How often we hear those words wished on a couple at their wedding: live in trust, in closeness, in love.
And everyone understands those words in their own way.
Some people think they clearly trust their partner if they ask them to drive their mother to hospital, or trust them to pick the children up from school, or trust them to organise the family holiday.
But the trust psychologists talk about is something else entirely.
Trust in a couple is when I can be myself at the most vulnerable moment of my life — in a spell of dreadful failure or utter defeat — and come and say: I have messed up badly. And the fear of being told off does not even cross my mind.
Trust in a couple is being able to say out loud any wild thought or fantasy of mine without being afraid of ridicule.
Trust leaves no room even for friendly teasing, because at a moment of maximum vulnerability all of it is felt, and it turns into pain.
Trust is a conversation about what troubles you, an unmasking and an opening up of yourself without the fear of being humiliated or wounded.
Trust is when you are a hundred per cent certain that your partner will not later build themselves up at your expense and use what they know about your weak points against you.
Trust calls for an enormous acceptance of your partner's personality — and not only of their diamond, presentable, wonderful facets, but of their unpleasant shit facets too.
Closeness is precisely about trust. How close can you let your partner come to what is most precious in you? To be in closeness and yet not get glued together, not dissolve into the other.
Real, authentic love appears when you are close to a person and can look at them, and let them look at you, unvarnished. When you share what is innermost.
In the group work I run we often play a game called "Tell us about your shit facets", your vices, your unpresentable parts.
We learn to be whole, to accept ourselves in all our different shapes.
Do you want a good relationship, do you want to trust your partner and be close to them?
Start with yourself. Get to know yourself. What you are like. Accept yourself vulnerable, weak, tender, cowardly, greedy, flawed, lazy, envious. And only after that take the risk of opening up to your partner. Your person will understand you.
