Welcome to the Awesome Marriage Podcast, a place for honest conversations about marriage and how to have the relationship that God has designed for you.

I am your co-host, Christina Dodson.

On the show will be our host, Dr. Kim Kim, Kimberling and Nill Smith.

To engage with the Awesome Marriage podcast, use the hashtag Awesome Marriage.

So this week on the podcast, we're doing a mini series on three ways to change yourself instead of your spouse. Today's way is the third

and final way. It's checking your expectation. So how does checking your expectation help us

from trying to change our spouse, Dr. Kim? But it's such an important one. I mean, we have expectations, I think, that we're not even aware of.

You know, I'll talk to couples and we'll, and maybe they'll tell them an expectation that

they don't feel their spouse is meeting.

And sometimes we'll trace, where did that come from?

And it comes is the way

you do marriage or this is the way you do life because it came out of the model they had. So they

just naturally think that their spouse is going to do those expectations, meet those, do it this

way, and they get mad at them. So I think checking them helps us to be realistic about what to expect

from our spouse, what is realistic,

what's not realistic, does this fit? Have we communicated those to our spouse? All those things.

So I think when you have an expectation, you need to kind of process through that and tell your

spouse about it and get some dialogue going about it because I think a lot of times,

a lot of the problems come from expectations that aren't met by our spouse,

but did we ever really communicate to them? And are they realistic?

Yeah, absolutely. And I love that you bring up the communication aspect because I think

that's the root of like so many mirror issues. It's just not talked about

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