You feel constantly let down.
Every interaction seems to leave you disappointed. Friends never quite meet your standards, family members always fall short, and colleagues never deliver exactly what you wanted. You find yourself frequently sighing and thinking, “I would have done this differently.” The gap between your expectations and reality keeps getting wider with each passing day.
2. Your help comes with hidden rules.
When you offer support, you have a specific vision of how it should be received and appreciated. You get quietly angry when people don’t thank you in the exact way you imagined, or when they don’t follow your advice to the letter. You keep a mental scorecard of who didn’t show enough gratitude.
3. You rehash conversations endlessly.
After every interaction, you analyse what people said and how they said it. You focus on the one awkward moment in an otherwise pleasant evening, and spend hours thinking about how someone could have worded something better or shown more interest. Your mind becomes a constant replay loop of social interactions.
4. People seem to avoid deep talks with you.
You’ve noticed friends keeping conversations light and surface-level. They don’t share their struggles like they used to, and they seem hesitant to open up. When they do share, you realise it’s usually after the fact, when everything’s already resolved. Your reactions to their problems have taught them to keep their distance.
5. You give more than you can afford to.
Your generosity often exceeds your means — whether it’s time, money, or emotional energy. You’ll stay up all night helping someone, even when you’re exhausted. You’ll spend beyond your budget to meet your own gift-giving standards. Your bank account and mental health take regular hits from your overwhelming sense of obligation.
6. Last-minute changes ruin your day.
When someone cancels plans or needs to reschedule, you take it personally. A change in dinner plans feels like a betrayal. You struggle to understand that other people’s schedule changes aren’t direct attacks on you. Your mood plummets at the first sign of spontaneity.
7. You keep score without telling anyone.
In your mind, you maintain detailed records of everything you’ve done for other people. You remember exactly who hasn’t invited you over recently, who forgot to wish you happy birthday, or who didn’t respond to your text quickly enough. Your relationships feel more like balance sheets than connections.
8. Response times drive you mad.
You check your phone constantly after sending a message. Anything longer than an hour feels like a deliberate snub. You’ve found yourself getting angry at those gray typing bubbles that disappear without sending a message. The gap between messages becomes a breeding ground for your worst assumptions.
9. You create detailed scenarios in your head.
Before every event or interaction, you script out exactly how things should go. You imagine the perfect responses, ideal reactions, and specific outcomes. When reality doesn’t match your mental movie, you feel deeply disappointed. Your imagined scenarios become impossible standards for real people to meet.
10. Your apologies come with conditions.
When you say sorry, it often comes with an explanation of how the other person contributed to the problem. You find it hard to take full responsibility without pointing out what they did wrong too. Your apologies usually start with “I’m sorry, but…” and end with a list of their mistakes.
11. You micromanage other people’s tasks.
When you delegate something, you can’t resist checking in constantly. You have precise ideas about how things should be done, down to the smallest detail. Even when the end result is good, you focus on how they didn’t follow your exact process. Your way becomes the only acceptable way.
12. Gifts bring more stress than joy.
Special occasions fill you with dread because no one ever seems to get it right. You find yourself dropping increasingly specific hints about what you want. When you receive a gift, you struggle to hide your disappointment when it’s not exactly what you imagined. The thought stopped counting a long time ago.
13. You believe in mind reading.
You expect people to know what you need without you having to say it. When they don’t anticipate your feelings or requirements, you feel hurt and misunderstood. You find yourself thinking, “If they really cared, they would know” at least once a day. Your unspoken expectations become silent relationship killers.
