Understanding reconciling

[Matthew Pounsett]

Hi!  I'm a new user of Gnucash (2.6.13) on MacOS, and I'm trying to
understanding something with reconciling transactions that doesn't seem
quite right based on what I've read in the docs.

I've just finished putting in my transaction history for the last couple of
months.  Once I was done, I reconciled all of my asset accounts (including
starting balances and bank accounts), liabilities (including my credit
cards), and income.

What confuses me is that those should cover at least one half of every
transaction.. but when I view transactions under Expenses they all still
show as unreconciled.  I had to do a subaccount reconcile of my Expenses
placeholder to make them all show as reconciled.

Since every expense involves a debit from either a bank account or a credit
card, shouldn't those transactions have been reconciled when I did the
reconcile of my asset and liability accounts?

Thanks!