One of the hardest parts of dating and relationships comes down to trust. It’s why it’s so hard to be vulnerable with someone new. We want to be sure we’re investing in the right person, but we need to trust that they won’t hurt us.

Trust is also essential to having a healthy and happy relationship. Without trust, you might still have fun together. But you can’t create the committed partnership you want deep down. At its core, trust is a mutual promise you make that you won’t hurt each other.

It’s also the part where you’re most likely to get stuck. Struggling to turn a dating situation into a relationship? A lack of trust could be one of the sticking points. Can’t evolve your relationship into a deeper level of intimacy or shared experience? It’s likely suffering from trust issues.

Building trust with the right one is a key component to our intelligent approach to dating. In this post, we’ll look at what trust is and why it’s important. Then we’ll look at how you can build trust with your partner for a stronger connection.

If you’re not dating right now, you can still use these tips with other relationships in your life. Let’s get into it…

What is Trust? Why Do We Need It?

Humans are social species. Trust is important because it’s the glue that holds our groups together. As babies, we need our caregivers to look after us. As adults, we need to trust others to fulfil tasks to keep our society ticking over. Without trust, it’s a lot harder to get anything done. 

Your ability to trust people will depend on your background and relationship history. Many of us learn how to build trust from watching relationships when we’re children. Say we saw our caregivers keep their word and follow through on commitments. That makes us more likely to believe people are trustworthy.

Yet if we grew up watching people tell lies, keep secrets, and do one thing while saying another? We’ll find it much harder to trust other people. Childhood distrust gets compounded as an adult by heartbreak or relationship problems. Trauma or codependency makes it difficult to trust partners.

If you identify as a ‘control freak’, then you likely don’t trust other people. That’s going to damage your ability to let others play a role in your life.

Remember, He Needs to Trust You Too

You might be a person who finds it easy to trust people and doesn't have any trust-based hang-ups. Excellent! But you still need to build trust with the right one—and that's trust that goes both ways.

Ask yourself:

- What am I doing that lets my partner trust me?

- What do I do or say that might cause them to doubt me?

- Are there times when I say one thing and mean another?

- Do I agree to things and then not follow through?

Start Building Trust With the Right One

So now you know what trust is, and why you need it. If you’ve had trust issues in the past, you might wonder how to build trust with the right one. Or anyone! 

Here are three things to do to build trust. You can use these with anyone. They can help deepen friendships, improve work connections, or even befriend neighbours.

1. Learn to Trust Yourself

If you’ve got trust issues, then it’s too much to ask you to just “start trusting people.” If it were that easy, you would have done it yourself by now!

So start small and build your trust muscles gradually. One way to do that is to learn to trust yourself. Set yourself tasks and stick to them. For example, you might tell yourself you’re going to eat whole foods for one meal every day. If you go straight back to junk food, you’re telling your subconscious that you can’t be trusted. The action says, “I say one thing but do another.” Over time, that teaches you that people are inherently dishonest or unreliable.

But if you stick to it? You teach yourself that you mean what you say and you can rely on yourself to keep your word. So if you’re reliable, then it’s easier to believe other people are too.

This one also shows other people you’re trustworthy. They can see that you stick to your plans and you do what you say you’ll do. Trust is always a two-way street. Do whatever you can to help other people trust you, which will make it much easier to trust them.

2. Be Consistent

Let’s think back to the four C’s you need for a great relationship. They are: Communication, Compromise, Consideration, and Compatibility. That said, we could actually add a fifth; Consistency.

A great route to building trust comes through consistency. That’s because it helps you to build an accurate baseline of that person’s behaviour. The more often they behave a certain way, the closer it is to what they’re like as a person. This makes it easier to predict how they’ll react to things. It also means you can spot any changes (and nip any problems in the bud). Consistency makes it easier to trust them because it gives data showing how they behave. 

Think of your closest friends. Now choose the ones you trust the most. Can you predict how they’ll react to situations? Do you know without question that they mean what they say? (Sometimes you can even trust someone who spreads gossip or can’t keep a secret—if you know that’s their baseline!) This is where trust comes from. It’s a repeated set of actions or behaviours.

That’s why it’s hard to trust someone new within hours of meeting them. Trust builds over time. But it’s exponential growth, so the more trust you have, the faster and greater it grows!

3. Look for the Behaviours that Tell You He's Telling the Truth

This is the critical step that many dating coaches miss. But it’s where behavioural profiling becomes so useful to your relationships. 

People become skilled at lying with words quite early in life. Think of the whoppers children tell when they’re trying to avoid punishment! But unless you’re a skilled actor, you’ve never learned to lie with your face and body. That’s why behavioural profiling can reveal what the person is really saying. You focus on what their body is telling you, not their words.

Remember that old phrase, actions speak louder than words? It’s more true than you think.

So for a more in-depth guide, check out our post: Is He Lying? Spot These 8 Simple Signs Around Telling The Truth.

Once you can see he’s telling the truth, it becomes much easier to trust him. That leads to better emotional intimacy and deeper relationships!

You Can Build and Maintain Trust

Following these three steps will help you build—and maintain—trust with others. Once you start the process, trust builds faster. That’s because it gets easier to trust a person every time they keep their word. We call it the Trust Flywheel. In engineering, flywheels can take effort and force to start spinning. But once they start, momentum keeps them going. The Trust Flywheel is the same!

Keen to learn more about the Trust Flywheel and how it can help your relationships? Click to book your free Love Blueprint Strategy call. We’ll look at your romantic history and your current relationships so you can figure out how and where to build trust. You can build trust with the right one—and it’ll uplevel your relationship when you do!