The Five Forms of trust in a Relationship

There are five different forms of trust in a relationship. Let’s define them and look at how much you trust your partner in each area.

The First Form of Trust: Fidelity

The first form of trust that most relationships are built on is fidelity. Obviously this is the area with which you are currently struggling the most. It is unlikely that you can trust your partner to be sexually exclusive with you right now. However, with their good behavior in place, in time, you can learn to trust them again in this area. The rest of this section is built to help you do just that.

However, there is another important reason to bring up fidelity as one of the major areas of trust in a relationship. It helps us to clearly identify the fact that it is not the only area of trust in a relationship.

Trust is not all or nothing. It is very unlikely that you either completely trust a person or completely distrust them. It is far more likely that you trust certain people in certain respects and other people in other ways.

It is important to note that, though you don’t trust your partner in terms of their fidelity to you right now, you may very well trust them in other realms. Let’s have a look at the other forms of trust.

The Second Form of Trust: Physical Safety

One form of trust that many people take for granted is their ability to trust their partners with their physical safety. In relationships where domestic violence
is unknown, people often don’t even think about their capacity to trust their partners in this regard. Nonetheless it is an important form of trust.

Imagine not being able to come home to a safe environment. Imagine worrying about whether you or your children are in physical danger when you walk through the door. If you haven’t thought about these things before, I am sure you can see that this would be a difficult environment in which to build a healthy and satisfying relationship. Indeed, trust of any kind has a difficult time flourishing if a relationship is suffering from domestic violence.

Sometimes a fear for physical safety may be unrelated to actual physical violence. Some partners threaten physical harm. Others scream brutally without touching anyone. Still others might damage inanimate objects without physically harming their partners. And finally, partners can threaten specific or detailed harm to themselves. All of these situations threaten the trust for physical safety.

If you are currently in a situation where you fear for your physical safety, I strongly encourage you to take advantage of the resources in your community for confronting such problems. Consider seeing a therapist or a counselor, going to the police, or calling a local hotline that deals with such issues.

Trusting another with your physical safety goes beyond your right to feel safe in your own home. Would you trust your partner to help you escape a burning building? Do you trust them in the car when they are driving? What if you were engaged in a violent situation on the street? Would you trust your partner to help you in this event?

 

The Third Form of Trust: Financial Security

Most people in long-term intimate relationships end up combining and sharing their financial resources. Doing this requires an immense amount of trust. After all, in this society, our financial security is tied immediately to our financial resources. If we don’t have money, we’re in bad shape.

If you have combined your finances with your partner, take a few moments to reflect on what this means about how much you trust them. Though you might not have consciously considered it, by sharing this part of your life with your partner, you are implicitly telling them that you put your life in their hands. This is a fairly powerful form of trusting a person.

When you think about your financial history as a couple, how does it reflect on the ways in which you trust your partner? Do you feel as though you can trust them with your financial security?

If this question seems a little too big to answer all at once, think about it the following terms. Would you trust your partner with your check book? How about your banking account? What about other aspects of your financial life, like your house payment, investments, or your children’s college trust funds? Do you trust your partner with these aspects of your financial life?

In the event that you have not combined your financial resources with your partner, you might reflect on why. Are there larger trust issues at stake for you? Do you worry that you are not able to trust them in this regard?

 

The Fourth Form of Trust: Emotional Predictability

Emotional predictability is a very important factor in relationships. While it might not sound particularly romantic, we actually rely on our partner to show a certain level of emotional predictability. We need it in order to trust them.

Take a moment to think about what it would be
like if your partner was emotionally erratic. Imagine 
a couple having a very pleasant and enjoyable exchange. Then, without warning, one unstable partner picks up on something innocent the other one did or said, or perhaps even remembers something
as abstract as a dream they had the night before
that made this unstable partner angry at their mate. The unpredictable person starts to act as if their partner has never done anything right, could never do anything right, and is intentionally making the unstable person angry.

What’s more, the unpredictable one might accuse their partner of never being able to hold an enjoyable conversation, contradicting what had, in fact, just occurred between them. Do you think you could build a healthy, loving relationship in the face of this kind of inconsistency? Most people find it difficult.

Again, this is an area of trust that people who
are involved with someone that is emotionally
stable usually take for granted. If you have been involved with someone who has proven themselves emotionally predictable, you may have never considered what it would be like to be with someone who isn’t emotionally stable.

Are you able to trust your partner’s emotional reactions most of the time? Have you ever felt that you were unable to trust their emotional reactions? How would you rate your partner in this area on a scale of 1 to 10? How do you rate yourself?

When I have erratic emotional dynamics like the example above occurring in my office, I can often find very subtle things that one partner says or does to precipitate this erratic behavior. If this area of trust is an issue in your relationship, take the time now to think of several non-accusatory, non-blaming changes that each of you could make to alter the outcome of one or several of your recent occurrences. Can you imagine that these changes would work for future incidents? Are they changes that you would guess your partner would find acceptable or desirable? Are they changes that you can imagine discussing with your partner?

 

The Fifth Form of Trust: Truthfulness

The final form of trust that I would like to address is truthfulness. This is another area that was probably marred by the affair. You might not be able to completely trust your partner to tell you the truth in certain aspects of their life, and you might need some affirmation that what they are telling you is, in fact, the truth.

At this point, you might not trust your partner if they come home late and tell you they had a last minute meeting at work. But would you trust them if they told you that they got the kids to school on time or that they made the deposit at the bank that you requested?

Whether you consistently believe what your partner tells you might depend a great deal on what area of life you are addressing. There might be some parts of your life together where you expect them to tell you the truth, and there might be other areas where you aren’t convinced.

Imagine you couldn’t completely trust anything your partner told you. Imagine you felt compelled to do some kind of reality testing on every word that came out of their mouth. This would really skew your sense of reality in certain ways, wouldn’t it? In such an environment, having a strong, stable relationship would be well-nigh impossible. Of course, the conduct of the other partner can influence this considerably.

 

Now that you have completely explored the five forms of trust, you should be able to see more clearly that trust itself is not a black and white issue. There are probably areas where you rate your partner more highly than you do in other areas. This is natural. No one is perfect, and it is normal that you trust your partner more in some areas than in others. This is not a mark against your relationship.

Indeed, trust is something that is practically built and changes over time like most aspects of a relationship. It is not something that is built into relationships, nor is something you can hope to just switch on one day. It takes time to build up trust in a relationship. The best way to start doing that is by practicing transparency.

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