I always felt like “I trust you” holds so much more weight than “I love you”. Let me elaborate.
“I love you” is great, but love is an emotion that we can’t control. Even when the person we love disappoints us or hurts us, we still love them. We can’t turn our love on and off and whilst healing from whatever turmoil, that love is always there. It’s like a baseline emotion that we try to ignore or push away because we know that the other person isn’t good for us or because we’re trying to heal or simply because we’re not ready to love blindly and deeply and unconditionally. Love is there whether we want it to be or not.
Have you ever loved someone who you know you probably shouldn’t love? Have you ever had to give someone up because you know they’re not good for you, they’re toxic or they just simply aren’t worthy of the way you love? There’s a lot of controversy about cutting off family members. For my mom, family is everything. She’s one of the people who feel like you should stick by family’s side even when they’re awful. “Family is family, you gotta love them regardless” is something that she’s said to me many times before. I, however, don’t see it that way.
Maybe at one point in my life I believed that to be true but that is no longer the case. Peace is very expensive, I don’t think I should sacrifice my peace to love and help someone who doesn’t care about theirs, or mine for that matter. As I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that protecting your personal peace and self worth is not selfish and that even though we cannot choose our family, we can love them from afar. People laugh when I tell them that my mom has expiration date when she visits, but I seriously mean that. I love my mom more than anything and I’d do anything for her but we cannot coexist longer than 3 days in the same space. I used to feel guilty about this and I would just sacrifice my space and my emotions just to keep her happy cuz she’s my mom. I no longer do that. I’ve learned to communicate better with her and let her know when she’s being too much and when I need space and even to voice when I don’t want or need whatever opinion she’s offering.
It’s taken 30+ years of me putting myself second, of me sacrificing my peace, my mental health, my entire life in order to please others. When my husband died 2 yrs ago I realized that life is so fucking short. We don’t have enough time in this world to consistently put others first. My kids are the only people who deserve my everything because I’m entirely responsible for their upbringing. I’m responsible for teaching them to be decent humans and I’m responsible for teaching them now that their peace matters and they shouldn’t compromise it for anyone. Love is not a good enough reason for you to hurt yourself in order to make someone else happy.
Then we have “I trust you”. Trust is fickle, brittle, it’s practically an eggshell. Once it’s broken, there’s no possible way of it being put together again. It’ll never be the same. Even if you manage to get past the hardship, the incident that broke the trust, it just will not be the same. You can glue the eggshell back together, but the cracks never go away. For this reason I feel like trust is more valuable.
Trusting someone requires vulnerability, which a lot of people have a hard time showing, even to themselves. Trust requires love, it requires honesty, it requires for you to be self aware of your flaws and vulnerabilities in order to show them to another person. It takes so little to lose or break someone’s trust. And it’s impossible to recover it, it’s just never going to be the same again.
Let’s try a little exercise;
Think of who you consider to be the person you trust the most.
- can you think of why you trust them so deeply?
- do you feel like they trust you in the same way?
- do you love them?
- if they break your trust, would your love subside?
- can you love them and not trust them?
- if you can’t trust them, is your love enough to keep them in your life?
- what would it take for you to cut them off completely?
After answering these questions, can you honestly say you still feel exactly the same way about this person? Do you love them any less? Did I make you question their loyalty?
If my little quiz made you second guess the person you trust most in the world, then the doubt was always there. I simply made it surface.
Stephen King once said,
“Monsters are real and sometimes they live inside of us.”
I couldn’t agree more, a lot of times we become our own worst enemy. Especially when love and trust are involved. Sooooo with that being said,
Trust your gut, protect your peace, and don’t be afraid to love again.
Love always,
Dory ✨
This is what the “experts” have to say about this,
https://www.elitedaily.com/p/is-trust-more-important-than-love-in-a-relationship-heres-what-the-experts-say-9370498
