Oct 01, 2015 17:52
I said something very clever the other day that I didn't realize was clever until afterwards: "relationships aren't built on commonalities, they're built on trust and inspiration".
Everything we think makes up a relationship, be it friendship, romantic or familial, is really about trust and inspiration. Trust gets it started, inspiration keeps it going.
Theoretically, everyone is born with their trust switches turned to max, then begin to learn to shut it down. The specific whys are myriad. Bleeding hearts want us to think that untrusting persons are defective as the result of some manner of massive trauma, that open trust of everything and everyone is only right and natural, the way we're all "meant to be". (I'd mistrust them. But then, I stopped being that trusting at a very young age. I think it came around the same time as it came to dawn on me that the world was lying to me, a lot. Like, constantly. And just to clarify, it wasn't traumatic, it wasn't emotional, it wasn't one big event or lie or anything like that, it was an accumulation of what in education one might call "lies to children" -- when they first tell you that 0 is the lowest number, then years later introduce negative numbers, which apparently have been there all along the whole time they're telling you there's nothing smaller than 0, *childish horror*... or grownups telling you things are ok when they clearly aren't, or innocuous lies to things they don't know instead of just telling you they don't know... little things-- and I suppose the argument could be made that those things are traumatic and hurtful, but you'll just have to trust me when I say they were not.) But I submit to you that the "whys" does not matter. To draw a chemical analogy, the whys are merely the catalyst to a foregone evolution. Catalysts hasten the timeline of reactions, they do not change the nature of the reaction. After all, the human race got ahead by being the "story-telling ape", and what that means, really, is we're the meanest, m-f-kingest, badass-iest liars in the whole mammalian kingdom (those non-mammal things live in their own worlds). We are, notoriously, the most curious and exploratory of species at our peak, the basis of which is mistrust. We are at our best when we question.
So, no, we're not meant to be all uninhibitedly open and trusting. You're not actually supposed to turn the volume on your electronics up to max, either.
Which finally begins to explain why, despite constantly being coached to foster trust in our relationship, we fail; and continue to fail the harder we try... why it doesn't work to declare some form of relationship then work on the trust.
Because it's backwards.
Because trust isn't something you add to a relationship to keep it going, trust is the only condition for a relationship, any kind of relationship, to even exist. You trust the bank to keep your money safe and give it back to you when you want it. You trust the shop will honour its contract to give you something in exchange for money. You trust your boss will pay you for doing the work, or your employee will do the work if you pay him. You trust your doctor when he tells you stuff about your health. You trust your friends when they say they like you... but you don't trust them because they are your friend/doctor/boss/shop/bank, they are your bank/shop/boss/doctor/friend because you trust them. (That is why we are born with our trust turned to max, to facilitate imprinting and bonding with the strangely different-from-us parental units.) And when you stop trusting them, that's when they stop being your bank/shop/boss/doctor/friend; and the kind of trust you have with them is what determines the kind of relationship you have. You just don't think about it.
This is why there's no such thing as "regaining trust' in a relationship, why things are never the same "after" -- Once the trust is gone, so is that relationship. The relationship you have with a person after the original trust has been broken, if you "still" happen to have one, is not the same relationship as the one you'd started out with. It isn't something that can just be ordered off a catalogue, after all.
And this is why forcing trust is so hard, it's not a universal "If A, then B" process, it is "organic" (which is a simplified way of saying influenced by many factors some of which are randomised and others completely hidden), unpredictable, part chemical and part intangible, and ever subject to change.