To trust is to risk

I got this article from "The Manila Times" by Bob Garon... I really like every entry of his articles because it has a real meaning... Try to read...

First part:

TRUST. It is the foundation of love. When trust is guarded and kept well, love grows by leaps and bounds. When it fails, the relationship is in danger of collapsing.

When you trust someone, you are saying to him that you feel safe and secure with him. When your trust is betrayed, you suddenly feel insecured and you become fearful of losing the friendship, the love that you have invested in so sincerely. When your trust is damaged, love begins to shake and become unwieldy. You don’t know which way it will go. Can you repair a damaged trust? If so, your love can get back on track. If not, the future of your friendship, your love too will look bleak.

To trust is to risk. All of us who have lived have experienced the betrayal of trust at one time or another. And the memory of a betrayed trust is deeply painful. So, when you get close to someone you care for, you are taking a risk of being rejected, of being fooled.

Perhaps you believe that this person is a high risk, but your love, your feelings of affection are so strong that you are more than willing to take the chance of being betrayed. Even if those who love you are warning you that you will most likely get hurt, you insist that the returns are worth the risks. So you go ahead and open yourself to the one you love. You trust him and make yourself vulnerable to him.

Sometimes trust is the result of knowing the person over a period of time. At other times, however, trust is instinctive. You hardly know the person and, before you can pronounce his name, you trust him. It’s trust at first sight.

It may happen that trusting too quickly ends up in a disaster for you. The guy you thought was so nice ends up being a beast. But it often happens too that the person you have known a long time ago also betrays your trust. You are stunned and shocked because you were so sure of him and yet so wrong about him.

Trusting is not a science where the outcomes can easily be predicted. It is more of an art where intuition, born of experience about how people behave, is most important.

Then again, there are different levels of trust. At the beginning of a relationship, the trust level is low. Both friends are careful about making themselves too vulnerable. They dance around and try to make a judgment about whether or not they should risk increasing the trust level by exposing themselves even more to possible betrayal.

The direct opposite, the destroyer of trust is betrayal. And that is what everyone is afraid of. We fear rejection. We choose carefully what we say what we don’t say. When the level of trust is low, we are very calculating with our words and actions. As the level of trust rises, however, we can relax and reflect more of our true selves.