How to Build Trust in a Relationship?
Psychologists all around the world noticed that over the past ten years, the number of couples who seek help from professional counselors and psychologists to build or rebuild trust in a relationship has increased dramatically. This rise is directly linked to technological progress in our daily life.
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Today, people can hide information from their partners in plenty of ways, and their partners can still find it in plenty of other ways. Not always trust issues but curiosity often leads to multiple checks, and they, in turn, result in uncertainties, insecurities, and lack of trust in a relationship. If so, what’s the secret to healthy relationships? How to build trust? That’s what we’re going to discuss.
Why Trust in a Relationship Is Important
Building trust is a basic skill that we develop from our early childhood, forming a secure attachment to our parents. The principle is simple—the higher level of trust in a child, the healthier and stronger the attachment patterns.
When we grow up, we learn how to build trust in a relationship with our partner, and if we succeed, we’re always rewarded as trust is what helps us enjoy emotional intimacy while remaining to be our authentic selves. Trust is like the glue that holds people together, letting them enjoy true love, loyalty, and affection, without serious fears, doubts, and insecurities. Moreover, biologically, we also get oxytocin—a neuropeptide that is usually produced when the bonding between a newborn child and a mother takes place.
Simply put, a healthy relationship is impossible without building trust. It’s crucially important in a relational relationship and is just even more essential when trying to build successful relationships with someone you’ve met on online dating sites.
How to Trust Your Partner?
Building trust isn’t easy if you don’t know where to start and what to focus on—you know there’s a problem, but you don’t know its roots and possible solutions. Here are some of them—use this information to understand which of the tips can help you feel secure and enjoy trust in a relationship.
- Try to forget previous negative experiences. Many psychologists note that lack of trust and inability to respect a partner space is often explained by the previous partners’ dishonesty. In this case, you can develop trust and mutual respect, and finally, feel secure if you realize the person you are dating right now is not the person who betrayed your trust in the past.
- Avoid defensive behavior. No one likes criticism, but sometimes, it’s necessary. If you’re censoring your partner, you can’t have that honest communication, and if you lack honesty between you, that causes mistrust.
- Try to understand your partner. We all have differences, but we can only communicate effectively and enjoy our own personal growth and the personal growth of our partner only if we accept and appreciate them, instead of letting differences cause doubts in each other. They’re not like me, that’s why I can’t trust them—that how differences, or your attitude toward them, to be exact, make you lose trust and worsen a relationship. By the way, if you’re dating online, pay attention to information on profiles—on sites like TheLuckyDate or similar platforms, members need to provide a lot of information when signing up, and you can use it to understand if you have similar interests and views of life overall.
- Get rid of the critical inner voice that spoils romantic relationships. We all develop defense systems aimed at protecting us from threats, disappointments, and negative emotions related to unrealistic expectations overall. However, we often use this weapon against us, developing mistrust, numerous doubts, and suspicions. When we fall in love and try to build trust, that critical voice tells us that our partner can’t love us that much because it contradicts our internal dialogue, in which we often blame ourselves, spotting all the tiniest imperfections. In this case, getting rid of self-doubt is what helps to build trust, both in ourselves and in our partners.
- Learn how to trust and be honest with yourself. The truth is you need deep self-knowledge to understand if there’s a problem, what its roots are, and whose fault it really is. If you are completely transparent in all your inner interactions and if you are dating a good partner, there is a chance that all issues related to building trust will be resolved automatically after you get more confident and be able to enjoy healthy communication with yourself.
In life, different moments happen. However, all the things that we listed above are a strong foundation that helps you build trust in a relationship and also improve your mental health.
How to Earn Trust in a Relationship Back?
If you are the one who suffers from mistrust because of the mistake made by your partner but wants to build trust with them once again, first of all, you need to hear and identify that critical inner voice and leave it in your past. Feeling compassion for a partner is essential, too. It’s harder than it seems especially if the thing that ruined your relationship is infidelity, but compassion is exactly what helps forgive someone. This principle can be applied when solving other problems, too. Granting and seeking forgiveness is the key.
But what if you are one who wants to earn forgiveness and build trust with a partner again? Here’s what you can do:
- Realize why you did it, search for the roots of the problem
- Apologize sincerely without trying to justify what you did
- Don’t put any pressure and don’t expect that your partner’s feelings will change immediately
- Respect your partner’s desire to distance for a certain time—in this case, respect for personal boundaries that may be wider than before is the key
- Communicate openly and honestly, without the goal of building trust in the blink of an eye again
Trust Exercises for Couples
Everything seems more or less simple in theory, but what about the practice? In practice, many people don’t know where to start, so here are some practical tips for those who are aimed at developing trust.
- Take yourself out of your comfort zone and support each other in some new activities—in such, to some extent, stressful situations, you’ll learn how to trust each other.
- Create a vision board for you as a couple. It’s not about the board itself, of course, it’s rather about how a couple can learn about each other’s expectations and how each partner sees their future together, and this information will help you feel secure and get rid of some uncertainties.
- Give extra space for spontaneity in something, for example, in planning dates. Lack of constant control is the key to developing healthy boundaries, so let a partner surprise you.
- Give each other small tasks without controlling the process. This is one of the trust-building activities for those who want to control everything and lose trust as a result. Don’t monitor how the task is completed, don’t expect the best result, just give your partner full freedom and enjoy the deeper connection between you.
Lasting relationships work only if partners build trust. But if you have any trust issues, the most important thing is not to get desperate—millions, literally millions of couples face the same problems. Some prefer to see their clinical psychologist, and that’s a good thing to do, but if you want to try to overcome it yourself or rather together with your partner, you now know what to focus on.