In Love, When Trust is Lost, All is Lost

Today, we begin to pull a deserved curtain over the issue of the key lessons I have learned from the first break-up ever and how they apply to our love lives. Now we know that spirituality, good intentions and one-sided maturity are not carte blanche guarantees of relationship success. We also have seen why we should be ruthlessly decisive about the direction of our emotional lives. Today we shall focus on the all-important issue of trust in love.

If we probe God for the reason why he broke the relationship with Adam, we will realize that the issue was more than fruits and trees. The issue was about TRUST. Adam’s obedience to satan’s suggestions was a statement of lack of trust in God. It was God’s word against satan’s word and by choosing to act upon the serpent’s suggestions, he violated the trust quotient of his relationship with God. Adam chose to believe and trust the unfamiliarity of satan over the familiarity of God.

I see this mistake still being made in my generation by several young people as they neglect the familiarity of people they have known for a lifetime in favour of people they met online or over the social networks. Social networking to a great degree has added significant value to our lives. However, when used as a singular tool for the establishment of lifelong relationships, it can be an emotional death trap. The reason is that most social networking platforms offer us a million and one ways to edit our profiles, images, and updates with almost no way to verify the authenticity of what is being updated online. Every once in a while, a gorgeous looking lady pops up on my Facebook page asking for a relationship and promising love. I simply ignore them because there is no way for me to verify the certainty of both the image, the person, and their claims of love.

Putting one’s trust in such fickle platforms can set you up for heartbreak from day one. The core limitation of social networking is that there is no way to verify the truth of what is being projected. If truth is the seed of trust, and it is, for truth not to be verifiable, trust cannot be verified. To arrive at trust and preserve it, you must understand the four inherent requirements for a trust to be solid.

• TRUST TAKES TIME: You can’t just meet a person today and start a relationship with them tomorrow. You can’t just promise love to a person you don’t have details about. Time, however, is a custodian of details, and details are the stuff that good decisions are made of. Some psychologists insist that it takes about six months to one year to be able to decipher the full range of a person’s behaviour. I agree. I have been married for several years and am still yet to fully unwrap and unravel the personality uniqueness of my woman. Trust takes time and you must be willing to give love the time it takes for trust to develop before you commit.
• TRUST TAKES TRUTH: In fact, it takes the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Nothing decimates trust like lies. Lies about who we are, what we are, what we’ve done, who we’ve done it with and so forth. The moment we are found to be liars, the trust quotient of our relationship falls to minus zero. I am often asked if there is a possibility for trust to be regained after it has been lost. The answer is YES if you are willing to pay the price. The price of trust is truth, the cost of trust is truth and the seed of trust is truth. If you aren’t willing to pay the high price of truth in your relationship, attaining trust will be impossible.
• TRUST TAKES TESTS: Love may be blind, but trust cannot be. How dare you put your trust in a person you have not tested over and over again. Edward W. Demming once said, “In God we trust, everyone else must bring data”. Funny as that may sound, blind trust will always get you hurt in the end. The longer I live, the more I realize the fallibility of human nature. A sure way to know you have been deceived 100% is when you claim you trust a human being 100%. Always leave a margin in your consciousness to accommodate the possibility of human error in all human interactions.
• TRUST TAKES TIES: One writer said if I bear witness of myself my witness is not true. Another insists that out of the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every truth be established. All of these mean that we should never conform to whatever we have not confirmed. Always seek complementary confirmations of whatever you have been told in love. If all you know about your partner is what you have been told by your partner, you are on shaky grounds. Sometimes the confirmation you need might come from your partner’s actions or inaction. At other times it may come from family and friends. Whatever you do, do not base your decision to trust a person on your feelings for that person alone, seek external sources to either justify or nullify the conclusions you have arrived at. Ties also mean you value face to face interaction over all other forms of communication if possible. The human body is a custodian of details. You must fight for flesh and blood interaction and not be swindled by the fleeting allure of social networking.

Most of all, be trustworthy. Those who don’t sow trust as a seed may never be able to reap it as a harvest. I love you.

THE GREATEST IS LOVE