I’ve learned to enjoy people without depending on them—because expecting nothing is the only way to ensure I’m never disappointed again

I used to take things personally. Someone would cancel plans, and I'd spend the next two days wondering what I'd done wrong. A friend would go quiet, and I'd catastrophize about what it meant. I'd invest in people who were still figuring out whether they wanted to invest back, and when they didn't, it would knock me sideways.

So I learned to stop doing that. I got better at letting things be casual. I got good at keeping my expectations low and my disappointments lower.

What I didn't fully examine—for a long time—was whether what I was calling growth was actually just a very sophisticated form of self-protection. Whether the orientation I'd developed around people was genuine or whether it was the emotional equivalent of never fully unpacking, just in case you need to leave quickly.

I think, honestly, it was both. And I think a lot of people are somewhere on that same spectrum—having learned to manage expectations so effectively that they've also managed to keep most people at a specific and comfortable distance without ever fully acknowledging that's what they're doing.

Here's what that's looked like for me.

I stopped trusting people before they'd had a chance to show me

The logic made sense at the time. I'd been burned by assuming consistency before it was established, so I stopped assuming it entirely. I waited to see what people would do before I gave them credit for anything. The problem is that skepticism, when it becomes the default, reads to other people. They can feel when they're being evaluated rather than welcomed. People who might have risen to the occasion sometimes just didn't bother. I wasn't wrong to want to see evidence. I was wrong to make the audition so obvious that it changed what people offered. You can't get a genuine read on someone you've already put on notice.

I got comfortable keeping things light

There's a real skill in being present without being invested. I developed it. I can have a genuinely good evening with someone—funny, warm, interesting—without any part of me wondering where this is going or building anything around it. I can enjoy the moment completely and then let it end completely. No lingering attachment, no quiet hope that it becomes something, no disappointment when it doesn't.

I am also, I've noticed, somewhat unreachable in those moments. Present but not fully open. Enjoying the surface while keeping the deeper parts offline. I've had people tell me I'm warm and then also say they have trouble getting close to me, and both things are accurate. The warmth is genuine. The distance is too.

I told myself I was protecting my peace

Eli Westfall, LMFT, writes on his website that tempering your expectations of others is a legitimate way to protect yourself from unnecessary disappointment—that meeting people where they actually are, rather than where you hope they'll be, can preserve a relationship and also preserve your own equilibrium.

He's right about that. The expectations I shed were often unrealistic, and shedding them did make things easier.

What I added, though, was that I started tempering my expectations even of people who hadn't given me reason to. The protection stopped being calibrated and became the default setting for everyone, regardless of whether they'd earned it.

I stopped asking people for things

Not just practical things—though that too. But the kind of asking that matters more: reaching out when I was struggling, saying I needed something, letting someone know that what they did had affected me. I stopped doing all of it. I handled things alone, presented the resolved version to everyone else, and called it self-sufficiency.

What I was actually doing was making sure no one ever had the opportunity to let me down , because I never gave anyone the opportunity to show up. Which is a very effective strategy, and also an incredibly lonely one. The scoreboard stays clean. The loneliness accumulates anyway.

I confused low expectations with being smart

Shelby Castile, LMFT, writes on her site that under every disappointment is an unmet need or a deeper longing—that disappointment isn't the problem, it's information, pointing toward something that mattered and didn't get met.

That reframe shifted something for me. I'd been treating disappointment as evidence I'd done something wrong—expected too much, been naive. Rather than treating it as just a natural part of caring about things.

Wisdom would be learning to distinguish between unrealistic expectations and reasonable ones. What I did instead was flatten everything to zero. No expectations, no disappointments, no information either. I stopped getting hurt and also stopped getting much. The two things turned out to be more connected than I'd realized.

I kept things casual and told myself that was fine

A friendship that doesn't ask much of you also doesn't give much in return. I understood this intellectually and kept opting for the shallow version anyway, because shallow came with no risk of being let down. I told myself I was being easy, adaptable, not one of those people who put too much weight on friendships. What I was actually doing was making sure nothing could get close enough to hurt me. Which is fine, strategically. It's just not friendship. It's more like a controlled environment that resembles friendship from a distance.

I stopped being surprised by people

Surprise—real surprise, the good kind—requires having expected something and been shown something different, something better. When you expect nothing, you're technically never wrong, but you're also never delighted. You never get the experience of someone showing up in a way you didn't see coming, or proving you wrong about how much they cared, or revealing a depth you hadn't given them credit for.

I noticed the absence of that feeling before I understood what it was. A flatness in my experience of people. Not unhappiness—just a particular kind of sameness. Nobody ever exceeded my expectations because my expectations were a floor I'd put somewhere around zero. There's no exceeding that. There's just not disappointing you, which is something, but it's not much.

I started noticing what I'd given away

The protection worked. I was significantly less disappointed than I used to be. I was also significantly less close to anyone. There was no dramatic turning point—just a slow accumulation of evidence that the strategy had costs I hadn't priced in. I'd kept the bad thing from happening. I'd also kept a lot of other things from happening. The being known by someone. The warmth of someone showing up who didn't have to. The experience of mattering to people in ways that were specific and not interchangeable. Those things require risk. I'd gotten very good at declining it. And when you don't need anything from people, you also become very easy to drift away from. There's nothing holding it in place. Easy isn't the same as close, and I'd been optimizing for easy.

I'm learning that disappointment is part of life

Not the kind that comes from expecting too much too soon, or projecting onto people who never agreed to be what I needed. That kind is worth avoiding. But I'd been treating all disappointment as the same category of thing, which meant I was also avoiding the ordinary kind.

But the ordinary, inevitable kind that comes from caring about things and people who are imperfect and human and sometimes going to fall short—that kind isn't a problem to solve.

It's just what happens when you're actually in it. And being actually in it—not managing it, not observing it from a careful distance—is the part that makes everything else feel real. I'd forgotten that. I'm trying to remember it.

I'm still working out what the line actually is

Between protecting myself and isolating myself. Between being appropriately selective and being afraid. Between having learned something real from the disappointing relationships and having let those relationships teach me something that doesn't apply as broadly as I've been applying it.

I don't have a clean answer. What I have is the growing awareness that expecting nothing is not actually a neutral position. It's a choice, and it has consequences, and some of those consequences look a lot like the loneliness I thought I was protecting myself from. The strategy worked. The loneliness came anyway. That's the thing I'm sitting with now—that the two things I thought were opposites turned out to be the same destination approached from different directions.

Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our "As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy .