No experience or person can possibly live up to our expectations or very rarely will this happen, any way. Our expectations, in a sense, take away our power of choice. We have the picture set in our minds, and for many of us, this is an automatic process that we seem to have very little control over. Once we have that picture in our mind, that expectation, that experience or person must live up to it in order to us to be fulfilled. The choice is really no longer ours to make unless we can open our minds to whatever is happening in the moment and reject any expectations our mind wants to form.
Expectations create pressure and conflict.
When our minds conceive of an expectation, we feel pressure, either internal from ourselves or external from others. That pressure is on us to make the event or person live up to whatever expectations we have or that others have for us. That pressure causes conflict, especially when the pressure is purely external and conflicts with our own expectations, or lack thereof. Failure is programmed into expectation. We set ourselves up for failure by not having an open mind.