Trust & Betrayal in Marriage

The success of marital relationships and other types of relationships whether business, community, or intimate relationships is based on trust.  Trust is what makes the relationship work.  Without trust, a relationship will deteriorate and eventually it will die.

Trust is one’s confidence in another person that what he or she says is true and that his or her intentions are for your best interest and the welfare of your relationship.

Betrayal by definition is a violation or breaking of a promise or agreement that erodes one’s confidence in the trustworthiness of the other person in a relationship. 

John Gottman, an expert in marital relationships, has studied the science of trust and betrayal and how to build trust in our relationship.  Gottman says that trust in another person slowly erodes any time there is a turning away from meeting the need of ATTUNEment to a loved one. 

Gottman’s colleague, Dan Yoshimoto has created an acronym to clarify the meaning of ATTUNE:

• Awareness of your partner’s emotion
• Turning toward the emotion
• Tolerance of two different viewpoints
• trying to Understand your partner
• Non-defensive responses to your partner
• and responding with Empathy

That slow erosion of trust from turning away from a partner's need for ATTUNEment can cause great damage over years, but individual events of turning away from needs of ATTUNEment do not define a relationship because everyone does it at some time or another.  When we fail to attune with our spouse or the person we love, we are allowing the basic building blocks of a strong and healthy relationship to erode.

For Gottman, betrayal begins after you have turned away from the need for ATTUNEment in your partner and then begin to distance yourself from your partner by saying to yourself, “I can do better.  Who needs this garbage?  I am always dealing with their negativity and I’m fed up.”  This ruminating on that idea that there is someone or something better is the initiation of betrayal. 

Many marital conflicts begin with small things such as forgetting to wash the dishes, coming late for dinner, forgetting to communicate, etc.  The offended person sends signals that something bothers him or her.  (Gottman calls this the sliding door)  These sliding doors, like a small reaction of sadness, a sudden silence or coldness are opportunities for the other person to ATTUNE to the person who is hurting or bothered.  When we choose to ignore sliding doors because we are tired or we don’t want to be sidetracked or distracted, we ended up destroying the trust that we could build by simply pausing and ATTUNE-ing  to our partner.

Lack of ATTUNE-ment turns to betrayal when we choose to believe that we can do better without them which usually leads to resentment, becoming uninterested and jaded.  Our level of commitment drops and we stop investing in and sacrificing for the relationship.  Without significant intervention, this relationship decline will lead to the ending of the relationship. 

Gottman created a “betrayal metric” where he defines the extent of the couples’ interaction.  When a relationship interaction is characterized by the thinking that I win when my partner loses known in game theory as “zero-sum game” trust erodes quickly.  During Gottman’s 20-year study,  many couples who engaged in this type of interaction dropped from the study.  When he started to investigate why, he discovered that many of them had died.  And it was usually the male partner who had died.  Creating a high trust relationship is very significant not only for the emotional wellbeing, but also for the physical health of the couple.

John Gottman explains how to build trust through ATTUNE-ment in this video:

Building and maintaining trust can be accomplished the paying attention to and investing the time to ATTUNE to our spouse or loved one.  This has tremendous emotional and physical benefits in the long run, both personally and relationally

Gottman’s full article and accompanying lecture videos can be seen here:

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/john_gottman_on_trust_and_betrayal