When People Pleasing Makes Your Partner's Disappointment Feel Unbearable
It’s probably fair to say that none of us enjoys disappointing someone we love and care about.
But for some of us, the experience of seeing our partner disappointed—especially when we’re the source of it—can feel unbearable.
This question came to me from Nisha, who writes:
“I’m married to a wonderful man and I’d like to learn how to be better for him. I have what I think is probably an unusual problem in my marriage, which is that I can’t cope with my husband being disappointed. I put a lot of thought into how to keep him happy and make sure he’s not disappointed, but sometimes it’s inevitable.
Most recently, my husband planned a surprise dinner for me on a Wednesday night, but I’d already promised my co-worker that I’d take her evening shift. When I told my husband I was working, he was clearly very disappointed and told me about the surprise dinner. But there was nothing for it, because it was too late to find someone else to work for me. I felt so sick about it. My husband told me I was overreacting, and we could reschedule the dinner, but I felt so bad. He ended up comforting me even though he was the one who was disappointed. I find myself dreading his suggestions and requests, because I hate telling him no, but sometimes there’s nothing else I can say.”
Dear Nisha,
I can hear in your letter just how much care, energy, and attention you put into trying to make it so that you never have to witness your husband feeling disappointed.
Given that you already recognize that sometimes it’s inevitable that you have to say no to him, it’s probably not going to come as a shock when I say that disappointment is also inevitable.
Disappointment is inevitable—not because you haven’t yet cracked the secret code to doing everything perfectly to avoid it. Disappointment is inevitable because disappointment is a normal human feeling, which means that all of us feel disappointed sometimes.
That’s actually not a bad thing, because feeling disappointment helps us develop more emotional capacity to cope with life’s challenges and difficulties.
Disappointment also helps us learn from our experiences so that we can make more informed decisions in the future.
For example, let’s say that I avoid making plans with friends because I prefer to keep my options open and do things spontaneously rather than being committed to something I might not be in the mood for. I wake up on Saturday morning, and I’m in the mood to get together with friends for coffee, but they all already have plans, so I’m probably going to feel disappointed.
That’s actually a great outcome for me.
I feel disappointed and I think to myself, do I want to do this differently next time? Do I want to make plans in advance so I know my friends will be available for coffee? Or would I prefer to keep things spontaneous, because I’d rather be disappointed than feel locked in to a coffee date when I’d rather go to yoga class?
In other words, there’s no one right decision here, but the feeling of disappointment adds more clarity to how I make decisions.
To make it more specific to your situation, your husband made a decision to try to surprise you with dinner. It didn’t work out, and he was disappointed.
But that doesn’t mean that either of you did anything wrong.
In fact, he might decide that the joy of surprising you with dinner is worth the risk that you’ll already have other plans and he’ll end up disappointed. Or he might decide that next time he’ll forego the surprise because he’d rather make sure you’re available than risk having the plan fall through.
Notice here that the learning process happens for the person who’s disappointed, not for the other person.
In other words, it’s no one else’s job to protect us from feeling disappointed.
Given that you said that you’re married to a wonderful man, I’m going to assume that your husband doesn’t think it’s your job to make sure he’s never disappointed. I’m going to assume that your husband is like a lot of partners I’ve worked with, who are innocently having their own experience of feeling disappointed while knowing that they’re perfectly capable of tolerating disappointment and getting over it.
Like all other emotions, disappointment is temporary. And when we allow ourselves to feel it, it moves through us and then it’s resolved. Life goes on, and there’s no harm done.
Now that I’ve assumed that your husband is an adult individual who is fully capable of working through his disappointment, let’s talk about what happens for you when you see that your husband is feeling disappointed.
What feelings arise in you in these moments when you experience his disappointment as intolerable and unbearable?
This is a really important question to consider.
One of the strangest and most fascinating research findings on emotional experience is that simply being able to name our feelings actually makes them more bearable.
What this means is that if you were able to identify that you’re feeling guilty, for example, just recognizing and putting a name to that guilt is going to help a little. My guess is that you’re not just feeling one feeling. You’re probably feeling several all at once.
Maybe guilt, anxiety, helplessness, or fear about what might happen as a result of your husband’s disappointment. You might feel inadequate, like you’ve failed somehow.
I’ve developed this feeling wheel for naming difficult feelings in intimate relationships to help you get clarity on what you’re feeling exactly, especially if all you know right now is that you feel unbearably uncomfortable with your husband’s disappointment.
Once you have more clarity about what you’re feeling, you can start to consider why it feels so uncomfortable to witness your husband’s disappointment.
Whenever we feel intense distress in response to a partner’s emotional experience, we can assume that their feelings are activating our own emotional experience, which may not have a lot to do with our partner—especially when we’re in a relationship in which our partner doesn’t make their emotions our responsibility.
