Does Trust Still Exist in Relationships?

"Your love is wonderful, mine is too, and yet our love is painful and full of suffering…" Jacques Salomé

Butterflies in your stomach, sleepless nights, journeys in dreams and in reality with the one you've fallen for. You think about them 24/7 and count the hours, minutes and seconds until you see each other again. You drink each other in with your eyes and it feels like you can read each other's minds, like you've known each other a lifetime even though you've only just met.

You set out full of confidence on the journey called "a loving relationship", with enthusiasm and the belief that nothing can stand in the way of your love; you swear to each other that you'll take care of your love and that you won't let any obstacle throw you off balance.

Months and years go by, and one day you wake up, bewildered, realizing the other person feels more like an enemy than an ally:
"What did I even see in him? Where are all those promises and dreams we used to share? What happened?"
You feel like you're in a dream, a nightmare, and you want to wake up back at the moment when things were good, when you were in love with each other and with life.

Day after day, love starts to feel more like a fight: a fight for power and for the other person's attention.

You want them to give you affection, to feel connected to their soul, but you don't do it — you close yourself off and argue with them in your own head, building dramatic scenarios.

You want them to listen to you and understand you, but everything turns into arguments and fighting, the fight for power. Even though you're shouting at each other, you no longer hear one another — now you're bringing up everything you've been storing up and never had the courage to say out loud. But your message no longer reaches the other person; your echoes collide and shatter against each other. A wall keeps rising between you, thicker and thicker.

You want them to support you in achieving your dreams, but all you notice is that they're actually sabotaging you — even though they need exactly the same thing from you: they need to feel that you're by their side, like a comrade. They need not just to hear it, but to see that you're the reliable partner who won't run away from the challenges and tests that come up along the way in the relationship.

You want them to declare their love for you and tell you how much they appreciate you, but instead you discover, disappointed, that they're already saying those things to someone else. You feel devalued and wonder where you went wrong, why they didn't tell you.

When love isn't enough

What happened in the meantime?

After an enthusiastic beginning, and once the infatuation fades, the first tests of a relationship appear:

• moving in together
• honestly communicating needs and feelings
• • when something bothers you and you don't say it, afraid of upsetting the other person
  • or you say it with the intent of releasing your own tension, without paying attention to how you say it, causing even more harm
• the first signs of jealousy appearing, and not talking about them
• hiding certain thoughts and things you do because you believe your partner won't like them
• her parents, his parents, and their influence on the relationship
• the baggage from the past resurfacing
• • For example: "As a child, her father would get angry and scold her whenever she was late. Her husband, Paul, never gets upset when she's late. She imagines that he's hiding his feelings (surely he shouldn't just put up with her being late, he should get angry). So she'll provoke him, exaggerate, "until everything explodes." She married a man very different from her father, but she'll do everything she can to make him resemble him.

These may seem like insignificant things that can be overlooked. Still, you hope the other person will change over time, but you don't tell them that, and you don't do anything to improve the relationship either. What's more, you don't consider that you too might be carrying baggage from your past that needs revisiting.

Time passes and you notice things haven't improved — quite the opposite, arguments become more and more frequent and seemingly come out of nowhere. But at their root lie all those unresolved things that were never put on the table when they first came up, or maybe you tried and it turned into a fight, and eventually you gave up trying to communicate about delicate matters.
So you start hiding things from each other, each fighting their own battles in their own mind, each feeling justified and placing the blame on the other.

And what about trust?

Where is it in all of this?

Who are you within that relationship? Where did you start, and where have you ended up?

You put all your hopes into that relationship, and now you don't understand what happened.

Well, all of those things gathered over time lead to imbalance and even breakups. Trust is built over time, if you allow yourself to open your heart to the other person and truly want to know them as they really are, not as you'd like them to be.

Building a solid foundation in the relationship from the very start spares you headaches, or rather, heartaches, later on 🙂

Talk openly with your partner about how you see a relationship and what matters to you, tell them about how you define certain things, and try to see things from their shoes.

Most of the time, even though we use the same words when we talk, they carry entirely different meanings for each of us.

For example, money might mean freedom of choice for one partner: what work to do, who to be with, where and when to travel. For the other, it might mean survival, power and peace of mind.

If having breakfast with your partner doesn't mean much to you, for the other person it might mean a gesture of love, quality time spent together, connection, and recharging their batteries for the day.

There's no recipe for reaching absolute trust in a relationship, just as there's no pill for happiness and fulfilling relationships. Only you can define what trust means to you and how it feels when you have it.

There is your path, and yours alone.

Experiment, live and love with your whole heart, and choose only what resonates with you.

Your soul knows best what it needs 😉

With a hug,

Ralu