“I just don’t trust him to tell me the truth anymore. I don’t see how we have a future”
That was how one client described her situation to me, after she had found out that her partner had been hiding the fact that his business was struggling and wasn’t making anywhere near as much money. They would be unable to sustain their current lifestyle and would be paying off debts for some time.
But that wasn’t the real issue. For her, the problem was that he hadn’t included her in it. What she had assumed was a partnership suddenly felt like two very separate people. He had treated her like he would anyone else and kept her in the dark. He hadn’t valued the importance of being in it together.
He had breached the trust.
The sad thing is that if he had talked it through with her, and kept her in the loop, not only would they have been able to take practical steps earlier, their relationship would probably have been much stronger for it. His shame around a business struggling had felt stronger than his desire to maintain the trust in the relationship.
Trust is Vital for a Relationship
Trust is a crucial element in any relationship, whether it’s with your partner, family or friends.
Trust in a relationship means having confidence that the other person:
- cares about us
- will keep their promises
- won’t lie to us
- will be there for us when needed
- will keep our secrets
- will forgive our mistakes
- won’t breach the agreement of the relationship
We’re going to look at each of these seven aspects of trust and how we can work on them to improve our relationships. They apply to all close relationships, such as partners, people we are dating, friends and family.
Interestingly we have a different set of trust criteria for co-workers, but that’s for another article.
How to Demonstrate Care
One of the most effective ways to build trust is by demonstrating that we genuinely care about the other person.
This involves actively listening to the other person, showing empathy, and being kind. Taking the time to inquire about the other person’s feelings and needs can go a long way in showing that you genuinely care.
If you aren’t sure what this looks like in practice, think about someone you know cares about you, and try to picture how you know. What do they do? How do they act? What do they say? What do they not say? What do they not do?
For example, one way I know my partner cares is because she will bring me food unexpectedly. Yesterday it was a plate of cheese and crackers. She brought it to me because she knew that my face would light up at the prospect of cheese, and that was enough motivation for her.
I have zero doubts that she cares because she shows me every day in different ways.
How are you showing your partner or friends that you care?
How to Be Sincere
Honesty is a core aspect of trust. We all like to think of ourselves as honest, and we love to vilify other people, especially politicians, if they are caught out lying. But we all lie. We all massage the truth and we all omit details that present us in a poor light.
And we will often lie to protect the feelings of people we care about.
So how does all of that fit with being more sincere and honest?
Being sincere means being transparent and open, even when it hurts you to do so. When the other person sees your honesty, and that you are trusting them not to judge you, it strengthens the trust between you.
In other words, by being vulnerable with something that you find embarrassing or shameful, you are trusting the other person. They can choose to either reciprocate that trust or reject it. If they reciprocate, then you have just improved the mutual trust. If they use it against you, then the trust will be damaged.
Honesty doesn’t mean being brutal with the truth. Some people go so far the other way that they think that it’s OK to say whatever is on their mind and blame the people receiving it if they take offence. They weaponise ‘honesty’, claiming that they “speak the truth“, or that they are “just being true to myself“. You can still damage a relationship through being careless with your ‘truth bombs’.
If you aren’t sure, just ask yourself “how would I feel hearing this? How would I feel if the other person didn’t tell me this?“
How to Practice Reliability
When we make commitments, other people take us at our word – they expect us to keep to those promises. When we break those commitments and don’t do what we said we would do, it very rapidly erodes trust.
I had another client recently talking about how her husband would promise to do various chores around the house, but her tolerance for dirt was far lower than his, so she would end up doing the cleaning before he ever got around to it. She ended up feeling resentful and no longer trusting his word.
The underlying problem here is that they had a fuzzy agreement. He said that he would do something, but they hadn’t agreed on a specific time, or even day. And so they both get to claim that the other person wasn’t sticking to the agreement and they both lose trust in each other.
Obviously there are other things to look at there, in terms of how we talk to each other about sharing responsibilities. But for now, it is really about how we make commitments and the importance of not just sticking to them, but also making sure that both of you understand specifically what you are committing to.
There is another aspect to reliability too, especially in a close relationship. This is when we trust the other person to be there for us when we need them. When we are ill, or when we have a crisis, or when we are feeling sad… that’s when we want the other person to step up.
