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.

And it’s true, some things your wife wants to do often get pushed to the rear. But if you are in the right relationship, and are mastering communication, quality time can be whatever you two negotiate it to be.

Take the emphasis off of the time and think more in terms of the quality. Consider emailing your wife a brief quiz, like, “What are my top five favorites outfits you wear?” Or, “What is my second favorite dessert?”

I just emailed my wife and challenged her to guess my favorite catchphrases of hers. If she gets it in time, and isn’t too groggy to respond, she may answer and nail three out of five. And we’ll laugh about it later.

Quality time.

That’s just one example, but there are a lot of ideas you can come up with to learn new things about your wife, and to engage her in ways you never have. That leads to interest and dedication, two things you never want to lose from your best girl.

The good news is that we recognize the culprit behind the broken communication – mostly, a lack of sleep and a deep commitment to providing good care for our baby. We’ve talked several times about what we feel, what we mean when words are getting in the way, and how we want to better moderate our communication.

The bad part? It’s difficult to create a formula to execute this. When you don’t sleep for more than three hours a night, you can’t pinpoint the moment when you’re going to go off. The best you can do is to monitor your reactions, and to suspend your sensitivities in favor of maintaining good ties.

But there are some do’s and don’ts that we have found make this a little easier.

Do – Remember its about the baby, not about you.

Don’t – Walk away frustrated. Both parents have to be on the same accord, particularly to figure out things about the baby that aren’t easily communicated by cries.

Do – Carve out time when the baby is sleeping to have normal conversation about anything other than the baby.

Don’t – Allow the baby to come between you and your spouse; i.e., sleeping in a different room or chair, eating meals separately.

Do – Remember why you wanted to have a baby, and the joy you felt when he or she arrived.

Don’t – Let the struggles of this child influence your decision on whether to have another one.

Some of these are lessons we’ve learned, but most of them are good advice we’ve picked up from friends and family. But if you use them, you’ll be on your way to balancing communication while  discovering your new role as a father or mother.

In other words, you are a master craftsman at your relationship. And everyday, you should think of yourself as such.

Think about how your words, your body language, your actions and your reactions help or harm your marriage. And consider what situations prompt you to pull out specific tools. Do you yell when you are upset? Are you dismissive when you feel unheard?

Do you angrily disclose your feelings? Are you passively-aggressive in saying things are okay when they aren’t?

Every interaction calls for a specific tool to be used. You wouldn’t take a hammer to a screw, and you would take a wrench to drill a hole. You have to be considerate of what scenarios call for what response, and sometimes, you have to use these tools correctly even when your partner is using theirs incorrectly.

If your spouse is a yeller, consider talking matching their bluster with calm and serenity. You’d be surprise how you can diffuse a loud situation with a calm expression and soft words of understanding and comfort. Ex. – “Baby, I’m sorry that you’re upset like this, and I hate to see you upset like this. Let me know what I’m missing in this conversation that you want me to get, and I know you’ll do the same for me. I know we care enough to start over and do this thing right for each other.”

If your partner likes to be passive-aggressive (which I tend to be), throw the curveball at them (which my wife has mastered to break me out of passive-aggressiveness). Ex. – “Honey, it looks like you need some time to chill and really help me understand what you’re thinking and feeling. And I’m glad that you want me to have the best of you, even when we disagree. I’d like to finish talking this out with you, but if you need some space, I’ll be here.”

The difficulty in this is when people don’t want to come across as docile or submissive, but the truth is that you have more power in negotiating than fighting. You can use a huge screwdriver for a small screw and take forever, or you can reach for the smaller tool, and get the job done faster.

To be a master craftsman at marriage, you have to learn the tools that you have, and practice using them appropriately. We all have our strategies to achieve what we want from our spouses; some good and some bad. But if you learn how your actions and reaction influence your spouse, and commit to being a better relationship builder, you can start a dream house of a partnership from this moment on.

But as I moved up in age, the time around my immediate family became less frequent and the names became a little more distant. ‘Baby’ and ‘sweetheart’ became the regular rotation.

I still go by each of these names, but now I’m focusing on the two names I like best. ‘Husband’ and soon, ‘Daddy.’

