Can I Trust you?
I wrote this a while back in IM with a friend who was thinking about how they trusted their partner. At the time I cut it out and saved it for later posting. Today, I found it again in my Drafts folder.
This piece came together as a surprisingly good summary (for an ad-hoc production) of something I've been talking about for while, but had never written down. Relationships founded on Trust have been something that I have given a lot of thought, despite the dearth of things that I have written.
You 'trust' your friends because you are reasonably certain that you can predict their behaviour. "He's my best friend, he's got my back no matter what" or "He's always late for everything, but he's a really sweet guy so we forgive him and just tell him the time is 30 minutes earlier than it is".
With intimate, emotionally invested relationships we put a lot of care into forming and checking the 'model' that we use for predicting the other person. Because we're trusting them with our secrets, our confidences, in many ways that they will be carefull with our emotional exposed bits. When that person behaves in ways that we don't expect it's frightening. Because now the person with a big box of our fragile stuff is behaving unpredictably. And worse, if they play football with the box, and hurt us, it's a double hit - the box gets trashed and we have to face the fact that our model is wrong. Under some conditions at least they'll play football with the box.
That's the hurt and confusion that we all feel when our 'trust is broken'. It's not the trust that is broken, it's the model that we formed in our own head. And thereafter any time that we see somebody with our 'box' behaving at all unexpectedly it's hard not to be fearful that they're about to spike it in the end zone.
And the question that we all ask the first time is: "How can I trust you again? You lied/cheated/betrayed me!"
This isn't the question that you should be asking. The question that is really there is "Where was my model wrong? what kind of person are you *really*?"
And you do the homework to find out where the model was wrong, revise the model and decide if you want to change the relationship. Some people do 30 seconds of homework, withdraw into their justified victim status and go off in a cloud of hurt feelings. Which is ok, if you don't mind abandoning the relationship. Other people will realize that the behaviour that they were surprised by this time is not exceptional, but average. And they will then expect it from the person. As I have said a number of times, "The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour." It's certainly not always true, but it's true more often than it's not.
[Later edit: I made the point elsewhere that for me 'Trust is a verb, not a noun.' Thus it can't be 'lost' or 'destroyed' or even 'regained'. ]
[And this all ties in together nicely with patterned behaviour in relationships, where I can 'trust' you to respond as I have learned to expect in response to my behaviour. Which feels comfortable, and thus nice. Regardless of whether the patterns, stimulus, response or outcomes are good, effective or even desired. But that is a topic for another day. And will probably be (or has been) written by much_ado. *grin* ]