Trust Fun

Posted by fxckfeelings on February 21, 2013

When someone doesn’t trust you, you’re left to wonder if they have a point, or if you shouldn’t trust them or their opinions in the first place. What helps you decide where to place your doubt and how to answer their accusation is avoiding the tendency to treat mistrust as a painful feeling that needs to be eased with talk and understanding. Instead, bypass feeing hurt and paranoid and apply moral standards to your own behavior, judging yourself and your actions reasonably. If you’ve been honest and reliable, then their opinion isn’t, and vice versa.
–Dr. Lastname

I know I made a huge mistake in the past and I have tried so hard in the last five years to make up for it, but my husband still has zero trust in me and I don’t know what to do differently. Back story– I got pregnant right after we got together in a time frame that meant the kid might not have been his. My ex wanted a paternity test and we had it done against my now-husband’s wishes. He still will not forgive me for proving the kid was his by letting the ex have the test done and paying for it (because my now-husband refused to do so and refused to let me pay for him to have one done, he insisted that if it were going to happen the ex needed to pay for his test). My goal is to get my husband to trust me.

Before condemning yourself for having sex with your ex-boyfriend, despite not knowing that he was about to become your ex-boyfriend and a then-stranger was waiting to become your husband, ask yourself whether you’re relying on your own sense of right and wrong, or just reacting to your now-husband’s/former-stranger’s feelings.

If you’re doing the latter, then you deserve a better judge. A present-stranger would probably do a better job, unless s/he’s found in the audience of the Maury or Jeremy Kyle shows.

If you were judging a friend’s actions, you wouldn’t find serious fault with her for having sex with a guy she was soon to break-up with. And even if your ex is an asshole, it’s hard not to have sad, attached feelings that keep you around/intimate, even when you know you should move on. If you’re being both smart and fair to yourself, you wouldn’t marry a guy who didn’t understand and accept your actions, whether he liked them or not.

It’s unfair then to make yourself responsible for winning his trust when you know you haven’t acted badly and done anything to lose that trust in the first place. Instead, ask yourself how much bad behavior you’re going to tolerate in the name of his distrust. Maybe he can’t help being a mistrustful guy—no one can completely control their feelings—but he can help what he does about it, like giving you grief for something that happened five years ago and/or not doing his fair share now as a parent and partner because of this undeserved grudge.

It’s not clear how his lingering anger affects his duties as a husband, or if he was happy to learn the kid was his, or if he married you because his positive feelings outweighed his mistrust, or simply because he felt required to marry the mother of his child. Whether he felt obliged to marry you or not, he’s obliged to support his child, so if your marriage is ruined by a fundamental lack of trust on his part, you don’t have to keep him around for the sake of his paycheck.

Given how unhappy you seem to be, however, you should ask yourself whether keeping him around is fair to you and good for your child. Forget his mistrust and ask yourself how well he rates as a partner. If he doesn’t do his share, and, particularly, if he doesn’t accept you as a person who has nothing to apologize for, the marriage is probably bad for your mental health, not great for your kid, and really only beneficial for therapists like myself.

Your husband mistrusts you, but I mistrust your husband’s judgment. Think hard about what you’ve done wrong, then about whether you deserve to live with someone who always believes you’ve done something wrong when you haven’t. Then do what’s right, even if it means making your then-stranger an ex-husband.

STATEMENT:
“I can’t get away from the feeling that I fucked up my marriage, but I haven’t tricked or betrayed my husband or failed to live up to my standards for being a good wife and mother. Now I must ask myself whether my husband meets my standards for partnership and acceptance.”

I love my girlfriend and there’s no one else in my life, but I value my time alone and, I admit it, I love to watch porn and sometimes go to strip clubs with my boys. But I’ve had no other girlfriend for ten years, so I don’t see why she’s always angry at me for not spending more time with her or flaking out when I promise to see her (but I can’t help it, I’ve got ADD and I get distracted all the time). So my goal is to get her to see that I care about her so she won’t mistrust me all the time and will finally accept me for who I am.

If you’re reliably unreliable when it comes to keeping dates with your girlfriend, you’re right to expect her to trust you—to be unreliable. Since you’re comfortable with your unreliability, you wonder why she isn’t as comfortable with it as you are, but what you haven’t done is ask yourself why she should be comfortable with your unreliability when most girls in steady relationships—or friends of either sex, or business associates, for that matter—aren’t going to put up with it.

Of course, you’re right to believe that your girlfriend shouldn’t take your unreliability personally; as you rightly observe, it’s something you do to everyone, including yourself. Trouble is, if she were detached enough to accept the fact that you are who you are, she might also be detached enough to wonder whether your relationship is worth it, or whether she’d rather just get a good, reliable dog and bid you farewell.

What you’ll probably find, if your current behavior continues, is that the only girls who are likely to stick with you are sticky girls, i.e., they love you, feel hurt, and then want to talk about how hurt they feel so they feel better and can love you again, etc., etc., because breaking up is not an option. I’m afraid your situation isn’t likely to change then, and it certainly won’t improve. So ask yourself whether winning a reputation for reliability is worth the trouble of changing your longstanding habits. Remember, lots of (or maybe most) guys are naturally disorganized porn-addicts who nevertheless learn to control themselves for the sake of a stable relationship. If that’s not possible or desirable for you, however, get used to what you’ve got.

Aside from making basic changes in your habits, I see no way for you to avoid the painfulness of your relationship. You’re strongly attached to one another, or you wouldn’t have remained together for ten years; that means you’re not likely to break up, but it also means that neither of you is likely to change after a decade of pressure and pleading. She will always see you as betraying her trust, and you’ll always be waiting for the heat to die down until you get back together, then feel claustrophobic after a while and go missing in action.

So don’t focus on the unavoidable pain and disappointment of your relationship. If, in spite of that pain, you watch out for one another and do one another some good, that’s a real achievement. The biggest achievement, however, would be growing up a bit and accepting that being reliably unreliable has become an unreasonable way of life.

STATEMENT:
“I feel like my girlfriend is always unhappy with me for things I can’t and won’t change, but we still care about one another and, given my relationship-challenging habits, that’s something to be proud of.”