If You Knew How to See It Your Spouse's Way, You'd Have Done Things Differently

But that doesn't lessen or negate or alleviate of us responsibility for the bad thing that happened to them, no matter how unaware we might have been. This is the only path to relationship trust.

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5-star review of my book This is How Your Marriage Ends:

“Please read this, before it is too late. I cannot recommend this book enough!
This book opened my eyes and laid me bare in ways I never expected. I have a long road ahead of me in correcting trust eroding/killing behaviors.
Please, please read this if you are in a relationship or plan to be. Especially if you are a man, please take the time, care, and concern to look out for the ways we hurt those we love the most!” - Crazed in Black

This is How Your Marriage Ends is 40% off on Amazon, available in local bookstores, or you can order an author-signed copy here from my friends at Islandport Media.

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Nice. (Image/Shutterstock)

Painful and negative relationship outcomes between two healthy partners are almost always the result of one person literally not understanding what was happening to the other.

The alternative to that idea—that most negative relationship outcomes are the result of “accidents, “ “blind spots,” or not understanding what an experience meant or felt like to someone else—is to believe that the offending partner did whatever the thing was on purpose.

Eyes wide open. They must have thought: Meh. I don’t really care. I’m doing it this way whether they like it or not. If it’s between them and me, I choose me because I care more about me than I do about them.

Trust erodes in relationships whenever there are negative outcomes for one or both partners regardless of whether the behavior was intentional or accidental.

And that’s often the rub in relationships. One person (often a man) does something they didn’t realize would be problematic for their partner. And then the other person (often a woman) reports having a negative experience because of it.

Could be as minor as the toilet seat being left up. Could be as major as a new father leaving his wife alone overnight in the hospital with a new baby even though she asked him not to.

I contend that the vast majority of people I work with, or who read anything I’ve written, are the type of people who would not consciously, thoughtfully, intentionally make a decision they knew would result in pain for their partner or damage to the relationship. (In instances which they have—like infidelity or porn use or gambling away a child’s college fund—they probably did so believing they wouldn’t be found out. I’m also not talking about scenarios a person knows—without a doubt—would destroy trust in a relationship like cheating or financial betrayal.)

I’m talking about bona fide misunderstandings. Like: I let my brother borrow $7,000 without discussing it with my wife first, and when she found out, she felt betrayed and I was surprised by how upset she was.

She acted almost like if I had cheated on her which seemed like a huge overreaction to me. Then I got defensive because I didn’t feel like I did anything wrong!

This is pretty standard relationship conflict.

One person honestly going about their business, maybe even trying to do something good, and then feels punished for it because their spouse/partner was upset in way they had never anticipated.

These incidents stack over many years, and sometimes you end up in year 20 of the marriage, and one partner is still bringing up some past incident in conversation and articulating how upsetting it was, leading the “offending” partner to wonder: Why won’t they let this go? When is it too late? When is there nothing more I can do about the past?

And the unfortunate answer is that there are some instances in which so much pain and trust erosion has built up over time that maybe there is no full trust-restoration to be had. Maybe there’s no coming back from it.

But I default to the idea that—independent of relationship outcome—attempting to restore trust with a spouse, romantic partner, friend, family member, etc., is a worthwhile endeavor even if a blissful, Hollywood movie-like outcome never materializes from it.

If we truly love, respect, and care about someone, then we should try to repair past painful incidents with them—even when we didn’t understand at the time that we did anything they experienced as “bad” or “harmful.”

Here are the steps:

1. Acknowledge what happened to them, even if no wrongdoing or harm was intended.

2. Demonstrate understanding of WHY that event or behavior eroded or broke trust between the two of you. They have to know that you understand, else they’ll have to worry about something like that happening again. Don’t pretend to get it. Do the work to actually understand why something you didn’t think was a problem turned into one for someone else. So long as you believe or act as if it’s THEIR fault that they think and feel the things they do, and that you’d do the same thing if you had to do it over again, then there will always be a trust rift between the two of you. No matter how innocent of intentional wrongdoing you may be.

3. Apologize. It’s not “I’m sorry I did a bad thing!” Maybe you didn’t do anything bad. You probably didn’t. It’s: “I’m so sorry that happened to you and that you couldn’t trust me to know ahead of time that it would affect you the way that it did.”

4. Explain what steps you’ll take to avoid the trust-eroding or trust-breaking behavior from happening again.

5. Make amends, if necessary. Experiences will vary from person to person. But in general, when something bad happens to someone else—even by accident—a sign of good faith is to try to make it up to them. Only they can provide insight into how that might look and feel.

6. Spend the rest of your life following through on the new promises that you’ve made.

THAT’s the process. The long, difficult way.

These are the steps to attempting to heal the past. I hope you will start today, and work hard at it if you want to restore eroded trust in your relationships.

Even if the other person chooses to not choose you back—a painful outcome I know well—this is the personal work necessary to be a trustworthy relationship partner (or friend or parent or coworker) moving forward.

This is how we heal. This is how we restore trust in relationships. It will not always have a happy ending. But the process is worth going through even if the other person chooses to not trust you again, or chooses to not reengage with you relationally again.

Sometimes, it may be too late for a specific couple or relationship. Sometimes, Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again.

But when we go through this process, we learn how to prevent severe trust breakage in the first place, ensuring that no matter what, our future relationships are going to be healthier and stronger than our past ones.

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Matthew Fray is the author of “This is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships”, a relationship coach, and formerly the blogger at Must Be This Tall To Ride.

P.S. - I know these things can present really small to some of you in your busy lives and marriages/partnerships. But that’s exactly why developing mindfulness and communication habits around these domestic scenarios is so critical to maintaining peaceful, loving relationships. If you have trust erosion, and/or pain points and frustrations around things like this at home, consider working with me as your relationship coach to develop these skills and habits. This stuff matters. Book your next appointment here. - MF