Why is it so hard for a woman to trust a man?
And why does it seem that she needs to test you, time and again, before her trust is given?What can you do to inspire the trust you crave and likely deserve?
If you’re a man, you want your woman’s trust. You work hard to attain it.
When you have her trust, you operate in your relationship without hesitation.
Without that trust, you might find yourself questioning simple choices and how they’ll land with her. Will picking up the wrong can of tuna blow up the weekend? Will an electronics spree at Best Buy get you labeled untrustworthy?
Every choice can feel weighty and potentially explosive when her trust and her confidence in you is tentative.
Trust is built on consistency. You, as a man, might think your woman’s trust is shallow or lacks generosity, for all your well-intentioned efforts. But what if it’s the little breaks you (unknowingly, even innocently) make in your consistency that undermine her trust?
For example, how often do you tell little, white lies to avoid conflict – to avoid upsetting your partner with the truth?
Lying can seem like good conflict management — a way to avoid that break in consistency.
I assure you it is not!
Case in point: when my partner told me that he had made a dental appointment he hadn’t made just to “keep the peace” with me, and I inadvertently discovered he hadn’t, everything he’d ever told me came into question!
I kid you not.
If he’d lie about making a dentist appointment, what else would he lie about? And, what else had he lied about?
Until that moment, I had honestly trusted everything he’d said. Naïve perhaps, but true!
All I could think is: He looked me in the eyes and lied to my face. That scared me.
Like any woman, safety matters to me. If my trust was a 10 with him, generally, before that moment, it dropped down to a 5 upon discovering the lie.
Men want women to trust. You want us to relax, and have faith in you, and yet many of you unknowingly undermine the very foundation of trust, with little lies you believe will help.
If you truly want to win a woman’s trust, you have to be super sensitive to how important safety is to her. Safety is: I can count on you to tell me the truth.Safety is: I can count on you to keep your word. Safety is: I can count on you to be consistent.
If my partner had said: “Look, I didn’t make the appointment yet, because I had important things to do today. Tomorrow I will do it. I give you my word,” I would have respected him so much more than lying to me. I would have trusted him that much more too.
A man who will tell the truth even when he knows his partner will disapprove or be disappointed – or even get angry – is a man a woman can feel safe with, and trust.
A woman would rather be pissed at you for forgetting a commitment than have to deal with a breakdown of trust after discovering you lied!
Women don’t need to test again and again where there is consistency, only when there are breaks in that consistency. Does this mean you can never make a mistake or disappoint? No, of course not.
Just understand that making promises you don’t intend to keep or telling lies to avoid confrontation can be more devastating to trust than simply letting a woman down.
One thing I know about men is that they strive to make women happy. Sometimes this means you tell a woman what she wants to hear.
In a woman’s mind when you say “Yeah I’ll take care of it,” she’s thinking in a day or two? You might be thinking “I’ll get to that later,” meaning sometime down the road when you don’t have anything more important to do.
These differences in expectations also chip away at trust. To build trust, only say you’ll do things you intend to do – soon – and then follow through with your commitment. Better yet, give her an exact day you’ll achieve what she’s asking of you and put that commitment on your calendar.
I’m curious (if you’re a man) how often do you tell white lies? What are your thoughts on this?
And ladies, can you relate to this? Your opinion?