What do you do when you just don't trust him?

[Dollslikeyouandme]

I'm not necessarily talking about physically cheating.

But lying, dating sites, online flirting, letting me down.

Even if things have got much better, but you just don't trust.

Leave.

I don't think you can be in a proper relationship with someone you don't trust.

If I found out DP used a dating site and had been flirting online, our relationship would be over.

What kind of lies and letting you down situations are you talking about? How long have you been together? Sorry you're going through this.

Can you ever get the trust back? Or is it just a lifetime of walking on eggshells waiting for him to mess up again?

As is written on MN many times:-

No trust = No relationship

You leave.
Seriously - why are you putting up with this?
Most of what you have listed would be deal-breakers for many many of us.

Get out now and get yourself a man who will love and respect you and who you can trust with your life.
You know you deserve it - you certainly don't deserve this treatment!

I would never be able to get the trust again. On the surface, maybe things would be okay. Maybe we could have some fun, but underneath, I would know what he'd done and I would never be sure that he wouldn't do it again.

I know some people will come along and say "My DP/DH cheated and I forgave him and we're fine" but I think that life's too short to stay with someone who treats you with so little respect.

Trust is a really difficult thing to restore when it's just a one-off and it's almost impossible when you're talking about a seasoned liar. 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf' etc. However much you want to and whatever he says, you're never going to believe this person again. Better to cut your losses than waste more time. Good luck

Can you ever get the trust back? Or is it just a lifetime of walking on eggshells waiting for him to mess up again?

As the saying goes:-

Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair. If its lost it's not easily found and if it is found its never the same again.

How long have you been together?
Do you have children together?

Has lied and let me down over all sorts of things, things have improved lately though. I guess it's been going on for years.

Funny you should mention the boy who cried wolf, I recently took ds to see this and they said 'noone believes a liar, even when he's telling the truth'. It just made me think so much of not so d'p

That is the moral of the story. :) You say things have improved but clearly you don't believe it fully. You are waiting for the next lie to emerge. That's no way to live but you probably won't appreciate how corrosive it has actually become until you are not in that environment any more.

With my exH it was financial dishonesty. I can't tell you how lovely it was to finally be able to check my bank account and find that everything that's supposed to be there was still there...

How do you know it's improving? How do you know his lying hasn't gotten better? Or that you've just given up and just accept it as "normal" now?

Thing is, you'll never know. And it'll get to you. It's best to cut your losses now and move on. You deserve better than a liar.

I'd leave too.

This isn't an isolated act of untrustworthiness.

It's a lifestyle.

I think that when you don't trust someone you question yourself so much, wonder whether or not you're acting irrationally.

It's funny too isn't it, how a man can break your trust completely, but when you dare to question them on anything. You're being controlling.

I think that I just know that I probably haven't got a good future with him. It's always one step forward two steps back.

I think if I was watching myself from the outside I'd say just hold your head up and walk away. Never that easy though is it?

I've always thought the worst thing anybody can do to me is to lie, and to lie habitually would be unforgivable, whatever that lie was regarding if it were to cover up something I wouldn't agree with.

It's that saying "waiting for the other shoe to drop", isn't it?

Once you've experienced that feeling where the bottom of your stomach disappears at the realisation that someone has lied about something, you are always waiting for it to happen again.

In my own experience I found myself doing and saying - almost provoking, I suppose - certain things, to try and get it to happen again so that I could say "now I know the truth, I have to take action"

And then the lying party denies and gaslights and you don't end up with the clarity you wanted, just more confusion.

Eventually it becomes like a horrible game where you know in your gut you are being lied to regularly so you obsessively look for any opportunity to catch out them out, but of course they fight back and do everything, including piling on more lies, to avoid being caught.

If it's got to that stage there is only one way out and that's to leave the game.

IME women spend far too much time and energy believing that they have to keep relationships and families together, regardless of the personal cost to their own mental health.

Diagonally you have just described my entire marriage to a T.

Gosh this really struck a thread with me as I am struggling with this at the moment. My husband hasn't actually done anything that I know about, but he keeps acting like he is hiding something. It is driving me completely bonkers - the lying and gaslighting. The gaslighting is the bit that gets to you. The bit where you are told you are paranoid and mental for questioning things that you see with your very own eyes - and that you are a disgrace for breaking up your family over 'nothing'.

I agree that once the trust is gone, there is nothing much left. My problem is, the trust has gone and yet there is no proof anything has happened.

Here is an example, which is why I have found resonance in this thread. I blew my nose in the car and popped the tissue in a takeaway coffee cup on the dash. I spotted a tissue already in there and said innocently, "Oh I see I am not the first to do that". He blew up, saying he hadn't had anyone else in the car(!WTF) and that it must have been me. Err OKAY - it was just a blase, off the cuff comment that didn't mean anything and at most meant - Oh I see you've used the cup to chuck your tissue in too. I asked why he immediately defended himself about having someone else in the car and after a huge argument, it all became clear. It's my fault, I accused someone else of putting the tissue in the bin and why didn't I just admit it was me wot did it.

This incident follows on from a huge list of similar ones over the past year, all of which originated form the fact that he admitted fancyng his new colleague who he kept mentioning for the first few months of the year and I really wasn't very happy about that at all. Because of that, every time I say something totally benign , I am accusing him of something. Either that or he denies the blatantly obvious (yes darling, it is obvious you are going to extreme lengths to make sure I don't catch a glimpse of the computer screen when you check your work emails! - why deny it it - over and over and over again - I saw you).

He gets me tied in so many knots that I can barely get my words out straight sometimes - which does make me look rather crazy. And to be honest, I don't care whether he is hiding something or not - I just want to be at peace. If we weren't married with two children, I literally would have been gone a year ago. Grr.