Banks warn us: don’t share your PINs or passwords. Don’t click on unknown links. Be wary of offers that sound too good to be true. It’s sensible to assume that strangers are not to be trusted until they prove otherwise.
Yet when it comes to people close to us, we can be pressured to offer trust before it is earned. I once belonged to a group where we took turns each week to buy a shared lotto ticket. When it was my turn, I would scan the ticket and email a copy to the group – that way they could watch the Saturday draw if they wished. Another participant would buy the ticket and simply hold onto it until Monday, then announce that it hadn’t won. Although I didn’t suspect her of cheating, I told her that her lack of transparency was an insult to the rest of us. We were being treated as stupid and gullible.
The way we talk about trust is often back-to-front. Maybe it’s because of linguistics. ‘To trust’ is a transitive verb, meaning that the person doing the trusting is the active party and the person they are trusting is the passive recipient. Therefore, we put the onus on the trust-er to provide the trust in a relationship, rather than seeing trust as the natural result of consistent dependability.
Too often I hear stories of people emotionally blackmailing a partner, friend or relative by insisting it’s that person’s duty to trust them, rather than considering it their own duty to prove their trustworthiness. Meaningful trust stems from a considered evaluation of the evidence. Unearned trust leaves us open to abuse. So rather than getting offended if others show caution, let’s commend their common sense and commit instead to proving ourselves trustworthy.
Stephanie Hills ©