I have a strong relationship with my partner; we work together, we love each other and we were friends for a long time before we eventually fell in love. The problem I have is that the way our relationship started was awful. He was in a long-term but flawed relationship with a friend of mine. He couldnât tell her for a long time, and I was not able to force him to do so. I did ask, but not enough. So I witnessed him lying to her for so long, and I canât forget this.
Now I realise I just canât trust him. I love him deeply and I care a lot for this relationship to last, but Iâm so afraid heâll do the same to me. I think this in the long run will affect our relationship. I donât know how to change this and Iâm constantly thinking that I should run away, and give him no chance of betraying me as he did with her. Talking to him is not easy: heâs the overly successful and very busy character, the kind of man that finds talking about emotions difficult (like many others Iâve met). What should I do?
Eleanor says: Starting a relationship with deceit means that lies get woven into the story from the outset. You lose the ability to say âIâd never do thatâ because the whole electric origin of the relationship was the preparedness to lie for it. We can try to take comfort in the second-best option of hearing âIâd never do that to youâ, but thatâs not exactly balm. Whatâs so special about us that weâre the exception? What happens when it stops being true?
You expressed a lot of uncertainty about whether heâs going to do the same thing to you. Itâs natural to want evidence that he wonât. But I want to suggest that this fear might not be wholly sated by evidence.
Once it sets in, scepticism can transform faith from a bucket to a sieve. No amount of evidence flowing in feels like enough to fill you with certainty, because we can always ask just one more âWhat if?â
On the other hand, no fact is going to give you certainty that he canât be trusted, either. You knew when the relationship started that he was capable of big deceit. Whatever it was that made it worth continuing then will still be true. Itâll keep the scales hovering, instead of coming down firmly on âdonât trust himâ.
So waiting for the facts to solve this for you might leave you waiting a long time.
I think that if this fear is going to go away, it probably wonât be because you can get enough factual reassurance. Itâll be because you decided to banish it, and â importantly â because he was able to make you feel safe enough to do so.
You mentioned that he finds talking about emotions difficult. But youâll need his help addressing this if you do decide to stay. Vigilance needs a certain amount of soothing to go away. Because your brain canât ever totally know itâs safe, it needs to feel itâs safe, and he has to be your teammate in that.
It might help to position reassurance as a feeling you want, not a proof you require.
Think of it like this: nobody thinks that after you say âI love youâ once, thereâs no point in saying it again. We say it again because it feels nice to hear it, not because weâre imparting new information. Similarly, when you want reassurance, itâs not that you havenât believed him the last six times heâs said âof course I wonâtâ. You want the feeling, not the information. So the fact that he might need to provide it more than once shouldnât be read as accusation.
This is a very hard dynamic shift to pull off by yourself. If you stay, I think professional counselling could be really valuable to you as a couple. It is a lot easier to trust someone when you can communicate well, and you canât just will yourselves into knowing how to do that.
It could be that he showed you his true colours once before. Or it could be that good people sometimes start good relationships in bad ways. This may be a situation where the facts wonât decide things; instead, you have to decide what you want to believe.
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