How to Build Trust With Your Partner in a Marriage or Relationship

Andrea Bonior, a licensed clinical psychologist, professor, and author, shares the following advice for building trust with a partner in a marriage or relationship. Bonior suggests that trust is necessary for emotional intimacy and that it’s necessary for a healthy, close relationship (2018). It’s much easier and faster to lose trust than it is to build it up.

To develop trust with your partner,  Bonior suggests you “say what you mean and mean what you say” (2018).

As young children, we quickly learn to tell if someone is being untruthful. It may be that someone doesn’t follow through with their promises, or a parent makes threats they don’t follow through on. This form of self-protection evolved to help us survive, so nearly all of us are able to notice the “proverbial boy crying wolf” (Bonior, 2018).

As we grow older, we finetune our expectations and behavior by learning not to trust an untruthful person, which helps protect ourselves from being let down again. So, when trying to develop trust in a relationship, don’t say things that you won’t follow through with.

It’s also important not to say things that don’t accurately reflect how you feel. Consistently telling lies, even if they feel small or inconsequential, will result in the other person no longer trusting what you say (Bonior, 2018).

Another aspect of building trust is to become increasingly vulnerable in the relationship as it develops. People feel trust when they rely on one another. In the relationships we have, we build trust through vulnerability (Bonior, 2018). Part of this will happen automatically over time through our daily interactions—such as feeling assured that our partner will be there if they have offered to pick us up from work (Bonior, 2018).

It is also important to be emotionally vulnerable (Bonior, 2018). Building trust requires you to open yourself up to the potential risk of being hurt. This could be revealing things that scare you or exposing aspects of yourself that you don’t consider attractive (Bonior, 2018). In other words, trust is developed when our partners have the chance to let us down or hurt us, but they don’t.

Respect plays an important role in trust. One of the most emotionally enduring ways we can be harmed by our partners is if they belittle us or look at us with condescension or contempt, because a lack of respect destroys trust (Bonior, 2018).

Any relationship, even that between a sales assistant and customer, involves a basic level of trust, and thus respect (Bonior, 2018). But maintaining that basic level of respect becomes even more important the more emotionally intimate the relationship is (Bonior, 2018).

Unfortunately, we occasionally show our partners our worst qualities. We may be more prone to lash out at people we are close to than we would at a stranger. We lose sight of the fact that respect is even more significant to those we love due to the harm that lack of respect over time will cause (Bonior, 2018).

It’s not necessary to be perfectly polite all the time with your partner. However, remember that every time you treat your partner in a way that breaches a basic level of respect, you will damage the connection you have. Plus, it will make it more challenging for your partner to trust you over time (Bonior, 2018).

Additionally, to build trust with your partner, be prepared to give him or her the benefit of the doubt. For this idea, Bonior gives the example of a patient and his doctor, who he’s been seeing for ten years and who he trusts and respects (2018).

Bonior describes the difference between how the patient feels about the trusted doctor’s opinion and the opinion of a doctor whom the patient has never seen before. While the patient may be prepared to have confidence in the new doctor because of her medical qualifications, it is likely that he will feel a lot more comfortable with the doctor with whom he has developed trust.

It may even be easier for him to hear difficult or surprising medical news from his regular doctor because he will be prepared to give the doctor the benefit of the doubt because of the trust and history they share (Bonior, 2018).

One more way to build trust in a relationship is to express your feelings in a functional, helpful way (Bonior, 2018). An important component of emotional intimacy is being able to talk about one’s feelings without shouting, verbally attacking, or shutting down the conversation (Bonior, 2018).

Therefore, in order to build trust, develop ways of discussing difficult feelings that are collaborative and respectful. To build trust, you need to give him or her the chance to connect with the “real” you—which includes your emotional complexity (Bonior, 2018).

Finally, to build trust with your partner in a marriage or relationship, it is important to consider reciprocity (Bonior, 2018). In other words, be willing to give as well as receive. It is necessary for both partners to feel comfortable with the levels of giving and receiving.