River: Stage Three Trust

[mdlbear]

If you're in a long-term relationship, or you're thinking about whether you want to be in one, Go read this article titled "Stage Three Trust" by theferret. I'll wait. Here's the intro:

What I am about to discuss is Stage Three advice -- the nitroglycerin of relationship counseling. Used properly in the right place, the "How Could This Happen?" technique will help you to maintain a loving, stable relationship... But use it at the wrong time, and it'll explode into a fountain of heartache and betrayal.

See, most relationship advice breaks down into three rough categories, each sequential:

1. How to determine whether someone you like is worth staying with, and what to do when they aren't;
2. How to build trust with each other;
3. How to act once that absolute trust is in place.

Hardly anyone talks about Stage Three, absolute trust, because the things you do to build a happy relationship with someone you trust are absolutely suicidal when used with someone who's not trustworthy. This advice, when used on the wrong people, will allow terrorists of love to fly Boeing 767 airplanes into the twin towers of your heart.

Heck, there are a lot of stable relationships that never reach Stage Three, and they're doing okay. They don't have absolute trust and never will, but a lot of people don't want to risk letting folks inside that close.

Furthermore, Stage Three takes a long time to get to for some people. Gini and I were married for four years before we even brushed up against it. That's right: we were willing to marry for life almost half a decade before we decided to trust each other implicitly.

It's suddenly very clear that Colleen and I have reached Stage Three -- we've probably been there for a long time, but I don't think we really knew that until earlier this year, when that trust was tested close to the point where anything less would have broken. Many, probably most, of the people reading this have not.

I'll also add that, clearly, absolute trust is neither necessary nor sufficient for a stable long-term partnership. You may be happy together but unable to open up completely to one another, or you may have perfect trust and transparency and love but be unable to share living quarters without driving one another mad. (The latter is stable; it leads to the kind of loving long-distance friendship that can last for a lifetime, the kind Gwen Knighton writes about in "Love Song for a Friend".)

Talk to one another. Figure out where you are in that journey, and where you want to get to.

Comments

[dejla.livejournal.com]

My parents had that. That may be why I never married and am now several years into not being involved.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

I know a couple who have been married for more than twenty years and are absolutely devoted to each other. One lives in Boston and the other lives in New York. They hadn't shared an apartment even when they both lived in New York; they tried it once for a year or so early in the relationship and discovered that they might be compatible but their stuff and the way they liked to use their space was not, and it was driving them both batty. So they had nearby apartments in northern Manhattan. Then James got a job in Boston that was too good to refuse, and Dennis still had his job in Manhattan that was too good to give up, so they simply went a little longer distance than they'd originally intended. They're both teachers of varying sorts, so they usually spend several months a year at one place or the other together. They've been doing this very happily for more than ten years now.

[mdlbear]

*nodnod* I have several friends with relationships of this sort. It's an option that's rarely considered, but it can work brilliantly if done right.