I guess the point is, there is no trust without risk. If it were EASY…I mean, if it was all a guaranteed walk in the park, if there wasn’t a real risk that someone would cross the line…then it wouldn’t be real trust.
–Amanda Palmer/the Art of Asking
In my eternal quest to quote everything Amanda Fucking Palmer has ever said, I find myself coming back to trust. Probably because it is what I keep coming back to in life. As I start this, I am in a bar in Beaverton waiting for my online date to arrive. He is a little late, which surprises me because he’d kind of gone overboard to confirm. Still. I have a pint of porter, and a way to write and we all know how much I love bars. I trust that he will get here. If not, I’ll have a drink and get some writing done. It smells like wood fire in the bar, and it is cold and rainy outside. I’m happy either way.
There isn’t much of a risk.
Oops, some of us should pay closer attention to our texts that specify a time, and not accidentally arrive an hour early. See? Trust. Just because something goes wrong, it doesn’t mean someone is ill-intentioned, and (ahem) sometimes the problem is the person staring back at you in all those selfies you like to take. I thought I knew how to read…
So yeah. Trust.
Once I drove from Beaverton to Newport to meet up with someone I’d met online. It was not the best idea from a personal safety standpoint, but my plan was to come back the same day. We had a decent, but not fantastic time at the Rogue pub for trivia night. He offered to put me up in his guest room because it was a long drive home. It was a 2 hour drive and there had been a visit to the pub, so I agreed. Only a little reluctantly, because he seemed like a nice guy. We stayed up late drinking wine and watching a few movies. There were no romantic moves at all. Eventually, as we parted ways for the night, between his room and the guest room he suddenly became all hands, and pushed me into his bedroom. I wondered if he was going to become threatening. It was an unpleasant end to what had been a fairly nice day.
To make things even more unpleasant, he woke me up at 0600, still put out at me for not wanting to put out, and told me that he had decided to go to work so I needed to leave. Immediately. I got in the car, very annoyed with him for being such a douche, and with myself for having been so stupid. Driving home angry and lead-footed, I got a ticket for going 55 in a 25mph zone through Depoe Bay. My silver lining was that I didn’t get clocked while I was still going about 90.
It was a ticket I couldn’t afford, and a lesson I apparently needed.
Sometimes, as Amanda Palmer says, people just suck. And you need to balance trust and risk.
Trust and safety.
Trust and common sense.
If there wasn’t some sort of risk, trust wouldn’t be so difficult.
When a guy I went out with the night asked me about online dating disaster stories, I told him that I didn’t have any. This one was sitting in my head untold until someone at work was talking about speeding tickets.
I still haven’t really told it, and I don’t know if I ever really will because it leads down a rabbit hole of questions and answers about too many very uncomfortable subjects that are not related to trust. Not exactly. Maybe it will come out some other time.
Not today.