Trust and partnership

(and other similar things)

Author’s note: stuff has been very rough. (As a vague gesture in the direction of the type and magnitude of “very rough”: I am unable to follow through on DunConII, the sequel to DunCon, which I had been planning for ~a year and which was originally scheduled for Halloween and is now canceled instead.) Longer essays will hopefully return soon; short thoughts in the meantime.

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It’s a shame that the word “trust,” in English, means two completely different things:

• The amount of confidence you have in a person, downstream of their previous behavior. The degree to which they have earned trust, by concretely demonstrating that they are worthy of trust.

• The act of putting your faith in someone significantly above and beyond the first kind of trust.

When someone says “just trust me,” they’re usually not saying “I have a solid and reliable track record; if you just look at it you will know that I can be trusted, here.” When someone asks a friend or confidant “d’you think I should trust him?” they’re usually asking because they’re in a position where they have to decide whether to trust beyond that-which-has-been-proven (or not).

There’s something in it that rhymes with the old parable about tolerance, where (I think) a ruler tries to point out that they’ve been highly tolerant of gays or Jews or some other disadvantaged group, and the vizier (I think) shakes their head and asks “do you despise that group?” and the ruler replies “No! Of course not!” and the vizier says “then you’re not tolerating them at all; tolerance requires there to be something that you are tolerating in the first place.”

Trust—of the second kind—is necessarily a leap of faith. You’re not engaging in trust (the action) if all you’re doing is reasonable accounting.

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There’s a similar thing going on, in my mind, with partnership.

(By which I mean romantic partnership, as well as serious friendship, as well as unusually close or co-reliant collegial or professional relationships, such as between startup cofounders or people working in the same small research lab.)

I have found that many people will run into some rocky situation with a friend or a colleague or a romantic partner, and turn to their friends for advice, and their friends will do something like reasonable accounting.

“Well, so-and-so has done these good things and these bad things, and on balance that leaves them about three degrees into the red; fuck ‘em, break it off. You literally don’t owe them anything at this point.”

And this is the right answer, by reasonable accounting! Like, in these situations, I don’t usually have disagreement with how they’re adding up all the +1s and -1s. I’m not claiming that the math is wrong.

(And I also don’t think that people should remain committed to friends or colleagues or romantic partners when things are bad and they expect them to stay bad, or to get worse. I think that America is much better for the fact that divorce is more common than it was in the 1950s.)

But there’s a way in which that sort of accounting feels like A Different Thing Than Partnership, just like trusting people exactly as much as they’ve earned (and not one whit more) feels like a different thing than Trusting™ them.

I feel like, if you’re conditionally hanging out with a friend or a colleague or a romantic partner because it keeps marginally paying off on fairly short timescales and you don’t feel like anything is dipping into the negative for more than brief, fleeting moments…

…I feel like this is different than Actually Being Someone’s Partner.

Having their back.

Supporting them.

Doing something like putting faith in them, and the best version of themselves, and in the partnership itself. Being, in some meaningful fashion, “still on their side,” even if they are clearly in the wrong and you’re having to go against them in the domain where they are clearly in the wrong.

(I can’t recall ever in my life validating someone where I thought their beliefs or actions were invalid or bad, but I have many instances of validating someone generally in a way that reached outside of the domain where I thought they were locally crazy or locally fucking up. The pattern of “look, you are Just Wrong, here, and also I am still beside you, radiating comfort and encouragement and love and warmth even as I firmly tell you that you absolutely have to fix this, because we are partners” is a familiar one to me.)

If you’re reacting to someone in a balanced and rational way that is basically indistinguishable from how any reasonable person would react to them, then there’s nothing special or different about your relationship, such that it deserves a label that sets it apart. There’s something about “this thing swerved into the red this month, so we’re calling it quits” that feels super duper reasonable, and also like it should be called something other than partnership.

Partnership feels, to me, like it should be more enduring. Like it should have longer grace periods. Like it should be an investment of the kind that maybe goes down for a while and that doesn’t cause you to sell the stock, because you bought the stock based on the premise that it would do well over the course of two decades.

Partnership.

To cut at the same thing from a different angle: there’s a certain type of person where I don’t bother to tell them if they are, in my view, fucking up, and accruing negative points, because it doesn’t feel like the-shape-of-our-relationship is such that I owe them that information. I can just watch, and quietly note that they are becoming a worse deal over time, and at some point I stop coming back for more, and this doesn’t feel like a betrayal of anything, because I wasn’t trying to support Them, The Person. I was just … getting mine, in a mutually beneficial trade, and expecting that they were doing the same, and that both of us would walk away if that stopped paying off.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trust-1-ing a person, such that I’m like “look buddy, from what I’ve seen of you, I’m happy to let you borrow my car for an afternoon but I’m not happy to have you house-sit for a week.”

But I wouldn’t want to confuse that person, and make them think that I was trust-2-ing them. I would try to avoid expansive and totalizing language like “I trust you!” that might reasonably lead them to believe that I was extending them faith well in excess of their proven track record.

And similarly, I just think that

[the sort of relationship where you’re like, yeah, idk, it’s going pretty well so far, each date has paid off, let’s keep going so long as that keeps being the pattern]

is different from

[the sort of relationship where you are Partners™].

I wouldn’t want to tell the first kind of person that I was their partner, lest they get the wrong idea, and lean on me in places where I don’t intend to support them.