Love and Trust in a Relationship

Love and Trust in a Relationship

Additional Post related:
Communication in Relationship

Before I write about love and trust in a relationship let me first make my position very clear:

A relationship without love and trust is for me unthinkable.

A loving, or amorous relationship must have LOVE as the main ingredient. For without love, what is the point of a long-standing relationship between two people in the first place?

However, to make that relationship a healthy, enduring relationship, love alone is not enough. There needs to be trust. And trust is something we will have to work on.

Love in a Relationship

You may be thinking at this point, “Of course there must be love, otherwise it is not a relationship”. I agree. Yet I have noticed that many people have very different ideas about what love is. I do not really believe there are different forms of love. I feel that there are different ways that love gets expressed and different degrees of ability to love.

Yet I am very willing to start from a place of seeing love as many people do. By this I mean that many think of love as taking different forms instead of staying with the essence of love is, which is unconditional love.

But if we are going to speak about love as “unconditional love” I feel we must also include its opposite “conditional love.”

Conditional Love

How do I see conditional love? Conditional love has a way of giving but only if you… and then there comes a condition. For example, one might have the unspoken attitude “I will have sex with you if you bring me flowers.”

It is this love that unfortunately leads to manipulation. From manipulation comes the pattern of the predator-victim, and from this we start a vicious cycle. Why? Because if someone is being manipulated in this way they will repeat the pattern. So the victim will manipulate as he has been manipulated. For example, the Director scolds the manager, the manager scolds the maitre, the maitre takes it out on the bartender, who then dumps it on the waiter, the waiter throws it at the cook, the cook yells at his assistant who then kicks the dog!!

Obviously this is just a short version of what I could say about this and unfortunately one can observe this far too often in today’s relationships.

Unconditional Love

Let’s talk about unconditional love. This is love for the sake of love itself. I love you, because I do. Not because I want you to do something for me, or because you have done something for me, not even because you are beautiful. I love you because you are you. Maybe you don’t even love me and I still love you. I let you be free in whatever you are or do, in whatever you want or dream. That is unconditional love.

This is the love that will be found in a healthy relationship and this relationship is bound to be successful come what may, because both partners love and respect each other in spite of their imperfections.

Trust

Talking about trust is even more delicate than talking about love. Love is or isn’t, it is not something one can force. Trust is something one gains, usually in time. We may trust a person because we just feel we can trust that person, yet if that person would betray us once, trust goes, and only in the positive of cases can that trust be regained.

Many people today have a difficulty trusting. It could be their partner, their parents, friends, the weather forecast, or even themselves. Trust is an essential ingredient of a relationship and although a lot could be said about it at this point I would like to keep my advice simple yet profound:

To win someone’s trust the best thing to do is BE TRUTHFUL!!

Try it out, and you’ll see this is so.

More pages that you may find helpful:

Building a Healthy Relationship
Relationship Advice for Men
Relationship Advice for Women
Relationship Test (right side of the page)