Straight Talk about a Foreigner and Filipina Trusting Each Other

Trust is something that any foreigner looking for a Filipina will have on their mind, and it actually goes both ways. Pull up a chair today to hear talk about trust. Subscribe to Love Beyond The Sea, where you will learn more than trust because I want to help with all kinds of things you’ll need to know about a relationship with a woman from the Philippines. Even after marriage, we want to find our spouse trustworthy.

I have rarely seen in depth talk about trust on YouTube so I will do something about it. If you are so inclined, you are welcome to leave a comment about this issue of trust. See the links in the description box for the LvBTS website, soon to get a makeover. I will share some thoughts and experiences we have had in the area of trust.

Trust is important of course in any relationship of any kind but especially when getting to know someone like a Filipina so far away. It’s one thing to say that you trust the Filipina, but I want to talk about how long does it take to think you trust her. Here’s my definition-Trusting someone means that you think they are reliable, you have confidence in them and you feel safe physically and emotionally. 

At Love Beyond The Sea, I want to share with others what I have learned about marriage to a Filipina since May 10, 2015. Please subscribe if you are open to considering starting a relationship with a Filipina, are already in one, or even have been married for quite a while.

I proposed to my wife on day 18 without meeting her in person, then flew to the Philippines and married her in only 54 days. It could have been sooner if not for not having a passport and the Philippine requirement of needing to be in the country for ten days before marrying. To be honest with you (I hope you trust me) I don’t remember asking myself if I trusted her enough to marry that fast. There had to be some elements to the short relationship that led me to believe that I could trust her. I find the whole trust issue confounding. I am not unintelligent. I am not afraid of commitment. In those 30 years I couldn’t find a relationship, I suppose I could have allowed myself to get sucked into a bad one, but didn’t.

There has to be a reason I trusted this woman from the Philippines, to be my wife so quickly. Considering we are doing well in the five years since, a certain level of trust must have been present, enough to get off the ground. To delve into trust, I will ask four questions.

Comments are welcome. Let me know what you needed to know in order to trust your Filipina or what she needed to trust you. Let me know how long it took to trust each other. Let’s talk about thought process and when you know you can trust each other.

1-How much should I be able to trust her?- Absolute trust would require us to live through a multitude of arguments and conflicts over a long time so that couldn’t be the standard for my trust, for my comfort level. Trusting someone means that you think they are reliable, you have confidence in them and you feel safe physically and emotionally. Maybe my standards or I should say my expectations weren’t super high? 27-year age gap, different culture, little in-person observation. I trusted her as much as someone asking the questions I did, and getting the answers I got, could trust her, could feel she was reliable and give me enough confidence to trust her more by marrying her.

We have been married five years and I still trust her. Can there be degrees of trust, increasing degrees of trust? Probably, based on time together. If I say I trust her more today than when we married, does not mean that I didn’t trust her before, I can say that over time she has confirmed my trust. If I am checking her Facebook and the people she talks to without reason to suspect her of something, that might indicate I tend to have a hard time trusting people, and maybe I am doing that only because some other people don’t trust Filipinas.

My wife was consistent in her comments to me in those early days, I didn’t see contradictions. I saw her on camera at her house, where it is less likely she would try to “pull the wool over my eyes”. She really gave me no reason to distrust her. I could have asked endless questions about why she would want to marry me but I didn’t.

2-How will I know she can be trusted?- I have had many surgeries and am probably not done having them. If you asked me if I trusted the surgeons, I probably would respond that I have no choice. Then I might add that he has experience doing them but admit that I never met him and can only make some assumptions about him. There are some physicians I definitely don’t trust. I believe they have been unethical and done things to harm my health and should have their license revoked. I even tried once but one physician warned me not to, claiming the AMA was very powerful. They proved themselves untrustworthy due to their shameful behavior. The Filipina I married had not done anything like that.

How will I know she can be trusted? I hope you don’t mind when I answer this question with ‘I will only know she can be trusted after she has proven she can be.’ It takes a lot of situations to be seen as reliable, gain my confidence, and feel safe physically and emotionally with her. Way more than I can acquire through dating only. That would be revealed only through many years of marriage. She can prove herself untrustworthy relatively quickly, but to be proven worthy of trust, that requires an impeccable reputation or evidence over a long time.

I never asked her if she could be trusted. I didn’t see any reason for me not to trust her. We chatted at least four hours a day and if you know me, we didn’t waste a lot of time talking about fluff. She knew I had a corny sense of humor, but for the most part she knew I was someone very serious about marriage and how it should work and was looking for someone who thought the same. She was consistent in her comments, there weren’t contradictory statements. Did she tell me absolutely everything about herself? No, because I didn’t ask her to and how would she know everything I would be curious about?

At what point in time will I have the revelation that this woman has passed all the tests, with flying colors, and can be counted on to be trusted 100 % of the time for the rest of our lives? That won’t happen. I wouldn’t know how to properly interrogate her or to be absolutely sure she isn’t holding something back. There are people who are able to beat lie detector tests. I had a reasonable sense she could be trusted enough for us to start a life together. I can sleep at night with this approach.

3-Why should she trust me?-What if the Filipina asks me questions to gauge if she can trust me? I might say something like ‘did I do something wrong, have I given you a reason to think I might be unreliable or not telling the truth?’ I would likely feel disrespected and so would she if the tables were turned. In a VLDR I think there has to be more trust, but having said that, I can see the point of someone saying that in a VLDR you have to be more suspicious or at least cautious, because of the high degree of difficulty to verify things that are said.

