Trust

Writer: Raghed Hamza
Editor: Abdulelah Ba Tarfi


Each one of us has secrets buried deep within him/her, but whom do we share these secrets with? There are also a few tasks and duties we entrust only select people with, but who are these people? One could answer by saying that these two types of people are people we trust, but what – exactly – is trust, and what determines who we trust? Is it chemistry? Is it common sense? The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines trust as “the assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.” But how, in this ever-changing world, can you be “assured” of someone or something? The concept of trust between humans is a complex one and cannot possibly be explained by a few words of definition or even – dare I say – a thousand.

We usually trust those we have known for a long time, such as our family and old friends, but sometimes we also trust people we met two days ago. Why is that? One could say these people we met not so long ago are unique in their manners of speech and their attitudes. Before delving into this topic further, I must digress and resort back to the topic of family. For most of us, our families make us feel safe, and the house we live in truly feels like a home. So the feeling of safety goes hand in hand with trust, as does friendship – we usually develop irreplaceable friendship ties with our parents, siblings, cousins, and even grandparents, as do we with the dearest of our friends from school and elsewhere.

I digress yet again. As aforementioned, there are few select types of people whom we feel safe with immediately; as a result, we tend to “trust” these people. However, this is counterintuitive, as our brains do sometimes fool us. We trust these people UNTIL they do something that breaks our trust, thereby resulting in the conclusion that they were never trustworthy from the beginning, which means that our brains and hearts were indeed fooling us, tempering with our emotions and feelings. Indeed, this does not apply to everyone – some people even take a long time to trust someone, but at least we are one step closer to tackling the concept of “trust”.