The Weight of Expectation: When a Favour Becomes an Obligation.
This summer we welcomed a friend's dog, Happy, into our home, temporarily, while her owner recovered from a fall. A few weeks, maybe a month, we thought. She's been here since June.
Happy's owner was one of the people who helped get me back on my feet after my knee replacement. So when she rang and asked if I would take Happy, her baby, while she recovered, I said yes before she had finished asking. She doesn't remember making the call. Saying yes felt like a way of paying her back for what she'd done for me, and one less thing for her to worry about.
In the scheme of things, one more dog didn't seem like much. I already have two, and the house could never claim to be calm to begin with. My two knew Happy, and between them they sorted out who was in charge on the first afternoon. By the end of the first day she'd claimed a sofa. The dogs got on with it with little fuss, and I was proud of how accommodating my pair were. Us humans stuck our heads in the sand and expected the terms to become clear over time. After all, we didn't have a prognosis or a timeline on her recovery, and given that she's an octogenarian, we knew it wouldn't be fast.
How a temporary arrangement becomes a standing one
Her recovery has taken most of the summer, and it's still ongoing, possibly for the next year. As time has dragged on she has needed to make some difficult decisions, including letting her dog walker go, because the walker couldn't hold the spot without being paid. In my friend's mind, an assumption developed that I'd cover Happy's walks and, by extension, that Happy would come to us whenever she went away. After all, I'd proved that walking three dogs was much the same as walking two, and I had to walk mine anyway. I was already the Pied Piper, three dogs trailing behind me listening along to my podcasts.
I don't mind having helped. I'd do the same again tomorrow. But the help she needed kept expanding, and something I'd offered temporarily started to look rather more permanent, without either of us ever stopping to ask whether that was what we'd agreed. She needed more help than she'd expected, fewer people had come forward, and so she leaned harder on the ones who had. I also have my own part in it. I never said, "I can have her for a month." I only said yes, and yes was enough to get it going, without setting out what I was signing up to, or the limits of it, or for how long.
The pattern of being the reliable one
That is a tendency of mine. Step in, sort out what needs sorting, be the reliable one. People ask me because they know I'll say yes and not make a fuss about it. It's easy enough to become that go-to person. You're useful, everyone's grateful, nobody has to have the awkward conversation. And then one day the thing you offered to do once is expected as the thing you do from now on.
My career rewarded that. Say yes, keep it moving, keep everyone happy, don't be the one who puts conditions on things. Which works, until you notice you're taking on more and more because it's expected, and you start to feel invisible, under-appreciated and like the workhorse, working longer hours while other people are freed up by it.
Mistaking usefulness for belonging
This situation with Happy has made me look back at how I was at work. Over my career I was lucky enough to work with some talented, hard-working people. I also watched plenty of people with a questionable work ethic get by on hot air, doing the barest minimum, talking a good game and still going up the ladder. I found that baffling for a long time. I'd been brought up to believe that if you worked hard, took responsibility, stayed busy and delivered, people would notice. So I did exactly that. Head down, work hard, take on more, stay busy, don't complain, and it'll be recognised. Some of it was. But it turned a lot of relationships into transactions. I'd review the RFP, I'd run the whole research process, I'd take on more and more, because underneath it I thought we were building something together.
It was only after the effort had come good, when the credit got handed out, that I found out we weren't in it together. We'd land a big opportunity, one I'd done hard yards on, or had been central to, and when it came to assigning credit, I'd be copied in rather than acknowledged for the part I'd played. Others who'd done very little would talk about it as though the win had been theirs. I'd done the work because it was my job and because I thought I was part of a team, part of something. It turned out my idea of teamwork and collaboration was different to theirs.
I'd mistaken being useful for belonging. The favours and the extra work were never the point. I was looking for connection, to feel understood and appreciated, but I was looking for it in the wrong place.
What went quiet when I left
When I left my career, I thought I was getting time, freedom and sovereignty, and I was. What I hadn't reckoned on was how quiet my day to day became. I felt stir-crazy having nobody to grab a coffee with, nobody free to be daft with for an hour. The job had worn me out, emotionally and physically, but it had also put people in front of me, and I hadn't thought about how much of my social life was a side effect of turning up to an office, or how quickly those connections would fall away once I was no longer in the immediate vicinity.
Some friendships didn't make it through the change. A few had been one-sided for a while, and I'd slowly disengaged before I left, because it was easier and less messy than ending them. Others turned out to be more conditional than I'd realised while I was still useful. They wanted what I knew, or who I knew. They'd pick my brain to review a CV or an introduction, ask for a bit of free coaching or help prepping for an interview. Once I was clear I wasn't interested in that kind of engagement, and there was nothing obvious in it for them, the calls stopped coming.
And then there was the commentary. Some old colleagues, one or two friends, acted as though there must be something wrong with me, or let me know that keeping the big job and the big salary made them the sensible ones and me the one who'd lost the plot. I felt judged, and their behaviour made it clear that, in their eyes, I'd somehow become lesser than them. Those weren't relationships I wanted to keep.
The weight of expectation: understandable and agreed are not the same thing
It reminded me of a post I wrote recently about how we get annoyed with people for not meeting expectations we never told them we had. It runs the other way too. Nobody can honour the terms of an agreement you never spelled out. It's not their fault for acting on what they thought was agreed.
We all make sense of what's happening from our own perspective. Happy's owner isn't sitting working out how to hand me more of her life. She's thinking I said yes, that three dogs seem to work, that she needs the help and I've helped before. At the same time, I'm thinking, I agreed to look after Happy for a while, not to become the default doggy day care and dog walker. Both are understandable positions. She can reasonably infer that I'll help again. I can reasonably decide that isn't what I agreed to. An understandable assumption isn't the same thing as an agreement.
I haven't said any of this to Happy's owner. I can see my own part in why she feels she can lean on me, and I'm not about to make some point about boundaries to an elderly woman recovering from a broken neck. She isn't the problem. If there's a problem, it's that I'm good at saying yes and not so good at noticing what I have committed to until it is too late. That's how I end up under the weight of expectation.
Choosing, rather than being obliged
I have no intention of becoming doggy day care and dog walker, paid or otherwise. The minute something I'd chosen became something I felt obligated to do, it stopped feeling like a choice. My youngest would have Happy back for the holidays in a heartbeat, and I might well go along with it for that reason alone. Once I'd decided what I was and wasn't willing to do, I could enjoy having Happy without signing up to always having her. I could take the holidays when they suited us and say no when they didn't. And by making that distinction, I got a bit of my own happy back.
Happy's gone back where she belongs now, and I'm glad, so we're back down to two dogs and a bit more room on the sofa.
Rosina Barnett
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