When people tell you that trust is like broken glass, they're right but I think that broken trust is much worse than broken glass.
When glass breaks, you can put it back together using glue, if you do it right you can still use the glass, you can see where the glass has been broken but it's still functional. Although obviously never the same again.
But when trust is broken, you cannot see just the damage but when you try to rebuild, you feel all the damage.
If someone has lied to you once then everything they say now has a greater weight than it did before you caught them lying. This means that you will be checking all factual information, cross referencing their stories and looking for things that you might never have caught the first time. It completely changes the way you listen and wait for them to finish speaking.
This makes it even more troubling. The person who broke your trust doesn't understand why you cannot just move on. They apologized, explained themselves and promised to do better so why are you still angry with them and why does your trust still not feel the same?
The reason is because trust cannot be fixed with good intentions. It takes a lot of time and repeated behaviours to build trust, a very long time, consistent behaviour and a whole lot of patience, which is something some people just do not have. Some will survive when there is a broken trust, other relationships will not.
The fact of trust is just like the stuff you can't unsee, once you see someone break your trust, you cannot unsee it. You may forgive them and remain in the relationship but the person you knew before they did what they did is gone forever.
