Do you ever wonder why you can’t trust your spouse? Especially when you think you should be able to?

Before we start, we want to make it clear who this episode is for because it may not be immediately apparent from the title.

We’re speaking to men and women who are struggling to trust their spouse and recognize that this trust issue lies primarily within themselves at this point. There may have been a past betrayal or not. If there was you might say something like, “I know in my head that I can trust him or her now, but I just can’t get past the doubts.”

You know your spouse is trustworthy, but you can’t get there yourself as far as trusting them.

So, if you’re struggling to trust and you cannot, and you are sure this is about something happening within yourself, this article is for you.

On the other hand, if you’ve gone through a betrayal and you’re struggling to trust and maybe your spouse is continuing to act in ways that are concealing or suspicious in nature and your lack of trust is legitimate, this is not for you. Trust your gut.

But if it’s more like you feel something’s wrong in you rather than in your relationship, we’d like to help you.

Finally, if you’ve betrayed your spouse and you can’t get them to trust you, don’t just stick your spouse in the bucket we are discussing today. A severe betrayal takes a long time to recover from. In fact, their discovery of your betrayal was probably a traumatic event and your spouse may be suffering from a variation of PTDS called Post Infidelity Stress Disorder.

Remember, everything said here should be seen as a self-help tool and not as a replacement for counselling!

So…trust.

Trust has been defined as the “confidence that [one] will find what is desired [from another] rather than what is feared.[i] It’s the idea that when I turn to Caleb for something I have this innate confidence that he will provide what I desire. He’s safe. He’s reliable. He’s predictable. Now, if he’s all those things but I cannot trust him, then I have a problem that I need to address.

Trust is implicit in love. 1 Corinthians 13 talks about love, and verse 7 says,

“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

Do you hear the trust implicit in that?

Proverbs 31:11 has this really neat little statement talking about the virtuous woman: “The heart of her husband trusts in her”. Trust is an emotional confidence in another person.

That’s why betrayal hurts so bad and why it takes time to heal – because it touches you to the core.

On the other hand, when you can’t trust but you should be able to, then this affects your marriage bond because of that fact that trust is implicit in love.

In terms of why you can’t trust your spouse, here are a few different possibilities that may apply to you.

Lack of Trust as Means of Maintaining Control

The first possibility is that you may be holding onto a lack of trust as a means of maintaining control.

In 2015, some researchers looked at the influence of trust on conflict discussions.

Typically, if you’re a trusting person you tend to make positive attributions about your spouse even in questionable circumstances. You also tend to display more positive emotions than negative when you’re in conflict. On the other hand, if you’re a low-trust individual, you tend towards pessimistic views.[ii]

For example, if you find a long black hair on your husband’s sweater and no one in your family has long black hair, a trusting spouse would remove the hair and that’s it. Instead, a low trust spouse may start the conversation with, “Who does this belong to?”

When you’re less trusting, you often move very quickly towards tactics that really destabilize the relationship or even harm it because you have this underlying belief that your spouse is concealing negative events from you.

In marriage then, low-trust spouses are more influential than high-trust spouses.