Trust is something I write about a lot, I know. It’s just that I’ve been teaching myself how to do it again, and although I’ve been pretty successful for the most part there are still some challenges.
Like when to stop. How many chances does someone get? I try not to worry too much about this. I figure it’s going to depend on the situation.
The one that’s kind of throwing me right now in the online dating world is trusting people you don’t even know. People you can exchange a lot of thoughts, preferences, feelings, wishes with who you haven’t even seen. Who maybe you won’t ever see. I might be a little unlike most people in that I am very capable of developing strong feelings for someone I’ve never seen in person but only talked to in writing. Written words can distill things down to essentials in a very good and very bad way. Things can get intense. (Yeah, yeah…I’m always intense, I know)
It’s a real kick in the ass to my stated position of trust as my default.
It’s a lesson, or maybe more like a test, every day.
Why?
Because there is just no fucking way to tell if someone is telling the truth. It can be hard in person, but online? Granted, most people are just not very good liars so the truth does come out. It is the perfect test of trust as a default position. You are trusting totally blind. You can’t look someone in the eyes. You can’t hear their tone of voice. You can’t tell if they are taking a long time to answer because they are inventing a story. They can’t tell if you are joking or insane. Are they not talking because they’re busy or because they are talking to 4 other women at the same time? Are they really married? Are they the gender they say they are?
Some of that you can clear up with a few video calls. Take a virtual tour of the place they live. See their expression when they talk.
Ultimately it’s like life offline–if you want to trust people, you have to have faith. Stop laughing. I don’t have faith in a deity, but I do have faith in people. Shut up. Do too.
But online you also have to be careful if you intend to meet up with someone in person at some point. So there’s an element of caution. A line to walk. That line pushes right up against the trust. It’s hard to be trusting when you’re trying to be careful not to divulge too much personal information. How much can you trust someone if they don’t even tell you their real name? And it is really off putting when you learn that someone has a different first name than they told you at first. Your name isn’t who you are, but it’s a link. It’s what you call them. It’s a sort of intimate thing, a name.
Everything makes you question everything.
That being said, I have made friends with a lot of people online over the years. I went to Italy and met dozens of them. Everyone was who they said they were. I saw their homes, I met their families. Real people. Real relationships. Was I crazy? A little, maybe, but I trusted them. I’d been talking with some of them daily for years. I knew them as well as I knew anyone.
Most of the time, trusting people is the right thing to do.
And if it doesn’t work out, in the words of Amanda Fucking Palmer:
Sometimes people will prove themselves untrustworthy.
When that happens, the correct response is not:
Fuck! I knew I couldn’t trust anybody!
The correct response is:
Some people just suck .Moving right along.
It doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt when someone betrays your trust. Of course it fucking hurts! You know what, though? It doesn’t mean you were wrong to trust in the first place, and it doesn’t mean that you can’t trust anyone.
It just means that in a world with billions of people in it, one of them was an asshole. Or, maybe they are just hurting and broken and trying to do the best they can, too. Like everyone else. Maybe you’ll never really know their truth. Maybe they will.
You hurt a little, and keep trusting. This is all a test of that. Can I keep trusting people I can’t see? Will I get hurt?
Yes I can.
Yes I will.
Sometime someone will lie. It will hurt. I will not like it, but I will get over it. I will try not to let it color how I interact with others. It is really, really hard to check your baggage when it comes to trust.
It will still be better than all of the things that I would have missed if I kept trusting no one.
