In addition to being romantically fulfilling, relationships are a market negotiation. Each partner is looking to evaluate if the other is a good deal/fit for them, given their own value. As partners become more invested in the relationship, being more and more vulnerable is acceptable, as for the other it's a sunk cost to leave and start over.
If you're not able/willing to see trust in monogamous relationships as at least partially an expression of this, then it's difficult to wrap your head around imo.
If you were projecting social competence and emotional stability in the idiom of your culture and then you start acting like an upper middle class Californian your spouse may want to join you in that. Or they may view it as some combination of a huge red flag and an utter betrayal. Imagine if a (secular, orthodox or religious) Jewish Israeli told his wife he was a Muslim now. That’s what abandoning the cultural scripts a relationship was built on is like. If you’re not actually the person they thought they were in a relationship with they may be willing to try and make it work. Or not.
Sounds like another relationship built on illusions.
So it was the illusion of strength and stability that propped up trust in the relationship? How does crying destroy trust? There had to be more to it than just that.