My friend Derek Y. ’22 and I were talking about closeness, and Derek proposed that closeness arises from honesty, which requires trust. That was when I realized my conventional model of closeness within a relationship—that it comes about from kindness, from consistent support, from vulnerability met with acceptance—didn’t capture a major element of trust.
When we think of trusting someone, we think it means believing that the other person has integrity, is loyal, etc., like trusting them with our secrets. And that’s certainly important. But for me, to be truly close with someone, I need to trust their judgment and their competence. If I need to make a decision about a sensitive topic, I want my friend to listen without malice, to avoid gossiping about me—but I also want to be able to trust their advice.
Several years ago, I was trying to snag a lunch special with someone I was seeing, whom we’ll call “Greg”. The special ended at one p.m., and my train was running late, but Greg had already arrived at the station, so I sent him the address of the restaurant and rushed to meet him there.
When I got there at 1:05 pm, Greg was standing outside of the restaurant. I was perplexed. “Why are you not inside?”
“Waiting for you?”
I darted inside the restaurant and asked if we could still get the lunch special.
“Well, it’s over now,” the maître d’ said. “It’s past one p.m.”
My ensuing disappointment wasn’t about the food (or lack thereof), although I was hungry—it was that Greg hadn’t been able to complete the simple task of getting us a spot in time. Obviously, some of the blame was on me—I could’ve managed my time better, and left more buffer room for transportation mishaps—but that didn’t change the fact that Greg hadn’t understood it was more important to go inside the restaurant to catch the time-sensitive special than to wait for me.
With Greg, this flavor of mistake happened often. He misplaced his stuff, he missed flights, and I ended up loaning him hundreds of dollars to help him get by. When I expressed frustration that he was letting so much slip through his fingers, he had an excuse (for example, with the lunch special, he was just waiting for me, after all, so it wasn’t his fault that he didn’t go inside). There are many factors for why he struggled so much to complete basic life tasks, and I’m not interested in assigning fault, but regardless of the underlying reasons, the effect was this: I couldn’t trust him.
Greg thought it was mean of me to be upset about how poorly he handled his own life. He thought it was unfair of me to ask for him to pay me back for what I loaned him, because he didn’t have any money, because he couldn’t hold down a job. And I did doubt myself—like, shouldn’t I care more about his kindness or other character traits than about his competence?
But we couldn’t build trust. In popular culture, when a romantic relationship lacks trust, it’s usually because one person cheated or was flirting with others or lied or whatever. The failure in our own relationship was much less exciting. I simply didn’t believe that he was reliable.
It took me a while—years, maybe—to realize it’s not mean or shallow to place importance on someone’s judgment and competence when selecting for friends or partners. It doesn’t make somebody a bad person if they consistently show poor judgment—but it does impact my ability to trust them, and I want to be able to trust the people I surround myself with.
Cross-posted on Substack here.