The conversation happened on a Saturday morning, and Gemma didn't realise until it was over that she'd been given a contract she hadn't signed.
Her sister had called to say she was hurt — genuinely hurt, voice tight — because Gemma had accepted a job offer without telling her first. Before accepting. Not after, when she'd have been sharing news; before, when it could still have been discussed.
Gemma sat with the phone and tried to locate the point in her life at which she and her sister had agreed that major professional decisions would be discussed prior to being made. She couldn't find it. There had been no such agreement. There had been, apparently, an expectation — deeply held, now revealed — that had existed without her knowing it and was now being presented as a contract she'd violated.
She was sorry her sister was hurt. She also had the clear, disorienting sense of being held accountable to terms that had never been proposed, never discussed, never agreed upon — terms that had become binding, retroactively, the moment she'd failed to meet them.
What about you?
Have you ever been told you'd violated an agreement — and discovered that the agreement had never actually been established, only assumed?
The terms had arrived after the commitment. She was expected to comply with an agreement she hadn't known existed until she violated it.
She called her sister back. She said something she'd practised: *I understand you're hurt, and I want to understand what you needed. Can you help me understand when we agreed on this — because I don't have memory of that conversation.*
There was a long pause. Her sister said: *I just always thought we told each other things like that.*
That was different. *Thought we told each other* was an assumption, an expectation, a preference — valid and discussable. *We always told each other* was a retroactive contract, a fact claimed after the fact.
They talked about it. Genuinely, carefully. What her sister actually needed was to feel included in important changes, not necessarily consulted before decisions. That was something Gemma could work with. It was also something she'd have been happy to offer, had anyone asked rather than assumed.
She went for a walk afterwards and thought about all the retroactive contracts she'd been handed over her adult life — obligations discovered at the moment of breach. She thought about how many of them she might have happily met, if they'd been offered as requests rather than revealed as failures.
What about you?
Have you ever found that an expectation presented as a broken agreement was actually an unvoiced preference — and naming that difference changed the conversation?