The Two Reoccurring Moments That Destroy Trust in Relationships
We destroy trust — and as a result, our relationships — by recycling two moments over and over again.
By Matthew Fray
In one home, it’s a pair of dehumidifiers near the family’s basement laundry room.
In another home, it’s a little double-sided sign stuck by magnet to the dishwasher. One side reads ‘Clean.’ The other reads ‘Dirty.’
In my home, it was all sorts of things, but a dish by the sink — a drinking glass for water — stands out as the star of the marriage-killing show.
This is how your marriage ends. This is how your relationship ends. In the sometimes difficult-to-hear whisper of a busy, routine-filled life speckled with what one person considers a “little thing” — a minor infraction so slight as to be deemed inconsequential. This same seemingly benign event is experienced by their partner as an emotional papercut at best, and an emotional gut punch at worst.
Relationships full of stress and conflict lack the ingredient most needed for relationships to succeed — trust. Above all, we must have trust. And relationships — and their participants — are routinely damaged because of these nuanced moments in which one person interprets it as…
