Trust In Relationships
Essay • 1,365 Words • Relationships, 2026 • 05/03/2026
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My argument for a best-interests centered conception of trust in relationships over honesty-based.
There are 1375 words in this article, and it will probably take you less than 7 minutes to read it.
This article was published 2026-05-03 00:00:00 -0400, which makes this post and me old when I published it.
I believe that the most important/relevant trust in a partnership is trust in that your partner has your best interests in mind, i.e. trying to maximize welfare and minimize harms. How can you know what is in your partner’s best interests? This is a complicated process that is always ongoing as you adjust and update your understanding of your partner. They will have stated and revealed preferences/values that you will have to take into consideration. I think that it is important to note that “common sense” does not really apply as much here, each person is quite different and you should not necessarily be punished for not knowing something that wasn’t an expectation set in the relationship. However, the absence of a stated preference does not totally let you off the hook, especially in the presence of a revealed preference.
I think traditional discussions of relationships center around the idea of truth and truth-telling as the most important sense of trust in a relationship. While I do think that truth is extremely relevant to trust, I would actually argue that with actions like secret-keeping and lying that the hurt comes more from a rupture in the feeling that your partner has your best interests in mind, rather than the actions per se. I think this because I do not personally believe that lying is inherently wrong, but it depends on the consequences, the harms.
I’m not arguing that you shouldn’t take truth and honesty seriously in a relationship, rather that it should be thought of in terms of best interest. For one, I think that if you posit that truth is the most important sense of trust in a relationship, then I do not think that it follows that you can say that sometimes certain kinds of lies are permissible. I could be wrong of course, but to me intuitively it seems like it should be quite strict, especially since it would be the foundation of the relationship. However, I think that this does not fully capture the reality of relationships and the gray area that lying sometimes inhabits, unlike my proposal of best interests.
Consider the following situation:
Your partner asks you to get ice cream after you’ve eaten dinner, and while you don’t really want to get ice cream, you know that they won’t get ice cream unless you also get ice cream. They will be very happy if you have ice cream together, and slightly disappointed if you don’t. What should you do?
From the scenario, it seems like the right thing is to say that you do want ice cream if you have your partner’s best interest in mind, even if it is a lie. My answer to this problem is straightforward with one caveat: I think that unless your partner explicitly values honesty over everything, you should say that you want to get ice cream with them. Unless someone has a strict view on lying about ice cream, food, desire, etc, then I do not see any harm to your partner/their best interests.
I do think that there is a limit to this idea though. Consider a more extreme example:
Janine was cheated on by her previous partner by the “girl he told you not to worry about”, and as a result she is very wary of opposite sex friends. Her current partner Jim is somewhat close with his co-worker Sheila and has been before Janine and Jim were dating. Janine knows about Sheila and is on guard even though it is strictly platonic between Sheila and Jim. When asked about his day, Jim doesn’t mention Sheila because he knows it would lead to unnecessary conflict that would emotionally elevate both of them and put strain on their otherwise good relationship. Jim thinks that he is acting in Janine’s best interest, but is he?
Jim is trying to consider Janine’s anxiety and try to spare her from it because he knows that she will be unable to let it go until she asks a bunch of increasingly invasive questions about what they did together. Jim obviously messed up, but how he messed up lies on why he thought he was acting in Janine’s best interest. If he was reasonably justified in thinking that he was acting in her best interest, then he isn’t in the wrong for lying necessarily, but instead messed up more because he was mistaken about Janine’s preferences. However, this could be selfish motivations that are cloaked in the idea of sparing Janine’s feelings, in which case Jim would clearly be in the wrong for lying out of convenience for himself.
Let’s consider the following:
Janine eventually finds out that Jim lied about when he was hanging out with Sheila. What is the path forward? If it’s just about truth, what can Jim do to regain trust from Janine? How can she have faith in him?
To me it seems like there isn’t much of a path forward in that way. I think fixation on truth leads to unnecessary rumination because you will always be trying to piece things together and catch the other person in a lie. If Jim truly did think that he was acting in Janine’s best interest, this means that he had an incorrect conception of what Janine values and what would harm her. This is then a failure in alignment, whereas failure to tell the truth may be moral. We don’t want to moralize actions in a relationship too much because right or wrong really has no objective measure that matters in a relationship. It happened and we must reckon with it in order to move on but we needn’t adjudicate it.
Truth requires evidence and evidence of truth-telling is burdensome to obtain and maintain. On the other hand, I think that having someone’s best interests in mind is more easily demonstrable. I would recommend for Jim and Janine to have a dialogue where Jim explains why he did what he did, and where Janine explains why that made her feel the way that she feels. While this doesn’t have to happen over one day, I do think that at a certain point both parties should walk away feeling like they understand each other better. If this is not the case, then alignment has not really been achieved. This means that they might be less compatible than they thought, or they have not put enough effort into really trying to step into each other’s shoes.
Jim and Janine may feel temporarily more aligned as a result of their dialogue as a part of the repair process, but the true test is if Jim is able to change his behavior and show that he has better insight into Janine’s best interests. They definitely shouldn’t continue their same behavior of the inciting incident, but depending on their ability to abstract and understand social situations, they may make the same mistakes in slightly different but similiar situations. I think that this can happen as a result of honest efforts, but this does not mean that you have to put up with it if it causes you harm each time it occurs.
A person might have your best interests in mind, but if they lack the skills necessary to do so, I am unsure of what good that does. However, I do not think that this is necessarily a dealbreaker because a relationship is an investment, and you do have the power/ability/right to stick through it and help your partner grow. Of course, you don’t have to if you don’t want to, and there are other reasons that you might want to leave the relationship as well.
Whether or not my model of trust in relationships is ultimately correct, I hope that it can be useful as a lens for understanding relationships, especially in terms of repair. I think that it offers a more concrete understanding of the rupture in the relationship and provides an avenue for repair (the alignment process). There is potential future work in regards to this idea of acting towards best interests like whether or not someone is doing it “for the right reasons” or applying it to the idea of secrets.