Two things that make this critical to me in the next 25 days when the baby is supposed to arrive. A pretty emotional argument last night with my wife led to me doing some research today. Half soul-searching, a quarter curiosity, and a quarter effort to waste my lunch break at work. I looked up some stuff on ADHD; not spurred by an emotional jab placed by my wife during our argument, but out of some well-meaning questions that she has long been searching to answer.

“Why is it so hard for you to listen?”

“I don’t understand why it seems so difficult for you remember the things we need to have done around the house.”

We have long been brawling about my lack of intuition and care when it comes to household chores. It’s not that I’m lazy, but I can be easily distracted. By television, by phone calls, by anything not household chores related. But last night was different; maybe it was her hormones, maybe it was the beer I was drinking. But last night, for the first time, I felt her pain.

I felt how painful it would have been for her to birth a child and try to balance the baby with a fully-grown functioning baby for a spouse. I could hear the anguish she was feeling, the threat of loneliness in household maintenance while shouldering the great burden of pregnancy. I could visualize that, five or ten years down the road, this was something that could significantly impact our marriage.

So I managed to convince her that I was sincere in my apologies, and diligent in my pledge to change. I’d always been sincere and diligent, but would always manage to slip back into the same kind of behavior.

So today, I Googled my bad habits. Easily distracted. Lack of attention to detail. Trouble listening. Bouncing between tasks and assignments.

And this is what I came up with.

Yeah, not something you want to find that you may be struggling with as a 28-year-old man.

So now I have to redefine what my names mean to me. They now mean making lists. Being cognizant of distractions and removing them before getting started on a task. I haven’t seen a doctor yet, but considering that these are very real obstacles to living a healthy and happy life, and traits that may pass on to my child in spite of the anal retentive genes the child will inherit from its mother, it’s something I gotta throw in the bag real quick.

Husband and Daddy. Obviously, you can’t have two more important names in this lifetime. So I can’t make up my mind about if I’m relieved to find out that I may have ADHD, or if I should be more nervous about what my child and wife may have to put up with out of scatterbrained dad?

Either way, these are names I wasn’t born into. These are names I took on. And if it takes post-it notes, pop up messages on my Blackberry, and a slew of reminders and motivational phrases, I have to wear these names well from now on.

Just like that.

And to be honest, I can’t blame her at all. There’s just over a month left before our little one arrives, and I can only imagine how tired my wife is of carrying around extra weight to match her extra-sensitive hormones. A baby takes a lot out of a woman, and I guess as a way to balance out things as much as possible, God designed it so husbands and fathers have to deal with their women going completely berzerk throughout the process.

Maybe in time, I’ll have enough years under my belt to learn how to navigate this pregnancy thing. I’ve tried to be quietly patient, and I’ve tried to stand firm and be confident. Nothing can stop the mack truck of a tired pregnant woman with a bone to pick.

What I do know is that I love her dearly for being strong enough to handle pregnancy. Not every woman would have the energy to go to work and run a household while on an emotional tightrope for months at a time, so she certainly deserves more than credit. I wish I could give to her whatever is greater than credit, but it can’t be but so much; because inevitably I’ll get it wrong and be scorned for trying.

And in a weird sense, I wouldn’t have it any other way. After all, we plan on doing this, what, two or three more times?

Duck and cover. That’s the best advice I can give if you are in a similar situation.

Yet, you don’t approach your marriage with the same methodical approach.

This is the number one reason why your marriage is hard. Because you have yet to accept the fact that a marriage requires regular maintenance. Sexual maintenance, spiritual maintenance, intelligence maintenance and excitement maintenance. If you’ve been arguing, don’t feel the same about your spouse, or find that your spouse is intimately tied to many of your personal problems, your relationship is on fumes.You’re just running on the mere establishment that is “a relationship.”

Get out of the mode of thinking that marriage is easy and natural. Marriage is probably the most unnatural institution on the planet. Two people committing fidelity, combining resources and sharing space for the rest of their natural lives together? Think about it, if someone offered that deal to you with a random person, you wouldn’t take it without a one-time payout to be awarded via direct deposit.

But because you share meals and a bed with someone for an extended period of time, its supposed to be different? Not at all. In fact, the difficulty in marriage is that people expect to know each other, and to have mastered idiosyncrasies that are always under construction.

