When thinking of reasons for divorce, many of us often think of infidelity, growing apart, and arguments over money matters as the main culprit. But the truth is, trust plays a large part in how successful your marriage will be.
A marriage that lacks trust is surely headed down the road to divorce.
Without trust, spouses will never feel comfortable in the relationship. They may be constantly expecting the worst from their partner. Not only is this an unhappy way to live, but it is also stressful and exhausting.
Is a Lack of Trust a Reason for Divorce?
Here are the biggest relationship problems that cause trust to break down, and advice regarding the role trust plays in a couple’s decision to get divorced.
Common Relationship Practices that Break Trust
1. Emotional or Physical Infidelity
Physical affairs: As a married couple, you are sharing your bodies and your lives together. You have vowed to love each other only, which makes cheating one of the most hurtful betrayals a person can experience. Being physically cheated on can leave you feeling empty, unappreciated, boring, ugly, and overall not good enough.
Emotional affairs: For some couples, emotional affairs can be just as painful or worse than a physical affair. While a one-night-stand, while painful, can often be written off as a mere sexual attraction, an emotional affair
Whether your spouse cheated once or is carrying on a full-fledged relationship with someone outside of your marriage, this act of disloyalty can destroy every last ounce of trust you once had for your partner.
2. Consistent Disrespectful Behavior
In a loving relationship, partners should be able to trust their spouse with their deepest secrets and biggest dreams without fear of judgment. They do not need to wonder whether their secrets will be used as fodder for gossip. They feel loved, respected, and supported.
One important piece of divorce advice regarding trust is that it isn’t always broken by some grand betrayal, such as cheating, but by disrespect.
Negative and toxic untrusting behavior include –
- Shares private/personal information about the relationship with other people
- Making big decisions without consulting a spouse
- Purposely sharing something their spouse would find embarrassing
- Confiding in others about matters before confiding in marriage mate
- Being verbally disrespectful and dismissive of a spouse
These are all characteristics and actions that can create a breakdown of trust in a marriage.
3. Lying
You have likely heard it said that the basis of a healthy relationship is honest communication between partners. Communication is how partners get to know each other on a deeper level, how they connect emotionally, and how they build trust.
Relationships cannot succeed when communication is lacking and lies are present.
Even small lies can block emotional intimacy between partners. Lying to a spouse about little things can pave the way for lying about more important things in the future, like your finances, attractions to someone outside the marriage, whether or not you’re happy in the relationship.
Even catching your spouse in a small lie can cause you to question whether they are being honest with you in the future, which can put you on edge and make you feel uneasy in the marriage.
4. Shift in Priorities
Sometimes trust is broken, not by a clear act of betrayal, but slowly over time. The daily behavior of a spouse can have a great effect on how we feel in our marriage.
A shift in priorities is one of the most common reasons for a slow breakdown of trust. For example, a spouse who no longer shows an interest in physical intimacy with their spouse puts their marriage in danger.
Studies show that regular physical intimacy is proven to boost trust, deepen emotional intimacy, improve verbal displays of affection, and reduce stress. Going without these important elements of a healthy relationship can send your marriage snowballing into disaster.
Someone who does not make time for quality time, intimate or otherwise, with a spouse is showing that they no longer value their partner. This can destroy trust and ruin a marriage.
Divorce Advice: Why a Lack of Trust Ruins Marriage
Once trust has been broken, it can be nearly impossible to get it back. Even if a couple manages to forgive and move on from a betrayal of trust, it can still take years to get back that bond they once shared.
Here are just some of the reasons why a lack of trust will ruin your marriage.
- Inability to be Vulnerable
You are vulnerable when you are physically intimate when you share your emotions, and when you communicate and problem-solve with your partner.
These are all extremely important aspects of a healthy relationship. Trust ruins your ability to be vulnerable with your spouse because you fear letting them in and being hurt again.
- Suspicion and Doubt
When your spouse breaks your trust, you feel constantly on edge. You no longer have that important foundation of trust and begin to question every text message they get or why they were five minutes late getting home from work.
The distrust hurts your heart and makes it impossible to fully connect with your spouse.
Not only is this an uncomfortable way to behave in a marriage, but it is emotionally exhausting and incredibly stressful to deal with.
- Communication Suffers
A lack of trust occurs when lies are present. If your spouse has the habit of lying (about things both big and small) it blocks your ability to communicate openly and honestly with one another. Without this communication, you will not be able to grow as a couple.
Trust is an important aspect of any relationship and it is easy to see how a couple could end up divorcing over the lack of it. The best divorce advice for couples on the brink of separating is to work on building trust back up.
Seek couples’ therapy, work on spending regular quality time together each week, and discontinue any dishonest practices against your spouse.
