Find people who are trustworthy

and then make them important. Rather than the other way around.

I like this blog post by David R. MacIver (about whom I know nothing) for the way it picks apart some principles I've taken for granted—aspects of trust that I have understood intuitively. It's so interesting how he puts words to this choice process that for me has been barely conscious.

"Central to [one type of] trust is the ability to tell someone true things, especially about yourself, and be confident that this will not go badly for you." This what I've done all my life, with few exceptions: if I want to consider someone a friend, I confide.

In childhood, I remember a sense of stepping over a threshhold with a new friend via sharing a secret. Having grown up with two very close friends from age eight onward, in my experience confiding has always been a foundation of friendship.

As an adult I've often shared something personal when it felt natural and appropriate to do so—hopefully I've never ambushed anyone with an overshare—and then wondered later on if that's "normal." Do other women feel that way? Do men? I don't know.

MacIver reinforces my lifelong approach to friendship. He says "telling someone true things about yourself" early on, just slightly "beyond what currently seems reasonable," avoiding oversharing or reckless abandon, is what lets the relationship move up to the next level of trust. We need to trust that the people who are important to us won't use the things they know about us to harm us. If you trust first—sharing a confidence with someone who's not yet very important—you find out by how they handle it whether or not they can become more important.

I've had good luck with this. I believe the friends I've made in both childhood and adulthood have received—maybe unconsciously—my confidences in the right spirit: as signals that I want to be closer friends. Not as signs that I have nobody else to talk to and not that I will go on and on about myself and not listen.

For me, this process happens below consciousness a lot of the time. I agree with MacIver's opinion that it's good to try trusting people who aren't yet important, rather than letting people become important and then finding that they will use confidences to do harm, or even just to hurt by being judgmental.

He says, "Safety is very important to being able to grow trust, and people who are important to you but untrustworthy are not safe." And that as an adult, unlike in childhood, "It is much easier to make people who you already trust important to you than it is to learn to trust people who are already important to you." Again I've been lucky, which was especially important in childhood, in that people who have been important have usually been trustworthy.

Now I'm intrigued to try to think of times when trust has developed in the opposite way, with someone who was already important who I hoped was trustworthy, or when I "told someone true things about myself," ie confided, and it did not go well.