What I am about to discuss is Stage Three advice – the nitroglycerin of relationship counseling. Used properly in the right place, the “How Could This Happen?” technique will help you to maintain a loving, stable relationship…. But use it at the wrong time, and it’ll explode into a fountain of heartache and betrayal.

See, most relationship advice breaks down into three rough categories, each sequential:

• How to determine whether someone you like is worth staying with, and what to do when they aren’t;
• How to build trust with each other;
• How to act once that absolute trust is in place.

Hardly anyone talks about Stage Three, absolute trust, because the things you do to build a happy relationship with someone you trust are absolutely suicidal when used with someone who’s not trustworthy. This advice, when used on the wrong people, will allow terrorists of love to fly Boeing 767 airplanes into the twin towers of your heart.

Heck, there are a lot of stable relationships that never reach Stage Three, and they’re doing okay. They don’t have absolute trust and never will, but a lot of people don’t want to risk letting folks inside that close.

Furthermore, Stage Three takes a long time to get to for some people. Gini and I were married for four years before we even brushed up against it. That’s right: we were willing to marry for life almost half a decade before we decided to trust each other implicitly.

That’s not unusual. A lot of other couples are the same way – and rightfully so, because absolute trust with the wrong person can destroy you.

So why go for absolute trust, if it’s that dangerous? And the answer is that some relationships need Stage Three trust to survive. Generally, when other people are asking, “Why did they break up? They seemed so happy,” it’s a case of a failed transition to Stage Three, where the protective behaviors they developed in surviving dysfunctional relationships corroded their functional relationship.

Let me give a real-life example of where learned behaviors can bite you in the ass.

Let’s say you’re brought up in an abusive household, where if you ever admit that you’re wrong then your parents and siblings will use that as evidence against you in every future argument. The correct behavior in such a case is to never admit that you’re wrong, and to conceal every mistake you make. Given the people you’re living with, that’s the key to survival - a perfectly sensible reaction.

But once you’re out from under the thumb of your crappy family, this secretive, angry denial will harm you. You’ll fail at most jobs*, and if you ever date anyone who does trust you, your behavior will convince him that you’re a big liar. And he’s right; you are. Unless you change your ways, the kind of relationships you’ll build with people will – gotcha! – mirror what you had with your family.

You act one way when you’re trying to control damage from awful people, and act another when you’re trying to build bridges with good people. Treating the two as though they’re the same will destroy what you have…

…But treating bad people as though they’re good will destroy you.

To quote Ursula: “Life’s full of tough choices, innit?”

Generally, you’ll realize when the time has come to trust, even if you don’t know what to do when you get there, because the arguments will intensify. It’s a pattern I’ve noticed in some otherwise-happy couples; they get to a stage where things are almost right, and then they start fighting even more because each mistake feels like a total betrayal of everything they’ve accomplished.

Those fights become so much more hurtful because you’re so damn close.

Hell, it still happens around here. I came home from Clarion to find that Gini had betrayed a big trust of mine – nothing 99% of the world would consider to be terrible, but every relationship is person-specific, and what she did was very triggery and upsetting to me.**

And I cried the words that almost every couple hears: “How could you do this to me?”

In an on-the-verge relationship, this is the worst kind of fight you can have.

The fights turn nastier because they’re not just about what happened now, but about everything that’s ever gone wrong between you two. It boils down to, “You act like you care about me 99% the time, and then you do something like this.”

Bizarrely, the little betrayals are more hurtful in a good relationship. If you get slapped all the time, it’s not pleasant, but you come to expect it – you’re steeled all the time. But if you get slapped once you’ve let your guard down, then not only does it hurt more because you weren’t braced for impact, but because you feel like an idiot for not seeing it coming.

The fight you’re having then isn’t just a fight about this – it’s a trial for the relationship as a whole. On the one side, you have all the goodness that your partner usually brings; on the other, here’s everything bad that your partner’s ever done.

How could they do that? That’s major evidence against their true love for you right there. And in most relationships, which are hovering somewhere between Stage One and Stage Two, figuring out whether your partner is likely to hurt you is the key issue.

They did this thing that they should have for-sure known would hurt you. What does that mean? So all the old transgressions get hauled in as you try to dope out not just what happened this time, but to rebalance how the relationship as a whole works. And you want it to work because you love them so deeply that if they were bad for you now, it would be totally catastrophic, the kind of thing you'd need to know ASAP. So you use the total evidence to re-triangulate how trustworthy your partner really is…

…And that’s really difficult because your partner’s now on the defensive, and is probably hauling out all the bad things that you did to him. Next thing you know, you’re unpacking every old wound you ever had together, and having the same stupid fights about the same four or five incidents, and by the time you’re done both of you are convinced that the other person never really lets go of anything.

And there you have the problem: They do love you, but there comes a point where proving that love with every transgression – and there will be transgressions – begins to gnaw away at the actual caring.

So what did Gini and I do differently? Because I did say, “How could you do that?” to Gini. And I was furious, and she was upset and defensive. But we had a slightly different emphasis:

“How could you do that?”

All the furious emotions were there… But I had absolute trust. I knew she loved me. This was an awful mistake she had made, but the question wasn’t, “Can you really care for me when you do shit like this?” but rather a more-clinical, “How did this happen when you love me so much?”

That informed the whole tone of the argument. There was still yelling, yes. There were still tears and resentments. But the focus was on prevention and analysis.

In under an hour we’d figured out exactly what I’d said that had been vague enough that she’d thought this would be okay this time, and talked about why it wasn’t okay with me (and, importantly, whether I should be okay with it), and come up with the rough skeleton of a plan on how to avoid variations on this bad thinking/communication in the future.

She should have known. But the fact that she didn’t wasn’t proof that she didn’t love me; it was proof that something had broken down in our communications, which is an entirely different thing. We were both still hurt, but “accusation” was off the table. Instead, the presumption was that one, or both, of us had done something very stupid, and we had to fix it.

It’s not easy. When someone’s done something that hurtful, remembering that “they didn’t mean it, they love me a lot, this is just what happens” is a learned skill. And you both have to have that skill of absolute trust, because once your partner sees how outraged and upset you are, they’re probably going to feel hurt themselves. And then they have to not put you on trial.

For us, it’s a lot easier to fix things when we’re not plopping almost eleven years of old grievances onto the table.

The problem is that if you give this kind of trust to someone who doesn’t deserve it, well… They’re going to abuse you something fierce. Part of the trick, as Gini has noted, is that the person who’s done the hurting has to take the complaint seriously, and not blow it off as mere histrionics. Heck, learning how to react properly to someone being hurt is a whole essay in itself.

Which is why I think that “When do you move to Stage Three trust?” is the most difficult question to ask about a relationship, and I don’t have a pat answer. But I do know that if you can get there, it makes a lot of the maintenance work a lot easier. And it starts with putting the emphasis on the “how” and not the “do.”

Maybe there’s a Stage Four. If so, I haven’t discovered it yet; I’ve still got a lot to learn myself. But I like to think that it’s out there, and one day we’ll get there.