30 Days Honesty Blogging Dare - Day 22

This 30 Days Honesty Blogging dare is hosted by Tom Baker. Hop on over and check out his blog, including a list of the other participants in this fun - and sometimes challenging - dare.

Day 22: Allowing another person to fully love me means they must...   be trustworthy.

How do you allow someone to love you, or feel safe in their love in they cannot be trusted? I cannot share myself if I don't feel safe. I'd always be stuck in a halfhearted situation where I don't feel like I can just let go, and the other person will always be stuck at arm's length. 

Sure, allowing someone to love you involves risk, but if someone carries a gun and you know that they don't hesitate to shoot, you don't exactly jump up and down screaming, "shoot me, shoot me!" If someone hurts you over and over again in the same way I also think that it says something about their love. After all, you know a tree by its fruit, yes?

Let's say that someone cheats on you, betrays you, say one thing and do another, etc. and you find out. You confront the situation, you tell the person how what they did hurt you, and ask them to please not do it. Then they do the same thing again and again and again... (I'm not talking about getting it right eight times and messing up once.) You know what? Your apologies won't mean anything anymore. Your sorry's won't fix anything anymore. Your "give me another chance" won't fly. If you loved, you would have cared about what hurt me. If you loved me, you would have realized how your betrayal hurt the trust and that it would take time and (probably) double the effort to heal that trust - that is doubly vulnerable. If you keep hurting the trust instead... hell, then I just don't see the point. Go love yourself somewhere else.

"Yes, but we must forgive and forget..." I can forgive you but I don't have to allow you to continue hurting me (if continuing is what you've done), and forgiveness doesn't cause amnesia, but when the wounds are healed I won't think about it all the time anymore. However, if you had to ask me, I'd still be able to tell you about it, but it would have lost its hold on me / power over me.

Remember, we are talking "fully" here, not from a distance.   

For me trust also allows you to share your intimate self by means of communicating. If I don't feel like I can trust you with my innermost intimate thoughts, you'd probably never hear them, and you'd probably always stay at an arm's length.

For me, without trust, there will not be any "fully".