“Good morning Miss, I’m waiting in the lobby!” a man’s cheery voice rings out as I answer my phone, ten minutes before a car is due to pick me up at my hotel. The man doesn’t identify himself, but his timing and message strongly suggests he’s my driver, so I proceed without clarifying.
“Great, thanks. On my way down,” I reply, slightly out of breath as I manhandle my suitcase into the tiny lift. My maybe-driver says OK, and I hang up.
Sure enough, when I emerge into the lobby on the ground floor ten seconds later, I see a man seated by the entrance. He also sees me, gets up, approaches.
“Let me take your suitcase to the car,” he smiles warmly and extends a hand. My brain immediately goes into overdrive. What if he’s not my driver? What if I’m about to hand my suitcase, with my laptop in it, over to a scammer? What if he /is/ my driver but decides he’d rather steal my suitcase than drive me to the airport? What if he’s honest but absent-minded and forgets to put my suitcase into his trunk, consigning all my essentials to eternal life on the pavement while I’m being driven to catch an international flight?
The maybe-driver-maybe-scammer’s hand is still outstretched, the smile on his face becoming a little strained. I’ve taken too long to answer and now he’s wondering what’s up.
“Sure,” I flash my most gracious smile and hand him my suitcase. The man’s face relaxes. He takes my suitcase and wheels it out the front door, soon out of sight. The only thought on my mind as I turn to the receptionist to check out of my room: that’s the last time I’ll ever lay eyes on that thing.
A world without trust
When I applied to university in the UK a decade and a half ago, I was asked to submit a short essay alongside my statement of purpose and test scores. The topic might have been assigned, or might be I chose it myself—whichever it is, I ended up writing my essay about trust.
Fifteen years is a long time, and my memory is more than a little hazy. But the gist of my essay was, the world can’t function without trust.
Imagine a scenario where:
You don’t trust that your partner is telling the truth when they tell you that they love you. (They’re going to dump me as soon as they find someone younger/prettier/smarter/funnier.)
You don’t trust that your immediate family and closest friends have your back. (If I ever ask them for help, they’re just going to laugh in my face.)
You don’t trust that your employee will do the work you assigned them to the standard you expect. (They’re going to make a royal mess and the client will fire us.)
You don’t trust that your taxi driver will take you to your destination. (They’re going to drive me to an abandoned scrapyard and rob/rape/enslave me.)
You don’t trust that Amazon will deliver the item you just paid for. (I’m never seeing my money again, never mind that bath mat I just ordered.)
You don’t trust that your waiter will brief the chef on your food allergy. (I’m going to take one bite and die a horrible death.)
What a world that would be. A world with no relationships as we know them, no working in teams, no getting in cars other than your own, no online transactions, no ordering food or eating out if you’re allergic to, say, gluten.
Remove trust from the equation, and what’s left?
Daring to trust
Thankfully, the man who took my suitcase was my driver, and when we arrived at the airport forty-five minutes later, I discovered he also hadn’t forgotten to put my suitcase in his trunk. I was right to trust him.
But did I know my trust was well placed when I handed my suitcase over to this stranger in the hotel lobby? Of course not. And herein lies the tricky thing about trust:
You can never know beforehand whether you’re right to trust someone.
Past interactions may indicate someone’s trustworthiness, but it can never guarantee it. When you marry the love of your life, you can’t know that this person, loving and caring and honest as they are now, won’t take a paramour ten years down the line. When you hire an employee, you can’t know that they’ll be as competent and hardworking as they’ve led you to believe. When you get into a hired car, you can’t know if your driver will drop you off at your destination or rob you blind.
I once heard on a podcast, a long time ago now, a take on trust in relationships that I won’t ever forget:
It’s not transparency that builds trust in a relationship. For trust in a relationship is about /not/ knowing everything about the other person, and choosing to trust them anyways.
Before this, I believed transparency to be integral to trust—the more someone reveals of themselves, the more trustworthy they are. But what I heard turned my thinking on its head. Transparency doesn’t breed trust. Trust is about not knowing, and choosing to put your faith in someone anyways.
Every single day, more often than we can count, we are called upon to dispense trust like a trust-vending machine, without ever getting paid beforehand. Do we trust that our partner’s really going to an evening client meeting? Do we trust our teammates to do their share of the work? Do we trust the security guard to look after our parked vehicle? Do we trust the market seller to not overcharge us? Do we trust the motorcyclist to stop for us at the crossing?
Without ever knowing whether our trust would be handsomely rewarded or brutally abused, do we choose to trust despite it all… and keep the world turning?
What do you think?
Trust is a fascinating topic that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. And I hope today’s question gets you thinking:
How can we know when to trust?
Do you require absolute transparency, or does blind faith suffice? Please hit “reply” or leave a comment—I read every response and I’d love to hear from you. If you want, share this with someone you trust.
Until next Friday… Stay thoughtful,
Val
Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash
Val- This is a great observation. Thanks for sharing. Growing up halfway around the world near the lands of near-extinct tigers, I've always had difficulty with trust. Not necessarily with people I elect to meet. But like your situation in this piece: with people I happened to meet---whether it's a cab driver, etc. I think it's not that humans don't trust--isn't it?--but it might just be that the organic programming for millions of years had been a sense of alertness to danger. Whether that was in the wild or now on the streets. Wherein the collective survival depends on a tendency towards erring on the side of caution, aka mistrust. But I think now that most humans no longer live in wilderness-settings, the hope is that that type of programming is laxing and gives humans more space to breath into the solidity of trust. Something that I, personally, loved so much more deeply than feeling like the world is out to get me. Your writing is a great reminder of this hope. :)