3 Ways to Prevent a Breakdown in Trust in Intimate Relationships

After coming home from a 9-month stint abroad, I came home and I found a bill that I didn't recognize. So I opened it and imagine my surprise when it was for a new mortgage. He had bought a house while I was overseas. I felt betrayed, I felt used, and it was the beginning of the end because in that moment all of the trust was broken. At the core of every marriage is trust. And when that trust gets broken down, one of three things happen. One, the couple splits right away. Two, they try to work it out. They try to understand where the other person is coming from. They try to make it work. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. And the third option is that they go on pretending like everything's the same, but they already know that things are over. For me, I chose door number 3. So you have, of course, the foundation for building trust. It's open communication. Say what you mean and mean what you say. It's about honesty and transparency. It's risky to be honest and to be transparent because you never really know how the other person is going to take it, if they're going to feel offended, or if they're going to take it the wrong way than the spirit in which it was meant. And it's about keeping your promises and your commitments. When you say you're going to do something, do it. Whether it's the big things or the little things, it doesn't matter. You make a promise, you keep it. So I wanted to share 3 ideas on maybe slightly unconventional ways of preventing trust from breaking down. And the first one is empathic sharing. And we do this from time to time. It happens organically. We'll be sitting at the dinner table, we'll be talking about things, we'll think of something a moment or an instance that comes up to the surface in conversation. Sometimes they're good things, sometimes they're topics that are a little bit more difficult to talk about, but that's the perfect moment to talk about them because there's no emotion. We're not in the moment feeling whatever emotions are that could be catalyzing an outburst or make us say something that we didn't really mean. When we talk about stuff in those moments, we do it from a place of curiosity instead of doing it from a place of judgment, fear, or hurt. It gives us an opportunity to understand our patterns, to understand our triggers, so that we can avoid repeating those in the future. The second idea is what we call our Power Couple World Domination Weekends, and we've only had one so far, but we love the idea. It's an opportunity for both of us to come and talk about, in a space that is safe, in a space that is open, we talk about our dreams, we talk about our aspirations, we talk about the trips we want to take, the commitments we're willing to make with each other, we talk about the house that we want to live in one day, we discuss what's going on with our respective businesses, and we also talk about how can we be there to support each other and help us grow, whether that is in our personal lives or how we can support each other in our professional lives as well. We're both in very different niches, so we're able to provide a different perspective that enables us to look at things in a slightly different way and expand our horizons. And the third one is our weekly check-in. Now I have to admit, we're not super good about doing the weekly check-in. We do it a little bit more haphazardly, but the weekly check-in allows allows us to talk about our wins, our celebrations. We talk about the things that went well, the things that didn't go so well, how we can support each other. It's really all about having that moment of transparency and that moment of sharing where we can see what is the best way that we can show up for each other in a way that feels supportive and expansive. And one of the things that makes both our Power Coupling Weekend and the weekly check-in so powerful is that we are both willing to show up naked, so to speak. We show up with a willingness to be vulnerable, open, transparent, so that we can work together to find the best way to move forward. So the key to making these things work is establishing some ground rules, and there are 3 rules that we live by. First, keep an open heart and don't think things 2, try to see things from the other person's perspective, right? Be empathic about what their own experience might be instead of being on the defensive. And 3, be vulnerable and share even the most difficult things. So how to prevent a breakdown in trust? Share openly and empathically. Gotta put that Power Coupling World Domination Weekend into play and make sure you have your weekly check-ins. So that it allows you to course correct as you move along instead of keeping things inside, bottling them up, and then one day you have that big explosion and nobody really understands where it's coming from. This allows you to stay on track with how supportive you want to be with each other so that you don't end up in a situation where you choose option number 3.