Why You Can’t Build Trust in a Relationship
I love you. I trust you.
See how interchangeable that is? To have one in a relationship is to have the other, and if one is missing, the other one also has found a serious hiding place within your heart.
As hard as it is to accept, and contrary to most Valentines Day cards and psychological advice, you can’t build trust. You can’t build what has and infinite value and place. It’s like being pregnant; you either are, or you aren’t.
Like pregnancy, trust can exist and grow stronger until its able to survive on the merits of the person working hard to earn it. But it’s not something you can quantify with percentages, feelings or examples. You either trust someone or you don’t, and the kicker in most relationships is that people confuse love and hope for a partner with trusting them.
If your trust has been betrayed, the most responsible thing you can do for yourself and your partner is to acknowledge that its gone, and that you don’t know the way to finding it again. You can’t tell a partner who has lied to you, deceived you, or made less of your emotions that there are tasks or behavior that can earn back the trust. Its unfair for you to think that a set amount of objectives can be timed with your emotional clock, and its not fair to burden a person with goals that may or may not achieve a desired result.
Case in point – for a long portion of our relationship, my wife could not trust me to do chores without being asked. I’m easily distracted, and general averse to domestic responsibilities. But because I love her, and want her to trust me, and tried multiple methods of trying to remember which chores to do on what days at what times.
Before, she didn’t trust me to do anything. And my initiation of doing chores didn’t make her trust me beyond those moments. But now, she trusts me to do more than slightly than the zero amount I was doing before. She can rely on certain things being in place. She trusts me to do the few things I have mastered, and maybe, she’ll trust me to do other things.
She’ll likely never fully trust me to be a domestic prince, but she trusts that I want to do the right thing, and with a few things, I meet that expectation.
You can trust someone to do some of the right things, but in matters of fidelity and honesty, it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. If you can’t trust who your partner is with, you can’t trust where they are. If you can’t trust where they are, you can’t trust what they are doing.
Trust is not a construct. It’s an existence based on the promise of continually met expectations. Should these expectations deviate at any degree with action or lackthereof, there is no trust.
