I Don't Trust You

But it doesn't actually matter.

Dear reader,

This week, there was a wife who marveled out loud to me that her husband still doesn’t fully trust her, even after years of marriage. I asked her if we ever really trust anyone, and then I asked her if it mattered.

Much emphasis is placed on building up trust in relationships, like stacking blocks of a castle one by one. But does this expectation set us up to withhold what’s most important — love — until Kingdom Come? And if love is delayed until complete trust presents itself, will some of us wait a lifetime to give or receive it?

I’m tired of love — of getting to see into somebody else’s heart — being contingent on a perceived feeling of “trust”, or the idea of it. I’m not even sure trust is real or if it’s something we’re meant to achieve with one another. At the very least, I don’t see why there’s concern around it, why it’s often presented as the precursor to loving.

I don’t think we’re supposed to trust each other completely. I don’t think we’re built that way. We’re built to survive, and I think we can survive without trusting one another fully. In fact, I wonder if we are more likely to survive when we don’t put all of ourselves into someone else’s hands.

Our evolutionary directive is to keep our own hearts beating and to nourish our offspring. We need other people to help us do this, but we don’t need to trust them in order to receive the benefits of their care. We don’t need to trust somebody in order to give them our care either. But we cannot survive without love, and neither can our relationships, at least that’s what I think.

There will always be reasons not to trust each other in a volatile and unpredictable world. Our lack of trust is on purpose — it’s not a biological flaw that we need to overcome. It just keeps us awake, discerning, and alive. The problem is that we interpret this lack of trust as something scary and we use it to hide, deny, withdraw, or fight. In simple terms, it prevents us from getting over ourselves. We fail to see that to love other people first, regardless of the circumstances, is to love ourselves.

What if trust is just a wonderful side-effect of love, just something nice that happens in its wake sometimes? What if trust is not the end-all, be-all? What if trust is not the reason for our loving, but simply another result of our loving?

More soon,

Anna