Trust: The Invisible Force That Makes or Breaks Everything (And Why You're Probably Getting It Wrong)
Trust: The Invisible Force That Makes or Breaks Everything (And Why You're Probably Getting It Wrong)
Last week, we talked about security – the non-negotiable foundation of any lasting relationship. Today, we're diving into something even more essential, something that can ruin not only today but yesterday and tomorrow in your relationship: Trust.
We all rely on it, often without thinking. You trust this signal is bouncing around the world, streaming live. But when it comes to your most intimate connections, what is trust? And why do so many people get it so wrong?
For us, trust in our relationship means: me being able to lay my vulnerability at your feet and knowing that you'll honor that.
I'm talking about jumping into the shark-infested waters of Alcatraz Bay, having never swum in open water, with you as my only guide. (Even if you forgot to teach me how to use my fins, and I was paddling backward the whole damn way!) That's a level of trust that goes beyond reason. It's priceless.
The Two Pillars of Trust: Character & Competence
The Google definition of trust is "a firm belief in the reliability, truth, or strength of someone or something." But when you really break it down for your partner, it comes down to two main aspects:
Character: Do I trust who you are? Will you do what you say you'll do? Are you truthful?
Competence: Do you have the ability to do what you say you'll do?
This is a crucial delineation. I might trust Whitney's character implicitly, but if my life depended on her deadlifting a thousand pounds, my trust in her competence would be very low. That doesn't mean I don't trust her as a person; it just means I understand her physical limitations.
Most people screw this up. They think you have to trust your partner fully in every area. That's total bullshit. There are many things I'm completely untrustworthy about – flaws in my character, flaws in my competence. (My six-pack abs, for example, have given Whitney no reason to trust my consistency over the last decade.)
You have to first get this awareness of yourselves: we are all unworthy of trust at some level. Where is trust well-placed in you, and where is it not?
"Talk is Cheap. Show Me."
This is where competence takes center stage. If you've shown me patterns of behavior for years where your words don't match your actions, how can I believe what you say?
We constantly tell people in our programs: *Don't go home and tell your significant other you've changed. Show them you've changed. When they ask, "Hey, what's different?" Then you talk about it. Because now you've earned the trust and competency.
"Show me, don't tell me" is about putting competence in front of character. It's not just "believe me because you love me." It's "here's the money in the bank, here's the exercise I did, here's what has happened." Match that to your character. Otherwise, just telling someone what you're going to do often erodes trust more than anything.
The Hard Truth: Trust is All or Nothing
Here's another tough pill to swallow: there's no halfway with trust. You either trust, or you don't.
If you say, "I don't know if I trust you," guess what? You don't trust them. If you say, "I mostly trust him," then you don't trust him. And that's okay. You don't have to trust anyone. But there's no gradation. It's a yes or no thing.
You can have specific areas of trust ("I trust my husband with our kids, but I don't trust him alone in Cabo"). But the core is binary.
Trust Time Travels: The Devastating Impact of Broken Trust
When you break trust, it doesn't just affect the present. Trust time travels.
If I break trust with Whitney, it doesn't just happen in that one moment. It makes her question the entire relationship backward – all the way to the beginning – and then question where the hell we're going. It affects the past and the future simultaneously.
When trust is violated, your certainty collapses. Not just certainty in your partner, but certainty in yourself – in your judgment, in who you are. That's why it's so devastating. If you cheat on your wife, she will wonder all the way back to the wedding, and all the way forward to when you die: "Is this worth the risk anymore?" That's normal.
If your relationship is built on lies, on things you don't talk about, it's tearing at the very fabric of trust.
The Foundation: Trusting Yourself First
You cannot expect to trust someone else more than you trust yourself. If you don't trust yourself at all, you're going to be a very untrusting person, and frankly, a terror to be in a relationship with. (I know, because that's how I was for a lot of my life.)
We all bring baggage from past relationships – being cheated on, lied to, whatever. Those "ghosts" and patterns inform our present trust. You have to open your mind to allow for new patterns and constantly remind yourself that this is not that. Your current partner is not your ex, or your mom, or anyone else from your past.
It's the willingness to have that conversation. To say, "Hey, I don't know what woman you're talking to right now, but that's not me." To look at the evidence of what your partner has shown you in this relationship.
Building Trust Back: A Courageous Act
Trust can be broken in a second, and then it builds back slowly, over time. It's a courageous act to give trust, especially after it's been violated. You have to stack positive experiences. If you were happily married for five years, then something terrible happened, it's going to take at least five years to heal that, because there was a five-year period where one partner thought everything was great, and it wasn't.
Start by making yourself trustworthy first. Then, admit, "I don't trust, but I want* to." That's a more honest conversation. You can start to develop trust in small windows: "I can trust you about fatherhood," or "I can trust you about work." And then expand from there.
It's okay to say, "I don't trust you in X, Y, or Z." We all have areas where our partners aren't perfectly trustworthy. (If our life depended on Whitney being in a good mood when she woke up, we'd be in trouble!) But that doesn't mean you don't trust them. It means you understand them.
Action Over Insight
Hopefully, this conversation has given you some powerful insights about trust. But here's the final, unfiltered truth: relationships don't get better because of insight; they get better because of action.
I challenge you to take one insight you had from this, and put it into action. Do one different thing that can take the next step towards building trust, or whatever it is you want to build in your relationships.
