On Trust - We're The Same, But Different

I was chatting with an acquaintance at work about trust yesterday, exploring why it is so important, how to know it when we see it, and how to know when it isn't there. This emerged from a conversation I had the day before with my supervisor, who had discovered, to his astonishment, that I put a lot of stock in trust. Doesn't everybody?, I thought.

So, surprised that there are folks who are apparently trust-indifferent, I was exploring the range of ideas out there. I was probably driving folks nuts, but this wouldn't be the first time. So this gentleman and I had agreed on the importance of trust, explored whether we trusted several mutual acquaintances similarly, and the like.

What constitutes trust? How do you know it when you see it? What makes you distrustful? How soon does that happen? Is it, (as it is for me) a condition it is impossible to retreat from?

Thinking about it, I believe my default condition is trust, at least in some moderate, social way. I believe most folks are honest, trying to do right, and the like. But once they incontrovertibly demonstrate to me that they are not trustworthy, they have gotten themselves in a place that there is no way back from. The road is washed out. Sometimes it troubles me that I am this way, but I am. It is a difficult place to get to and an impossible place to retreat from.

Anyway, I digress. So we're talking about trusting folks and he says "I always think about whether this is somebody I'd go into a fight with." Whoa. Never in a million years would that occur to me. Because, of course, I'm a chick and getting into fights isn't seriously in my repertoire. Never was. Now this is a quiet, low key, mannered guy but I infer from that statement that his life wasn't always so low key. And when I get past what is in fact a cultural difference between us, I can relate to the concept. But boy, what a way to get myself in somebody elses shoes.