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“I trust you,” you might tell your friend who insists she can fix your mobile. “Our marriage is based on trust,” you might also hear someone saying. Or, perhaps in moments of semi-conscious introspection, one might say “I guess I’ll have to trust that you know what you’re doing.” This latter phrase reveals that trust is a choice. You choose to trust people, and you choose not to trust them.

There are several aspects that trust involves, and the dynamics are quite complex. Perhaps this is partly due to “trust” being a word that (like love) is misunderstood and misused a lot.

We Talk about Trust, when We Mean Something Else

And so, “you don’t trust me anymore,” is a phrase used to convey something closer to “you don’t love me anymore,” rather. Similarly, when your friend claims she can fix your TV while you’re at work, to tell her “Nah, I’m not sure I can trust you,” is ambiguous. It could mean “I’m not sure you have the skills to do it,” or it can mean “I’m not sure you won’t deceive me and steal something.”

Tellingly, the phrase above (“I’m not sure I can trust you”) is something you would rarely tell your friend. The reason? But because it’s a taboo to tell someone the truth about trust, a bit like it’s a taboo (a social faux-pas) to tell someone “I don’t like you, so no, I won’t come to your party.” We prefer to come up with excuses instead. “Don’t fix my TV, you’ll get tired!” “I’m terribly sorry I’ll miss your party, but I’ve promised to visit my aunt at the hospital.”

When Trust Is a Choice, so Is Its Withholding

When we say that trust is a choice, we mean that it’s not something you either feel or don’t. To some extent, you can develop trust in the sense that someone can inspire trust – usually thanks to their… track record. Naturally, there are many elements that affect our choosing to trust someone or not.

If you have called a technician to come and fix your TV (to continue the same example as before), you feel better about your choice to trust her when you see someone looking the part. Conversely, if the doorbell rings and you see a drunk, nose-picking (just throwing ideas here) teen barely out of school, you feel far less well about your choice.

Trust Is a Choice: You Choose to Trust Yourself

Here’s another secret about trust: it has nothing to do with other people! When you choose to trust someone, what you really do is trust yourself. In other words, you trust yourself to deal with the repercussions should the person you trusted failed.

“I trust my husband” ultimately means “I trust that I will survive it if we break up.” Similarly, to trust your TV to a friend means you are choosing to value your friendship (or the money saved) over the possibility of your TV breaking down even worse.

Trust Is a Choice because Your Control Ends with Your Choices

Ultimately, it all boils down to control. Whom you can control and whom you can’t. Well, that’s an easy thing to answer: you can’t control other people. To be pedantic, we could also wonder to which extent you can control yourself, but let’s not go to personalities and all that.

And so, let’s assume you can control yourself; your actions and choices. Trust, then, becomes a matter of deciding to allow another person to proceed with an action. Essentially, you acknowledge that you can’t control them directly, so by trusting them you allow them to exercise their own control on aspects of your life that are important to you.

You can’t fix the TV, and you’d rather not pay a technician for it. So you decide to trust the friend who claims she can do it. You decide to acknowledge the fact that you can’t personally control the repair of your TV, and you surrender some control to your friend. That is, you allow your friend to attempt the repair.

A guy (a dentist, parenthetically) had once told me that everything sooner or later has to do with sex: who gets it from whom. Nah, I disagree. It’s all about control. Who controls whom. Including fixing your TV!