- Trust and Intimacy
When you ask large groups of people what it is that makes life happy, most will speak of love relationships. The fact that more people get divorced these days hasn't had much effect on this way of thinking. It may be true that on average marriages do not last as long, but people still hope that they will, and those whose marriages fail almost all try again.
Being able to reveal yourself completely to another person, to feel completely accepted just as you are, to receive caresses and warmth and consideration is obviously a pretty special experience. However, there are emotional risks in becoming intimate with someone, so the early stages of a close relationship involve a fair degree of uncertainty. The basis for taking such risks, and indeed for the creation of commitments that follow, is trust.
Like many of the words that we use in emotionally important situations, trust is open to all sorts of meanings, but one meaning that seems relevant to this sort of discussion involves the idea of emotional safety. One of the most important things that happens to us all as we develop as children is the formation of a feeling of emotional security, founded on the understanding that certain people are going to be there for us and that the world is, if not always a nice place, at least to some extent predictable and controllable. We have the same kind of need in adult life, but the person or persons who help underpin our emotional security are no longer our parents but our friends and lovers and, eventually, our children.
I remember one young women telling me a few years ago about her need to be emotionally close to people and about the emotional risks that this involved. When I asked if she was sometimes hurt by the trust that she gave, she agreed but said that she made a lot of good friends so it was worth it in the end.
The difficult part is judging how far to risk your trust. Over time we can build up an understanding about a new friend, at the same time sharing our own innermost thoughts and feelings. Through this process of mutual discovery we can get a feeling about how much they are to be trusted.
The more trusting we are, the more likely we are to be trusted by others. If we adopt the attitude that no one is to be trusted, the risk is that in turn we will be trusted less. Similarly, if we put less into a relationship because of doubts that it could ever work, we are likely to get less back. Research shows that the more you put into a relationship, the more time, trust, and consideration, the more commitment increases from both sides.
It is natural to be wary after a failed relationship, but some people carry doubts forward into the next relationship, undermining it from the start. If a marriage fails because there was no trust to begin with, it is not very realistic to doubt the value of trust itself. The initial problem was a bad choice of partner, and the solution might be to examine reasons for the bad choice rather than rejecting trust.
Research shows that some women who can't trust are so afraid of being deserted or betrayed that rather than taking the care to select a partner who is right for them, actually pick men they are sure of not losing, or who they don't care about losing. The experience of being listened to, understood, and accepted can have a terrific impact on straightening out people with these kinds of uncertainties.
For both men and women in our society sexual intimacy creates such powerful emotions that hurt is to be expected when things go wrong. People under about eighteen whose relationships fail show an increased rate of suicide and attempted suicide if the relationship has been sexual.
Men are as at least as vulnerable as women to long term emotional hurt as a result of failed relationships. I had a client a few years ago who seemed unable to maintain a relationship with a woman. The relationships began alright, often getting to the stage of an engagement, or in one case to the eve of the wedding. But eventually he found reasons to back out.
It seemed that a failed marriage in which his wife had been cool and distant, and then unfaithful, had made him so wary of commitment that he would eventually find himself disliking the unique qualities of his girlfriends that he might once have found charming. This reaction often surprised him as much as his girlfriends. Once he understood the basis of his mistrust he was able to change himself and made a happy marriage.
The central quality of a lasting relationship seems to be the feeling by both partners that the marriage will last. They don't stay together because of the kids, or because it is financially convenient, but because the relationship itself is considered valuable and worth nourishing. When couples can do this and share the feelings of everyday life, true intimacy can develop.
Keeping the intimacy can be assisted by being explicit about what you expect from the relationship, even to the extent of writing it all down. This includes those hard to define ideas such as receiving emotional support and being independent, as well as the more concrete things like what happens with the children, the work situation, and the work around the house. Having these ideas out in the open helps reduce the feeling of betrayal when things go wrong, so that trust and intimacy remain.
More readings will be added to my blog from time to time. Have a quick look now to see the first posting on my blog PSYC1PLUS