Once you’re able to see that your own inner emotional response is the true source of your distress, a few things become a lot clearer.
First, you may be able to recognize that all the energy, effort, and attention you put toward making sure that your husband never feels disappointed is really about trying to avoid your own emotional response to his disappointment.
Because that’s really what is making this so unbearable for you. In other words, by trying to protect your husband’s feelings, you’ve also been protecting yours.
But since, as we’ve established, it’s impossible to prevent a partner from feeling disappointed—or angry or sad or hurt or any other feeling in the range of human emotions—a more effective approach here is to start tending to your own feelings.
Here’s my working hypothesis, which I apply to myself and to everyone I work with.
Whenever there is a particular quality of experience that we feel like we really can’t tolerate—whether that’s failure or making a mistake or a partner’s disappointment or anger—it’s because at some point in our lives, we learned that this experience has catastrophic consequences for us.
Avoiding these catastrophic consequences is so important that we’ll try to do whatever it takes, whether that’s always accommodating a partner in order to avoid conflict, attempting to avoid failure and mistakes through perfectionism, or trying to anticipate a partner’s needs and wants in order to ensure they’re never disappointed.
For you, Nisha, I would suspect that perhaps at some point in your life, someone’s disappointment was so unbearable that you’ve devoted a tremendous amount of energy to never having that experience again.
Identifying the source of your present-day emotional response to disappointment may take some time. Or it might be immediately obvious to you.
When you’re able to identify the original source of your distress around disappointment, then you can also start to identify the beliefs that you formed during that same time in your life.
For example, let’s say that you recognize that your mother used disappointment as a way to control your behavior when you were a child. If you fought with your cousin, she’d be disappointed in you. If you brought home a less-than-perfect grade, she’d express her disappointment freely and fully. If you wanted to spend time with your friends instead of your parents, disappointment ensued.
Eventually, your mother’s disappointment immediately triggered shame for you. And then when you got married, that relational pattern was applied to your husband, even though he’s not like your mother and he doesn’t weaponize disappointment to control your behavior. Do you see how this works?
Whenever there’s a particular experience—whether that’s failure, disappointment, disapproval, emotional distance, or rage—that was completely overwhelming and unmanageable to us during early life, we will really do anything to prevent it, even when we’re adults.
The good news is that you have the power to dissolve these old associations with another person’s disappointment.
Given that you’re in a marriage with a supportive, caring partner, you have the opportunity to discover your husband’s ability to cope with disappointment so that you can focus on developing your own ability to tolerate his feelings without turning on yourself by assuming you’ve done something wrong.
This process takes time, persistence, and lots of practice. But you can essentially take all the energy that you’ve been using to take responsibility for anticipating your husband’s desires and use it instead to change this pattern of over-responsibility for his emotional state.
Your work now is to learn how to tolerate your own feelings so that you can see that disappointment doesn’t mean what it meant when you were a child.
It doesn’t mean the loss of your husband’s affection. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It doesn’t mean that your husband is going to be permanently disappointed.
Learning to feel your feelings instead of trying to fix your husband’s feelings will give you a chance to learn something really important, which is that feelings rise and fall.
When we’re able to feel them instead of panicking, emotions intensify and then they diminish. In our relationship with ourselves, our emotional experiences help us get to know ourselves better.
In our intimate relationships, sharing our emotions with our partner allows for the development of deeper intimacy, closeness, trust, and understanding.
You can initiate this process with low-stakes practice by saying no and allowing your husband to feel disappointed. He wants Mexican tonight, but you’re not in the mood? Great. This gives you a chance to say, “No thanks. Maybe next week. But what would you think about having sushi?”
While this kind of exchange between partners might not be difficult for many people, I want to acknowledge that when you’re first practicing, it can feel earth-shattering to say no when you could say yes.
It gets easier with time, but in the beginning, it takes determination to choose to allow your husband to feel disappointed, even when that disappointment might be minor.
So here’s my first wish for you, Nisha. May you have courage in the face of your husband’s disappointment. May you come to see that the rules that applied in your early years no longer have any place in your life or in your marriage. And may you come to trust that your marriage is strong enough to hold disappointment without it costing you love or connection.
~Angela
Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Click HERE to submit a question for Angela.
DISCLAIMER: this content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical condition.
about angela Amias, LCSW
Angela Amias is a therapist, writer, and educator whose work focuses on healing relationship trauma and creating more meaningful, fulfilling connections. She has worked with hundreds of individuals and couples to help them understand how early experiences shape their relationships and to find a path toward deeper connection with themselves and others.
Her work is grounded in the belief that even painful experiences can become part of our growth, and that relationships can be a powerful place for healing and transformation.
Angela has been featured in publications including Today, Oprah, Cosmopolitan, Well + Good, The Independent, Salon, Inc., Forbes, Toronto Sun, Women’s Health, and Refinery29.
