Relationships; So Easy a Caveman Can Do It! Part 3

Trust.  Trust is obvi­ously impor­tant to a rela­tion­ship, it’s kind of like oxy­gen to a human being, like the infor­ma­tion and b.s. that a rav­ing lunatic of a mad sci­en­tist feeds to Glenn Beck wire­lessly when he’s on the air, via the souls of pup­pies and chil­dren.  Yes, trust is that impor­tant!   That said, here’s part 3 of my ongo­ing series, Rela­tion­ships; So Easy a Cave­man Can Do It!Trust is huge.  How does one become wor­thy of trust?  How does one become trust­ing?  Good ques­tions and I sup­pose that’s the direc­tion we can take here.

To become trust­ing is dif­fi­cult, cer­tainly eas­ier to say than it is to do, I think.  Usu­ally peo­ple develop dis­trust when they’ve been burned in the past.  Some­one cheated on them, some­one abused them some­thing unfor­tu­nate hap­pened in that person’s past and they haven’t come to terms with it yet.  Then, the kicker, is that the crimes of the past are brought to the fore­front in future rela­tion­ships.  For exam­ple, a friend of mine, Kaley, had a jeal­ous boyfriend who despised the fact that she had a guy as a best friend, and that friend was me.  They were together for over three years.  He didn’t agree to meet me until after their sec­ond year!!!  Crazy.  Part of that was that he had an ex girl­friend who cheated on him with one of his friends… So he took that sit­u­a­tion and applied it to his rela­tion­ship with Kaley, so she really didn’t hang out with her own friends, just her boyfriend’s social clique.

In other words, to become trust­ing one must come to grips with their past and those sit­u­a­tions where their trust was tram­pled on.  Then one must let go of the past, make a pact with them­self to not bring it into their new rela­tion­ships and let each rela­tion­ship stand on its own two legs, indi­vid­u­ally.  That’s the hard part, because we are prod­ucts of our expe­ri­ence.  We can sim­ply take what we’ve learned and deal with each new rela­tion­ship as its own entity…

Being trust­wor­thy is a dif­fer­ent can of worms alto­gether.  How­ever, I strongly feel that this is the eas­i­est part to deci­pher.  When you strip away all of the things that your sig­nif­i­cant other says and focus solely on what they do, what do those actions tell you?  What’s left?  Does  your part­ner make deci­sions and do things that put your mind at east?  Do they do things that keep your rela­tion­ship together and things that bring you closer?  Are their actions pre­dictable and inline with the ground rules set forth in your rela­tion­ship?  If not, then I’d say that there’s a prob­lem.  Focus on those actions and what they truly mean.

Also notice how Com­mu­ni­ca­tion, respect and trust build on one another?  Builders don’t make a build­ing miss­ing a floor.  Utterly ridicu­lous like Oregon’s loss to Ohio St. at the Rose Bowl, but I digress.  A build­ing needs all of its floors and foun­da­tion to stand tall and firm.

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and respect are keys to estab­lish­ing trust.  When your sig­nif­i­cant other does some­thing that you don’t like you have to let them know about it, rather than take a pas­sive or passive-​​aggressive stance with the issue.  When we com­mu­ni­cate our feel­ings we estab­lish bound­aries; a frame­work to work from, within a rela­tion­ship.  Respect comes into play by rec­og­niz­ing and adher­ing to the bound­aries that we’ve com­mu­ni­cated and laid down for each other.   Obvi­ously when our part­ner dis­re­spects us by cross­ing estab­lished bound­aries it becomes dif­fi­cult to trust them.  One such exam­ple is a part­ner who fre­quently stays out until 5am or later and not call when a prece­dent has been set to be home by 2am and call if they’re going to be out later.  Yes, that causes trust issues and things can head to the pooper right quick!

In short, for trust to be present in a healthy rela­tion­ship.  We have to make peace with our past and keep it out of our rela­tion­ships.  We can take our expe­ri­ence and our lessons and move for­ward with them, but we must not pun­ish our part­ners for things that hap­pened in our past.  Also, we must be wor­thy of trust.  That is, we must be con­sis­tent with the things we say and we do this through sim­ple action.  Actions are the cur­rency of trust.

Until next time, stay tuned for our hard hit­ting inter­view with Cthulu!

Related posts:

1. Rela­tion­ships; So Easy a Cave­man Can Do It! Part 1
2. Rela­tion­ships. So Sim­ple a Cave­man Can Do It. Part 2.