Every aspect of your relationship with others will change over time.
Every.
Aspect.
The reasons that brought you together initially may continue to exist, or they may disappear, and without the ability to let go and remain flexible, a person can begin to focus on the loss and in doing so will miss the burgeoning positive aspects of that same relationship. Remember, continual focus on the negative brings more negative to light.
That being said, it takes a great deal of strength to let go of expectations.
I'm not talking about a level of performance you aspire to attract in others-I'm talking about those things that you know and count on happening from day to day.
There is an old proverb that goes; "Better the Devil that you do know than the Devil that you don't." , and it means, in general, that given the choice, people tend to opt for familiarity over relief. That means that even if a situation is unpleasant; one will remain involved in it because it is familiar and all the variables are known. I'm sure it doesn't take a genius to see how this applies to relationships.
Personally, I believe that the one thing a person dislikes more than a negative quality about something, is to be surprised by it. It is those who are able to see through the illusion of circumstance and assign other meanings (or no meanings) to them are the ones who will be best able to remain stable while disruption occurs around them.
Simply said, becoming comfortable in handling the unexpected is a sign of Spiritual Growth/Evolution.
Personal growth makes it easier to become comfortable in handling the unexpected, which leads to your ability to remain unattached to a particular outcome, which leads to less stress when things change around you.
The other reason that one must evolve in order to stay happy has to do with the reality of any relationship with another.
Any relationship you experience is actually a single facet of your relationship with yourself. We become involved in a relationship to study specific aspects of our own selves-be it passion, broken-ness, pain, talent; it is all related back to the self in terms of likeness (i.e. "This person is like me-I also have this quality" or "This person is not like me-I do not have this quality") Even though we are noticing that a quality is missing in ourselves with relation to the other person, ultimately we must still focus on ourselves in order to notice that the quality is missing.
OK
That was confusing. Let's try this:
You are green and your friend is orange. In order to realize that your orange friend is different from the green you, you must know that you are green.
In order to do that, you have to look at YOURSELF.
That's better.
Finding acceptance and happiness within yourself is another sign of Spiritual Growth.
Congratulations, by experiencing the same/otherness of another person, you have just identified something about yourself. Committing to a relationship is equal to making a commitment to becoming self-aware. This is why many cultures consider marriage to be a Spiritual state.
If we cannot learn to accept and integrate what we become aware of, we leave portions of our selves attached to a negative emotional charge. Even without a long and involved explanation about the Law of Attraction, how long will you want to stay in a relationship that continually reflects the unliked bits of yourself back at you? And there is a big difference between "I HATE that about myself, I won't do that anymore" and "Well, I know I have a tendency to be that way but it's who I am. But that doesn't mean I have to stay that way."
In many ways, acceptance of self is a form of high Spiritual practice-and it encompasses the ideas of remaining non-judgmental, flexible, centered and the ability to let go of the familiar and non-productive for the productive but non-familiar.
In other words;
Evolution.