Rachael Pace is a relationship expert with years of experience in training and helping couples. She has helped countless individuals and organizations around the world, offering effective and efficient solutions for healthy and successful relationships. She is a featured writer for Marriage.com, a reliable resource to support healthy happy marriages.
What if ur spouse can’t or in this case won’t come clean
He lies
Holds secrets
Has his phone up his ass constantly
Gives any money he can get his hands on to this “friend” he always says he loves to
He had also taken money from the savings acts of our kids
Ripped apart our daughters room looking for her bank book and took $30 out twice while she was in school
Took his older kids trust fund Money his mother started them when they were babies
I had to have the bank lock all our online accts
He was transferring our monies into our joint acct that I stopped using then he’d go take it out they the ATM
Yes I have filed for a divorce this my second attempt first one I was afraid but with each bad name he calls me and every time I catch him picking up this scary ass girl he picked up makes me tougher and tougher
I could go on but it’s late
Anonymous.
I don’t know how or if I’ll ever trust my husband ever agai. His cellphone is the cause of problem to our marriage, he cheated on me while still dating , he even cheated now when we are married and he never said I’m sorry , and not only that his said I have pushed him to confide his problem outside of our marriage. His always exchanging text even during the night in our bedroom ( where is the respect there)
Your lack of trust push them away get over it
My wife always lie to me especially when her family is involve, I don’t feel secure in the marriage anymore, I have spoken to her in my occasion about this but there is no change at all and this is killing me seriously. Please what do you think u can do because am thinking of divorcing her
My loyalty to prophet munak at [holyprophet8@ gmail. com] will ever remain in my heart for the peace he has brought back to my marriage, i am a man who always busy with my JOB, which i really don,t enough time with my family and my wife always complain about it and i tried to make her understand the situation but she got angry and left to stay on her own and move on with her life, the most painful thing is that she left the 2 years old daughter. i went to her several times to bring her back home all she could do is to filed for divorce which i don,t want that to happen I love her and i want my child to be taken good care of. but Thank God for using prophet munak to save my home with peace within 7 days of his spiritual intervention that change her mind about the divorce.
My wife is extremely financially irresponsible and it has been causing problems for us for years. We make over $100,000 a year and I am the only one who will save any money. I pay 100% of the mortgage and all she has to pay is the utilities and she still has no money. She lives paycheck-to-paycheck and I’ve been telling her that saving and planning for retirement is very important but she will not listen to me. She has been financially irresponsible her entire life and I wish I would have known this before I got with her. It is now to the point to where she is lying to me about her foolish spending and hiding some of her foolish spending from me. I am not far from retirement and she is trying to put me in the Poorhouse when I retire and I’m not going to have that. I will not let her or nobody do that to me after I worked so hard my entire life to plan and prepare for retirement. It has had me so upset and stressed out and I don’t deserve that. I’ve never lied to her about anyting but she accuses me of lying all the time when she is actually the one who lies. I am going to divorce her real soon and it’s going to come as a big surprise to her when they serve her with papers. I’m to the point now where I don’t even want to be in the same room with her. I have been sleeping in the basement. I do not want to even sleep in the same room with her let alone the same bed with her. I have never seen anybody at this age so financially irresponsible. We are both 56 years old I know you don’t want to work till I die even though I might because you never know when you’re going to go but if I do live a long time I want to be ready financially when I get there and if I stay with her it will never happen. She is a financial boat anchor tied around my ankles and I’m in the middle of the ocean and that anchor is sucking me down and I’m going to drown and the only way to stop from drowning is to cut the line. This has been going on for years and I am very tired of it. It’s to the point to where not only do I not love her anymore it’s getting to the point to where I came out stand her. Her lying and her financial irresponsibility has destroyed our marriage.
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My marriage is over I could never trust him again. For the past year if not longer he had been accusing me of cheating and that was not happening. He made me feel bad and constantly defending myself to find out that it was him that was messenger other woman asking for sex with them. When u found all this out I was so hurt by it. To think all those time I was defending myself and swearing to him that he was the only one to find out that it was him. Now I don’t know if he had physical relationships with any of them but I’m pretty sure he might have had. He always lies about everything steals money from me. He also keeps his phone with him even in bed. He recently changed the pin on it so that just shows that he still is hiding stuff from me. He says it’s because I don’t have any right going through his phone. I told him I don’t have a thing to hide that I would gladly trade him phones for 24 hours and he won’t do that so there isn’t any way to trust him. I know its over for us.
My husband called my 23 years old daughter after we fight. We promised each other not to burden our daughter with fights, he broke his promise. I felt betrayal, disrespectful. My daughter no longer wants to speak to me again. My husband thinks it’s alright to do so.