Trust: It’s a Two-way, Bumpy, Dangerous Road…

It takes years to build trust and it literally takes a second to destroy it. Trust is one of the best, yet one of the worst feelings in the world and they say — when you trust someone — you offer them a sword and your throat together. Yet you believe that they would not cut your throat because you trust them. This is how trust works and this is how the world works.

The world is going in smoothly because there is still a bit of trust left (although, it’s depleting with the passing of time). Imagine the conditions when you needed everything from everyone in writing because you would never trust what they promise. And then, if they refused to do whatever they promise, you would have to carry out further actions to get things done.

Imagine the life of courts and lawyers then. They would have had so much work to do and every family would be aspiring their kid to be a lawyer. That’s way too hypothetical and let’s get back to reality.

So when you trust people, you are sure that they would fulfill what you expect from them and what they really promised. If they don’t that is the story of a different day.

And trust actually works differently at different ages. When people are infants, they are actually bound to trust whosoever is carrying them because they have no other option. If someone drops them or they get hurt somehow, it’s because people whom the infant trusted did not live up to the expectations.

Similarly, when you start growing, you trust different people. You trust your parents, your teachers, your colleagues, your friends, and other people around you. This is the age when you learn a lot about trust — about who to trust and who to not. In the age when you grow from a child to a youth, you meet so many different kinds of people.

And except for the people that are related to you by blood (exceptions aside), most people will break your trust in some or the other way. That’s how you learn how to trust people and whom to trust moving forward. And then you reach the age when you stop trusting people altogether (at least you show that you do not trust). However, deep inside, you are still trusting people and expecting them to fulfill some promises.

But do you believe that trust is a two-way road? It’s bumpy, it’s dangerous and sometimes it leads to outcomes that you would never expect to occur.

Yeah, it’s easy to start trusting people, trust them twice, thrice, and many times, without even getting any returns in return. However, at one point, you cannot trust the person again, because you gave them ample chances and you are not getting any reasons to get that trust back in any way.

So trust always works when it is a two-way road. In fact, even if you keep trusting your parents to fulfill your wishes and they do not live up to the mark, you would start believing that there is no way you can trust them in the future. Similarly, when you trust your kids a bit too much and they betray you, you get enough reasons to not trust them any further. The consequences are different in any case.

And the worst consequences occur when there are trust issues in the married life of a couple. When you are marrying someone, you are actually putting your trust in the person, believing thing they would not break your trust in any case. You trust them 100% and you expect them to trust you back.

In such a case, married life works well when both partners are completely honest and fulfill the trust of their partner. Married life works relatively well when both partners do not trust each other and both partners break each other’s trust more often than not. This is the case when they are married just for their namesake and are living the life of a gypsy who would love to food around. If such married people get kids, the life of the kids is somehow the worst.

The troubles in married life occur when one of the partners trusts the other partner completely and the other one breaks the trust frequently. Yeah, you need to make some promises and fulfill them while getting married, but if you are not able to fulfill the promises, you are actually not committed to the person you are married to. And such marriages do not last too long.

So in any case, when you expect trust from someone, you need to trust them in a similar way. That’s because you cannot expect someone to trust you and you rather betray them in return. Similarly, you cannot keep trusting people when you do not get the desired trust in return.

Trust is a two-way bumpy road and it is dangerous as well. It may or may not contain any traffic but it definitely hurts people when it become only a one-way road.