But often in relationships, we see the other person in a ‘mess’ and swerve out of the way as fast as possible. We think “that’s some inconvenience I can do without”. We might use work commitments or kids as an excuse not to be there for them. But they will still feel our absence and the lack of teamwork. And they will know that we could have been there if we truly wanted.
If you want to demonstrate reliability, then drop everything else to be there for that person.
Actively look for opportunities to be there for your partner, friends and family.
How to Maintain Confidentiality
The fastest way to lose someone’s trust is to share their secrets and private information.
If you want to demonstrate confidentiality, you need to be able to keep your mouth shut. Be like a vault that will hold any trusted information and never reveal it.
We get real pleasure knowing that another person shares a secret with us. When we have volunteered something vulnerable, it feels both dangerous and exciting. The more secrets we protect about each other, and the more we know about each other, the more trust we have.
Holding information also applies to gossiping about other people too – when we hear someone gossiping we always quietly think “do they also talk about me behind my back?“. So if you want to demonstrate confidentiality, don’t gossip about anyone. We inherently know that we can’t trust people who gossip.
This isn’t easy because gossip can feel like social lubricant. Knowing a tidbit of information about someone that we can reveal can get us some attention, and make us feel interesting and important.
Criticising someone else’s choices or mistakes with other people can feel like bonding… but it’s not real bonding. It can be confusing because it feels conspiratorial – like we are the same because we aren’t like the person we are talking about. But it’s not real connection, it’s connection through bullying or gossip, and that’s toxic.
This is a lesson I have to keep teaching myself and catching myself doing.
How to Embrace Forgiveness
In a healthy relationship, we trust the other person to forgive our mistakes, our foibles and our poor choice of words when we are angry, stressed or hungry. We don’t want to be continuously on our guard. That’s part of the trust – that the other person will allow us to be imperfect sometimes.
Therefore, we can build trust by being forgiving of the other person, in the same way that we would hope that they would treat us. Don’t bring it up. Don’t shame them. Don’t make a big deal of it. Allow them to simply apologise and move on.
Sometimes we get into really unhealthy game-playing in relationships, where we try to score points by catching the other person out. We wait for them to make a mistake. Sometimes we even engineer situations, knowing that they will mess up. That’s the opposite of forgiveness, because we are actively seeking to cause shame or embarrassment.
If you find yourself, internally, playing a game of “gotcha” with your partner or friend, it’s time to take a long look at why you are trying to score points over that person.
And we all play games like this – it’s a natural thing – but it can also be very damaging. When we use people’s mistakes against them, it says that we aren’t on the same team anymore. It damages the trust.
We want our partners and friends to allow us to make mistakes without fear of retribution, continuous reminders or shaming.
That’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card to walk all over your partner, or for you to be treated like a doormat. We are talking about occasional mistakes that are out of character.
If it’s a pattern of bad behaviour, then that’s a very different story and probably requires an intervention.
How to Show Fidelity
Whatever the nature of your relationship, we all attach importance to the contract – the often unspoken agreement about how we expect the other person to respect us when we are apart.
You might think that the rules of a monogamous relationship would be very clear, for example. Yet people will have different assumptions and expectations around this, especially if you haven’t discussed it in detail.
For some people, monogamy means not engaging in sexual activity with anyone else, but they will regard flirting and playfulness as harmless fun. For other people, flirting will be seen as a breach of trust because they think of it as emotional cheating.
Now here’s the tricky part. We may disagree with our partner’s specific details of what constitutes the contract. And very often we will simply operate using our version of the contract, disregarding theirs as “unreasonable“, “overbearing” or “inconvenient“. We will tell ourselves that what they don’t know about can’t hurt them. Until it does.
To demonstrate fidelity you have to stick to their expectations, not yours.
Remember that they are not going to judge your behaviour by your expectations, they are going to judge it by theirs.
For example, if you know that your partner will be hurt by you sharing details of your relationship with your friends, but you do it anyway because you want someone to talk to… that is breaking their trust. You may justify it in your head in many different ways, but they are still expecting you not to do that. When they find out, they are going to be very hurt and the trust will be damaged.
If you want to change the contract, you need to have a conversation about it. You can have an open talk about what is acceptable and what is not. You can say why certain things matter to you, and ask what the other person thinks about it. There has to be some compromise here, and both of you need to be aware that you will be coming at the conversation with a fair amount of baggage from previous relationships, parental messages, social conditioning and so on.
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