5 Signs of Trust Issues in a Relationship
Trust isn't just something you either have or you don't. It's something that gets built, tested, repaired, and sometimes quietly unraveled over time. If something in your relationship has started to feel off but you're having trouble naming it, you may be looking at a trust issue.
That word, "trust issue," can feel loaded. It often carries a kind of shame with it, as though having one means something is wrong with you. But here's what I know from working with couples: trust issues are incredibly common, and they're almost always rooted in something understandable. Past experiences, old wounds, patterns learned long before this relationship even began.
The goal of this post isn't to diagnose your relationship or your partner. It's to help you recognize some of the signs, understand where they come from, and feel more empowered to do something about them.
Researchers have long understood that trust in romantic relationships is built on more than just honesty. A foundational study by Rempel, Holmes, and Zanna published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology identified three distinct dimensions of trust in close relationships: predictability (knowing how your partner will behave), dependability (believing they'll come through for you), and faith (a deeper conviction that your partner genuinely cares about your wellbeing). When any of these dimensions feels shaky, it shows up in real and recognizable ways. 1
Here are five of the most common signs.
You Assume the Worst About Your Partner's Intentions
This one is often the quietest and the most painful. Your partner comes home late, and before they've even had a chance to explain, you've already run through a dozen possible betrayals in your mind. They don't text back for an hour, and you're certain something is wrong, or that they don't care, or that they're hiding something.
In therapy, we call this negative attribution bias. It's the tendency to assign the most threatening explanation to an ambiguous situation. And when it becomes the default setting in a relationship, it's exhausting for everyone involved.
What makes this particularly tricky is that it often doesn't feel like distrust. It can feel like being realistic, or protective, or simply aware. But if you notice that you routinely interpret your partner's neutral actions as threats, that's worth paying attention to. It may be less about what they're actually doing and more about what past experiences have taught you to expect.
You Find Yourself Needing to Check Up on Your Partner
There's a difference between staying connected and monitoring. Sending a loving check-in during the day is connection. Checking their location every twenty minutes, reading through their messages, or asking the same questions repeatedly in hopes of catching an inconsistency, that's anxiety trying to stand in for trust.
Surveillance behaviors like these rarely provide the relief they promise. You check, you feel okay for a little while, and then the doubt creeps back in. It becomes a cycle. And over time it tends to erode both your own peace of mind and your partner's sense of being trusted and respected in the relationship.
If you recognize this pattern in yourself, please know it doesn't make you a bad partner. It usually means that something in your history, whether in this relationship or a previous one, taught you that staying vigilant was necessary for safety. That's a very human response. It just may not be serving you anymore.
Trust issues are almost always rooted in something understandable. They are rarely about who you are, and almost always about what you've been through.
Vulnerability Feels Genuinely Dangerous
Healthy relationships require vulnerability. The ability to let your partner see the parts of you that feel uncertain, afraid, or not yet fully formed. But when trust is low, vulnerability stops feeling like closeness and starts feeling like exposure. Like handing someone a map to everything that could hurt you.
This shows up in different ways for different people. For some it looks like keeping conversations surface level, even with a partner they've been with for years. For others it's the inability to ask for what they need, because needing something feels like too much of a risk. And for some it's a pervasive sense of emotional guardedness, a wall that they themselves know is there but can't seem to take down.
The American Psychological Association notes that emotional safety is one of the cornerstones of a healthy romantic relationship. When that safety has been compromised, whether by a specific event or a slow accumulation of small disappointments, the impulse to self-protect is a natural response. It just tends to keep both partners feeling more alone.
Jealousy Shows Up in Ways That Feel Out of Proportion
A little jealousy now and then is pretty normal in relationships. It's when jealousy starts driving decisions, creating conflict, or showing up in situations where it doesn't quite fit the evidence that it's worth examining more closely.
Jealousy in the context of trust issues isn't usually about the other person your partner talked to at a party. It's about a deeper fear: that you are not enough, that this relationship is fragile, or that you will be left. Those fears can attach themselves to anything nearby and turn it into evidence for their case.
Research also points to a connection between attachment style and trust. A 2023 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that both anxious and avoidant attachment styles were associated with lower levels of dyadic trust in romantic relationships, and that past relationship experiences including parental divorce and prior breakups played a meaningful role in shaping how much trust people could access. 2 In other words, the jealousy you're feeling may have roots that go much further back than this relationship.
Noticing these patterns in your relationship? Working through them with support can make all the difference.
Let's Connect →Reassurance Never Quite Feels Like Enough
Your partner tells you they love you, they're committed, they're not going anywhere. And for a moment you feel it. And then it fades, and you need to hear it again. Or you find yourself looking for reasons the reassurance might not be true, replaying their words and searching for the catch.
This is one of the more painful signs of trust issues, partly because it can leave both partners feeling helpless. One person is trying to offer comfort and the other can't quite receive it, not because they don't want to, but because something inside keeps moving the goalposts.
This pattern is closely tied to what researchers describe as the "faith" dimension of trust. When faith in a partner's goodwill is genuinely felt, reassurance lands and holds. When it isn't, words alone rarely fill the gap. That gap is often where the therapeutic work begins.
- Do these patterns feel familiar from other relationships or from earlier in life?
- Is there a specific incident that started to shift things, or has it been more gradual?
- Does your partner know what you're experiencing, or is it mostly internal?
- Have you been able to talk about trust directly with each other?
- Are both of you feeling the effects, or does this feel more one-sided?
So What Do You Do with This?
If you recognized yourself or your relationship in some of these signs, please don't panic. Recognizing a pattern is actually the first and most important step. You can't work on something you can't name.
Trust issues are treatable. They respond to the right kind of relational work, the kind that helps both partners understand what's underneath the patterns, communicate about it in ways that don't make things worse, and slowly rebuild a felt sense of safety with each other.
That is exactly the kind of work couples therapy is designed to support. A good therapist won't take sides or assign blame. They'll help both of you understand what's happening and give you tools to change it together.
If you're in Maine, Texas, or Montana and you're ready to start that conversation, I'd love to connect.
You Don't Have to Figure This Out Alone
Whether trust has been broken by something specific, or has just quietly worn thin over time, there is a path forward. I offer telehealth sessions across Maine, Montana, and Texas.
Trust is not something you either have or you've lost forever. It's something that can be understood, tended to, and rebuilt, with the right support and the willingness to show up for each other.
That willingness, even in the middle of all the doubt, is already something.
— Sagebrush Counseling
1. Rempel, J.K., Holmes, J.G., & Zanna, M.P. (1985). Trust in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(1), 95–112.
2. Yılmaz, C.D., Lajunen, T., & Sullman, M.J.M. (2023). Trust in relationships: a preliminary investigation of the influence of parental divorce, breakup experiences, adult attachment style, and close relationship beliefs on dyadic trust. Frontiers in Psychology, 14. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1260480
