"why lie?" by AutumnRedux on Flickr

Last week we approached a word that everyone knows but not everyone completely understand, love. This week, we talk about the third trait you’ll need to make a marriage work: honesty.

I’ve witnessed the demise of too many marriages and other loving relationships caused by the lack trust that honesty creates and maintains. Who was the culprit in those marriages? Fear - fear of conflict, fear of hurting the other, fear of rejection, fear of disappointing, fear of losing the other’s trust or love or respect. Fear.

“I don’t want to make him angry.”

“I don’t know, I think there’d be hell to pay if I told her…”

Honesty, in the spirit of openness and ownership, allows for the understanding on which trust relies. We don’t trust what we don’t understand and we can’t understand without a basis. Is there a greater gift than the trust you can give to your marriage, to that one person you have chosen to know you and to be known by you?

Marriage is a place to share what you’ve done or what you would like to do and why. But, even more than that, marriage is a place to share the deepest parts of ourselves, the darkest corners of our psyche. This special bond between two people encourages complete and total honesty.

We can know a lot by what someone does. To really know and understand each other, however, comes from learning how everyone experiences what it is they have done. Yes, we watched that movie, but it is how that movie affected us that reveals who we are and how we feel about things. How we experienced the movie we just watched or the phone call we just received or the accident we witnessed is what will help our partner understand the uniqueness of who we are. Our morals and values in our individual sense of “right and wrong,” of our fears and wants, or of our biases and judgments. This is the sharing of what we’ve done or what we’ve experienced. But, it’s in the sharing of how it affected us that richly describes who we are. And, in that honest disclosure comes the trusting and bonding of one to another.

“I did…blah, blah, blah…and boy, did it scare me/inspire me/frustrate me.”

Another important element of honesty is trusting that the one we need the most knows us completely.

“When you say, ‘I love you,’ do you really know the ‘you’ that you’re referring to?”

“Can I trust that you do know all that one can know about me and still love me?”

Tags: marriage, relationships //