Some foreign men don’t trust Filipinas because of all the bad things they have read; she is just after my money, she just wants a visa, she will become Americanized. Some Filipinas don’t trust foreign men because of all the bad things they have read; he might beat me, they just play games, they aren’t serious. I never tried to prove to Aiza that she could trust me. What I did do was be open about my past, talk about the type of leader of our marriage I wanted to be and why and how. I believe we both had to trust each other to be reliable and feel safe with each other until there was a reason not to.

4-How long should it take a Filipina to trust you?-She could reverse the questions and probably has even if without realizing it. She knows only what you tell her. She doesn’t know your friends. She only knows what you tell her about your past relationships. She isn’t going to ask you what you’ve learned from past mistakes. In most cases for immigration, it is the Filipina who is making the daring move very far away to a strange country with, by and large still, a stranger. She has been forewarned what could happen as far as mistreatment and what her options are for help. When my wife told me what her conference for Filipinos overseas taught her, initially I was a little upset because it sounded like they were trying to set us up to fail by talking about all the bad that could happen, even what to do if it did.

Things I did that helped her trust me- I assume my wife trusted me before we married and would say she trusts me today, perhaps more fully simply because it takes time and over time, I have shown her that she can think of me as reliable. She can have confidence she can feel safe with me physically and emotionally. I reinforce that consistently being gentle with her, with the way I give her non-sexual touch. It shows her I care for her emotionally.

I want her to know that I am very interested in our future. My wife doesn’t tolerate a lot of numbers and can get frustrated when I talk to her about money for this and money for that and what we will need because she just tends to think of the present, but she gets the idea that I am in it for the long-term because I talk to her about the long-term in practical terms. She can trust me more because when we were dating and married, all I could do was talk to her about our future, but since we have been married a while, she has seen up close and personal, that I am trying to give her the future she wants and needs.

If my wife had a degree of distrust or maybe I should call it a lack of tangible proof of trust before we married, she surely knows now that she probably has nothing to worry about from now on. I think I have spent the first five years of our marriage building on the trust she had when we got married. I can also say my wife has spent those years building my trust by the type of wife she has been.

Something my wife revealed to me was that she felt better about us getting married after doing a Skype with my pastor. She offered to do the Skype, it was her idea. My pastor came over at six in the morning probably on a Saturday which would be evening in the Philippines, and chatted with my wife for about 40 minutes. He had never done anything like it before and I have to laugh remembering him telling her that she typed so fast!

I can still remember hearing her strike the keys with vigor and excitement! When they concluded he gave me his approval of our relationship. This was a first for him, but hopefully not the last. Later she met with my mother and aunt on Skype, a first for them. Am I suggesting you do something similar? Yes, I am because that will help her to trust you.

That webcam with my pastor was a watershed moment for her, and for us. She said that after doing that, she was comfortable with me, a synonym for trust. I do try to earn her trust, whether it is a conscious effort or not. Perhaps she does the same. If I admit that trust takes time, that doesn’t mean that all of that time should be before getting married. I think it comes down to having a certain amount of comfort level with each other, admitting that you don’t know much really, about each other and won’t for some time down the road. Please think of comments to ask as we near the end of this part.

Some people say that you should never trust anyone. I can’t live that way. If that statement were true then it would mean that no one should ever trust me. Some say you shouldn’t trust because you could get hurt. I would say, no you are guaranteed to get hurt. Your vulnerability is guaranteed to get exposed, you are going to get misunderstood. Your Filipina is going to do things that make you angry, and you are going to do things she wished she knew before she married you.

Everyone wants to trust the person they are with and trust is often broken. You may have trusted someone at one time only to have them break that trust, and now you don’t trust them. Sometimes we wonder if we can trust anyone. We might wonder if we should invest any time in getting close to someone since they might end up breaking our trust.

Accept that you will be let down throughout the relationship. No one is completely trustworthy. We don’t always seem to trust God and we would admit God is perfect, true, and trustworthy, yet there are times we don’t trust Him. We show that by something called worry and discontentment. If we don’t trust God then how can we possibly trust another human being?

Before I conclude, it dawned on me when preparing this that I have trusted God throughout this relationship. I trusted Him all those 30 years without my wife when I felt in hopeless despair of ever getting married. When my relationship with Aiza was forming I remember saying to God that if He was going to allow me to go all the way to the Philippines to marry after all I have been through and get scammed, then I don’t know what to say. I didn’t see any logical reason why He would do that to me. If that happened, I would simply just acknowledge that the whole thing is beyond my ability to comprehend.

No risk no reward, right? There is risk in any relationship. In those 54 days I believe I did my due diligence. My wife didn’t give me a reason not to trust her and I wasn’t interested in finding reasons to think she would.

How long should it take to trust your Filipina? For her to trust you? I could rephrase this How long are you going to take to trust this Filipina? How long is she going to take to trust you? You already know she isn’t perfect, she has told lies just as you have in your life. If you are going to trust her to simply be a normal human being, you won’t expect perfection, you will expect some conflict and friction now and then in your relationship as being completely normal. Don’t let that be a reason to not trust her.

Let me know what you needed to know in order to trust your Filipina or what she needed to know to trust you. Let me know how long it took to trust each other. Leave a comment about your thought process in your own relationship and when you knew you could trust each other. My trust has paid off with my Love Beyond The Sea.