Creating a Trusting Relationship: 4 Essential Steps

1. Always Follow Through

People get burned and lied to throughout their lives. It’s just a part of living. Whether you’ve been the victim of little white lies before or you have experienced past relationships where your partner said one thing and did another, it’s easy for trust to get shattered over time.

So, you might find that you trust people less today than you did years ago. It’s a self-defense mechanism and isn’t necessarily one person’s fault.

To combat mistrust, make sure you and your partner are on the same page about following through with your promises and everything else you say. Communication is key to building and maintaining trust.

To build a trusting relationship, make sure the way you communicate with each other is honest and open. Even if the conversations can be hard sometimes, you’ll build more trust with the truth than you will be by letting your partner down.

2. Understand the Importance of Respect

Trust and respect go hand-in-hand. While some relationships thrive on gentle teasing and joking around, there’s a difference between having fun and belittling the person you care about.

Think about the level of respect you have for people in general. How do you treat your boss at work? How do you treat the waiter at your favorite restaurant?

Now, consider how much more you should respect the person you say you love. If you can give a basic level of respect to people you hardly know, you should give much more than that to your partner, and vice versa. After all, respect is a vital part of building a trusting relationship.

3. Express Your Feelings

Whether you’ve been in an untrustworthy relationship in the past or you just have a hard time expressing yourself, trust in a relationship can’t grow unless both people are willing to open up.

It can be scary to be vulnerable in front of your partner. If you’re not, though, they may eventually find out that you’re keeping certain feelings hidden from them. Or, your problems may become bigger until they’re too much to handle on your own.

Letting your partner know how you feel—whether it’s good or bad—will help to build a trusting relationship in a variety of ways.

First, it will let your partner know you trust them enough to show your vulnerabilities. Second, when they offer to help you or just to be a listening ear and support, they’re showing you that you can trust them too.

4. Believe Your Partner

Giving the person you love the benefit of the doubt isn’t always easy. This is especially true in relationships where trust has been broken before. But, if you’re constantly looking for ways to “catch” your partner in the act, you’ll never fully be able to trust them. As a result, your relationship will undoubtedly suffer.

If you want to create a strong relationship, you have to be fully committed. Believe your partner when they say what they’re going to do. Assume they aren’t keeping things from you.

While this might seem naive to some, it’s the best way to move past something that may have caused a roadblock in your relationship.

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No matter what stage your relationship is in, it is always beneficial to work on building and maintaining trust.