Trust is a crucial component in developing and maintaining emotional closeness with someone you care about. A strong, close relationship is built on it. Unfortunately, breaking trust is often easier and takes less time than building it. Rebuilding trust can be a long and challenging process that calls for a lot of tolerance, time, and energy. It takes just as much effort as building trust.

When trust is betrayed, the relationship may suffer, and feelings may be hurt. It can be challenging to recover a sense of safety and security in the relationship because it can lead to feelings of uncertainty, uneasiness, and mistrust. However, if both parties are willing to put forth the effort, trust can be restored.

Speak With Honesty and Intention in Your Words

We can tell when someone is lying since it’s in our nature as humans. We are able to recognize signs of deception in others even when we are very young. We may begin to question a parent’s statements and promises if, for instance, they often threaten to leave us at the restaurant but never do so, or if they offer to share a cookie with you but always end up eating the entire batch.

Over millions of years of evolution, we have developed self-protective instincts that enable us to identify dishonest people. In order to avoid disappointment, we consequently change our behavior and expectations, teaching ourselves to have less faith in that particular person and moving forward.

Being open and sincere in our communication is important if we want to build trust in a relationship. Trust can be damaged when we make promises we won’t keep or when we express emotions that don’t match our behavior. When they happen frequently, even small lies might let the other person know that we are no longer trustworthy.

Undertake Challenges Together

In order to build trust in any relationship, both parties must be open and vulnerable with one another. This means revealing intimate information and putting oneself in danger of being hurt. However, it’s not just about sharing personal information; it’s also about sharing experiences that force both partners to step beyond their comfort zones.

This can be a cooperative effort towards something fulfilling, such as going on vacation, changing to a better lifestyle, extending your social circle, or simply discovering novel concepts through thought-provoking books or films. This kind of common experience can deepen the connection and build trust between partners.

Another fantastic way to strengthen a romantic relationship is to embark on a new experience together. It may arouse excitement and a sense of adventure, which may heighten attraction and intimacy.

The relationship may benefit from the sense of fear-induced excitement that taking on new experiences can generate. Trying new things together can be an excellent method for fostering attraction, trust, and connection in a love relationship.

Express Emotions Functionally, Especially in Difficult Situations

Being willing to set aside time to understand one another’s viewpoints is one of the essential components of emotional intimacy. Being receptive to hearing and expressing uncomfortable or challenging feelings and thoughts is included in this category. It also requires the maturity to discuss these feelings without throwing insults, yelling, or cutting off the conversation.

It is vital to remember that developing and maintaining an emotional connection requires effort and commitment and does not happen immediately. Our capacity to connect emotionally and effectively with others is frequently strongly impacted by our past experiences and coping mechanisms acquired from our parents or other significant relationships. Therefore, it’s crucial to make an effort to find constructive, supportive, and respectful ways to communicate with challenging emotions.

Furthermore, it is critical to avoid the trap of masking difficult emotions and maintaining the appearance that everything is fine. Due to the other person’s inability to genuinely know and connect with the real you, including your inner self, can prevent true intimacy from developing.

Give Everyone the Benefit of the Doubt

Let’s imagine you’ve been seeing a doctor for ten years who you have come to respect and trust. Now, try to balance the advice given by the doctor you just met and the doctor that you have known for years. Even though you might be willing to trust the medical credentials of both doctors, it’s likely that you’ll feel far more comfortable with the one you’ve come to trust.

In fact, your doctor might even make it easier to accept any unsettling or painful medical news since you respect them and have a bond with them.

Personal relationships work the same way. Setting aside your skepticism—even for a moment—and believing in the other person to fulfill their promise to you goes hand in hand with trust. Putting aside all the uncertainty at once may not be a good idea in situations where trust has been lost and you are attempting to repair it, such as in cases of infidelity or substance abuse.

If you ever intend to fully reestablish trust, you must be willing to string together some occasions of letting the doubt go, or at the very least suspending it, and see if they come through for you over time.

Take Your Time and Open Up at Your Own Pace

Whether in the office or in personal relationships, building trust requires vulnerability. The bond between two coworkers who have only been working together for a short time but have continuously relied on each other for important tasks and projects is stronger than the bond between two coworkers who have been idle small talkers for years.

The first two must be honest and vulnerable with one another, relying on one another to achieve difficult tasks. The basis of their trust is built on their openness to one another.

In the same way, trust develops in personal relationships through constant communication and a willingness to be open and honest. Even though there may be a risk of being hurt in the process, it’s necessary to express our views, feelings, and expectations.

When a partner has the chance to let us down or hurt us but decides not to, trust has been developed. They show by their words and deeds that they can be trusted and that they are reliable.

Keep in Mind the Importance of Respect

One of the most emotionally damaging things our partners can do is belittle us, make us feel inferior, or treat us with disrespect rather than with love. Any relationship, whether it be a mother and son or a cashier and a customer, could encounter this. So, maintaining that fundamental level of respect becomes essential as your relationship gets more emotionally intimate.

Unfortunately, sometimes when we are closely intertwined with someone, we reveal our worst to them. Although being open to them can be good, it might also involve disrespecting them. We forget that respect is much more important with our loved ones due to the harm a lack of it can do over time. We may act out toward our mother, child, or partner in ways that we would never do with a cashier.

This does not imply that your interactions with your partner must always be formal or perfect. But it does mean that you must keep in mind that if you treat someone in a way that denigrates them or oversteps that basic minimum of respect and dignity.

I found this book to be really useful in my journey of building trust with my husband, and that’s why I recommend it to you.

You should also check out: Is Your Partner Romantic? 9 Signs That They Are