Psychology Today41%
Do You and Your Partner Share the Same Relationship Ideal? 4%
By Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD32% ABPP36%
7/21/2026, 1:46:58 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 7 faulty reasoning types, including Confirmation Bias, Fundamental Attribution Error, and Indoctrination, with Optimism Bias as the most egregious example at 8.3% saturation with 87 hits. Analysis detected 295 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,045 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 18% and a BS Rank of 4% (18,766 of 19,442 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 96.50% of the article peer group.
Without realizing it, most people have some kind of idea about what they want from a relationship.
Some want to be as close as possible, spending as much time together as they reasonably can.
Others would prefer to have more alone time, even if they share the same household.
Presumably, people sort themselves out into whichever camp they feel they belong in, and find partners with similar needs for shared space.
But what if they don’t see eye to eye on one or more of these?
Can they succeed as a couple?
Helen and Pat have known each other for close to a year, still maintaining their separate apartments, but getting together at least three or four times a week.
Helen’s lease is coming up for renewal, and she’s not sure if she should do so if, sometime soon, she and Chris will decide to move in with each other.
When she mentions this to Chris, she gets an unpleasant surprise.
Chris says to go ahead and renew the lease so that each can keep their own households.
Helen doesn’t like having her own space—she wants to share it with Chris.
Two Models of Interdependence in Relationships
According to University of Western Ontario’s (UWO's) Omar Camanto and Lorne Campbell (2025), there are ways to approach this problem, but at its essence, it involves understanding the nature of trust.
Defined in terms of predictability and dependability, trust is the foundation of a couple’s ability to deepen their ties.
The more you can trust your partner, the more interdependent you can become.
But what if, like Helen and Chris, each partner has a different view about the desirability of interdependence?
Peeling back the layers a bit, trust is a quality that develops either from the basis of evidence (i.e., partners wanting to be together and being honest) or faith (partners wishing that their partner had those qualities).
Those who want a partner they can trust will seek people who approximate a “dependable archetype.”
That’s where the faith often comes in, flying in the face of evidence.
It’s possible, then, that Chris is low on trust in general, and this presents the barrier to greater interdependence.
Helen needs to figure out if Chris will never fit that dependable archetype, and whether that will become the dealbreaker moving forward.
Testing the Roles of Predictability and Dependability in Relationship Partners
Across two studies and using adult online samples, the UWO research team tested an existing trust in relationship measure (Rempel et al., 1985) to determine how the items on this scale fit into the predictability-dependability/faith components.
In the first study, they used online samples to test whether the three predicted factors would fall into the framework of their model.
The items they arrived at through this analysis included some of the following:
**Predictability**
* I am familiar with the patterns of behaviour my partner has established, and I can rely on him/ her to behave in certain ways.
* My partner behaves in a very consistent manner.
**Dependability**
* My partner has proven to be trustworthy, and I am willing to let him/ her engage in activities that other partners find too threatening.
* I am certain that my partner would not cheat on me, even if the opportunity arose and there was no chance that he/she would get caught.
**Faith**
* Even when I do not know how my partner will react, I feel comfortable telling him/her anything about myself—even those things of which I am ashamed.
* Though times may change and the future is uncertain, I know my partner will always be ready and willing to offer me strength and support.
As you can see, the predictability and dependability items are based on past evidence, but the faith items involve conjecture.
To test how sensitive these items would be to commitment in a relationship, the second study compared whether their statistical model would vary based on the age group of couples.
As it turned out, there was a difference between these two groups of couples.
Younger couples seemed to base their view of trust more on faith, and the older ones on the two components of predictability and dependability.
In other words, at the start of a relationship, couples may impose their very general notions of trust onto their partner.
As the relationship develops, trust becomes defined more in terms of evidence-based observations.
What also emerged from the findings would be relevant to the situation of Helen and Chris.
Adding to interdependence theory, which is a relationship-based approach, attachment theory helps to explain individual differences.
In attachment theory, people develop trust in their partner only if they’ve had early life experiences that allowed them to feel they can rely on close others.
Maybe Chris is low on this type of trust.
<h2>The Trajectory of Trust and What It Means for You</h2>
Putting these findings together, Camanto and Campbell suggest that faith-based trust tends to be high early in relationships or, as they noted, “when in romantic relationships, people are trusting of their partners as a default.”
This is the faith-based version of trust.
Feelings of dependency and predictability need time and experiences to develop.
Problems occur not due to lack of trust over time, though, but due to how partners express their trust.
Again, this could reflect variations in attachment style.
Chris may strongly trust Helen but not be willing to translate that trust into behaviors that would convince her.
The UWO findings suggest ways they could overcome this divergence in models of trust.
Helen could learn to look for evidence in what Chris does (other than not wanting to live together) to feel reassured that their relationship is on solid ground.
Chris could, in turn, be helped to gain evidence, as well, that Helen isn’t going to go away anytime soon.
She may feel impatient and disappointed by Chris’s divergent view of interdependence, but if she’s willing to wait it out while also showing her own constancy, their models can eventually start to converge.
**To sum up,** trust in your partner may be a matter of faith, but as your relationship evolves, that faith can mature into deeper levels with the accumulation of time and experience.
Analysis
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