Reality is that you need to recognize two important things before you get married and while you are married. One, that marriage is nothing sweet. The great moments you have with a spouse are created, not happenstance. Committing to listening, laughing and patience never pay off immediately, but they do reap long term benefits of trust and satisfaction.

Two, you need to understand that bad thing are going to happen, and you can’t take it personally. It’s natural to feel like marriage is a mistake and you made a wrong choice when you are in the heat of an argument, but it’s usually just that; one argument. Problems are usually solved when you aren’t yelling and screaming at each other,rather, in random statements of understanding and affection.

Marriage is hard because you think it should be easy. The harder you think marriage is, and the dedication that you show daily to make it easier, will make your perspective completely change.

Don’t get me wrong; there’s no long-term damage or foreseeable circumstance that would lead to a REAL separation, but it’s definitely at a place where two floors and silence are the best referees in the heavyweight bout.

The good part is that no one is budging, so it’s interesting to see that both of us are passionate about our perspectives, and hopefully, we’ll grow from this scenario. The bad part? You always miss your partner most when you choose not to be near them out of anger.

Does it really matter what the argument is about? Misplaced frustration on her part, unnecessary sensitivity on my part, it’s the darkest parts of our relationship over the past four years. Sometimes, it has to reach impasses like this in order to define how much we really love each other. In the past, I have let macho get in the way of seeking swift resolution, and it takes a lot to come back from that.

But because I have an intelligent independent wife, it’s also a flaw of hers. When the stars align and the sun is just right, we both adopt the “get you first” philosophy, and it equates to one of two things. Late night arguments that find resolution in the early hours of the following day, or several days of snapping at each other and mixed signals.

It’s a blower that we are probably going to be arguing throughout the Fourth of July weekend, but so be it. We’ll let the Lord sort it out and keep praying for the best. For now, my immediate future is filled with X-Box Live, blogging and probably Subway sandwiches.

Man, I hate arguing with my wife.

It got me thinking of things that make a marriage happy and healthy, and while you can look in a magazine or on in a book for similar answers, here are five physical behaviors that can be hallmarks of a strong relationship.

1. Listening  - This one is obvious, but the physical manifestation is for every 20 seconds you spend talking, you should spend two minutes listening. Most times, your spouse is not going to say what they truly think or feel until the very end of any given statement. The rest is just precipitors and adorning observations, but their last few statements are usually the instructions you need to take to become a better spouse for them.

2. Offering – When is the last time you offered some assistance to your significant other? And not just an extra helping of food or an opinion that wasn’t needed, but some help on a work project or a hobby?

3. Understanding - When you get into an argument and you have an epiphany about something your spouse has said, how often do you say, “You’re right. I understand.” Those two words, “I understand,” go miles in a relationship like you wouldn’t believe, because it makes your partner feel equal, intelligent, and emotional capable of expressing feeling.

4. Laughing - Try this out this evening. Think of one of the funniest moments you have ever shared with your spouse, and bring it up just as they are taking a drink at dinner tonight. A funny statement, a humorous scenario, anything that will get the drink to spray all over the place and the good times rolling.

5. Congratulating – When is the last time you told your spouse that you were proud of them? Have you congratulated them on keeping a good house, being a good parent, giving good advice to friends, or being patient where they have not been before? You’re approval matters. A lot.

So, with all the courage I could muster, I waited until we nearly fell asleep last night to tell her that she’s been having mood swings lately. I said it nicely, with plenty of tact. I waited for her to go silent on me, or to blow up. “Either way,” I thought, “this isn’t going to end up in a restful night’s sleep.”

And, as my soul mate is prone to do, she completely surprised me. She playfully pretended to be offended, and we fell asleep in each other’s embrace. And when we awoke this morning, she was in a subdued mood, customary for the most non-morning person in the world.

I completely didn’t see that coming.

I was under the impression that mentioning the mood swings of a nearly five-month-pregnant woman would create a deluge of emotion, sure to sweep up the person bold enough to travel into the rough waters. Not with my wife. She seemed to take it well, and seemed to be glad that I was willing to keep our silent agreement of complete honesty at all times.

I whiffed on that assessment about my girl. She may go crazy every now and then, but when it counts, no matter what kind of number Mother Nature is doing on her body, what we are is what we always will be.