What judgement do you make when you decide to trust someone? How long you've known them? What they've done for you? How they helped you?
It's really easy to say things like "trust no one" - but do you really trust no one? I feel like sometimes trust can be something that you don't realise you've given to someone until they've backstabbed you and you become affected by the pain and hurt that comes with it. I say things like "I don't trust anyone" but in fact it's amazing how much I realise how many people I've actually trusted. Of course at the same time, trust can be subjective, it can vary from lending someone your favourite shirt to trusting someone with your life.
Trusting no one is difficult, some societies live together collectively and rely on trust. Do you really want to live your life suspecting everyone is out to get you? In some sense it's wise to be that way because then you don't get hurt. There are some people out there that don't put themselves first and foremost, the most selfless of people will always look out for others, perhaps to the extremes of even becoming a doormat for people. It's not pitiful but somehow no matter how much these people get hurt or betrayed by the people they look out for, they're always happy. I think that some people are just naturally selfless, maybe they've been brought up to care for others more than themselves but isn't there an extent to how many times someone's trust can be broken before enough is enough?
There are also people who have had their trust broken by the people that they cared about the most, time and time again. Whether it be cheating on your partner, being let down by the same people, finding out your friend has been gossiping about you again. Whatever it is, I find it hard to see how some people can be so accepting of others back into their lives. For me, if my trust is ever broken, there are obvious grounds to totally remove them from my life, once your trust has been broken it's really hard to get it back. There's always things I can't forget.
I guess you could say I'm not the most forgiving of people. Once someone has been a backstabber, what they did will always be in my memory. Of course, forgiveness is dependent on what they did in the first place, some things are forgiveable, some simply aren''t.
It's this distrust or loss of trust that distances me from a lot of people. I prefer a close circle of friends over huge groups, I want to be able to trust a select few but at the same time, I don't think it's good to trust a lot of people. Maybe if you trust a lot of people this'll be reflected in how friendly and how willing you are to do things for other people. But at the same time, I feel like sometimes I have to live life pretending everyone new I meet is a total idiot.
They say trust is the basis of friendships, but I actually think that you can be friends with people without trusting them. To me, trust isn't a superficial thing, trust to me is more deep rooted. I can lend you my things without trusting you (as long as I know you'll give it back, of course - this is also debatable because if I know you'll give it back it means I trust that you'll give it back), but at the same time there may be things that I don't trust telling you for personal reasons. For me, I can say I trust someone when I tell them things I wouldn't tell others - the secret telling type thing, because I trust that you won't tell other people. Referring back to the bracketed part about lending items - to me, it's not fully trust involved because material things can be replaced, hurting my feelings by spreading secrets that I've trusted you with can't be fixed easily.
How about trusting members of the opposite sex? Where's the line when men start to trust women and women start to trust men? In a relationship? But how well do you know this guy/girl? I don't believe in getting into a relationship half heartedly - I've made mistakes in the past, assuming certain guys are good but then find out something that just destroys every part of trust that I started building. It doesn't take much to hurt me actually, I'm not emotionally strong, I'm affected by imperfection, I overcome imperfection by accepting. But sometimes there's things I can't accept, because the grounds for forgiveness and forgetting isn't there. The reasons people give me for what they did is not acceptable and no matter how much I convince myself it'll be okay, it won't.
From a female perspective, there are times where I wonder how much a man can be trusted. When their past is unknown it's up to you to decide based on what you see. I know the past is the past, some men do horrible things and come back a new man but there are some who just never change. I'm not experienced, I might even be a bit too mature minded about things, setting expectations for certain people doesn't help either. I've tried lowering my expectations for people but sometimes you just can't get away from what you really want. You start to question if this is how you imagined your life to be like. I start to think too far into the future, considering if my ideal future life is matching with the reality before my eyes - if it isn't, I start to consider change.
I'm not the go-with-the-flow type of person. I'm afraid of the unpredictable, I'm afraid of change, I'm afraid of the unknown. I like things to be orderly and planned in life, I like being able to imagine what my life would be like in the next 10 years. I'm a human with many flaws like everyone else, but sometimes my expectations get the better of me.
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