About trust and how to build it

Navigating the Balance Between Personal Agency and Connection in Relationships

I've been thinking about trust lately—how it's both essential and elusive. Trust is one of the fundamental building blocks of modern society. Many systems we rely on, like banking, government, and mail services, are built on implicit trust. These systems operate with well-established, transparent rules and counterbalances that help create immediate trust. Breaking these rules carries clear consequences.

Building trust becomes more challenging in personal relationships. Unlike formal systems, our personal relationships lack clear rules, and the consequences of our actions often remain unclear. Yet trust is even more vital in these relationships since they profoundly shape our daily lives. In this essay, I'll explore the behaviors that either build or erode trust in these personal connections. I think that most of these behaviors arise in the conflict between trust and agency.

Trust vs agency

In all human relationships formed with the purpose of achieving a goal, there are two forces at play in every interaction: Trust and agency. Trust provides individuals the assurance that members of their group shared some values, respect a common set of rules, and work towards one or more common goals. Agency is the capacity of an individual to make decisions on their own and pursue interests unique to them with confidence and security.

Trust promotes collaboration while agency serves individual interests. When individuals in the same group are pursuing conflicting interests, their agency can erode trust. Lack of trust, in turn, leads to dysfunctional behaviors such as withholding information, hindering the ability of others to achieve their interests, or just falling into avoidance. This negative feedback loop ends up hindering collaboration in the group.

For example, let’s say that a couple is planning to purchase their first home. A real estate investment is one of the most important and challenging decisions that two people can make together. We trust that the person that we decided to spent our lives with will have our backs financially. We also expect that our preferences will align with our partner’s in a way that makes the buying process smooth and happy.

In reality, your better half might be more of a city animal while you lean more towards the suburbia life style with backyard and an automobile included. Also, you both could have different levels of risk tolerance which leads them to desire properties with a wild price range difference. These conflicting perspectives often lead to the dysfunctional behaviors that I described before because we will defend our agency to choose the home of our dreams. We can try to avoid these traps by guiding our actions with values that protect or even develop trust in relationships.

Building trust

These are personal values that have helped me to develop or repair trust in my relationships.

Respect the agency of others. We should make other people feel that we respect their opinions and decisions even if we disagree with them or they end up making a mistake. Sharing a long term journey with anybody means that they will make many mistakes along the way. If mistakes are unavoidable, what is the point of creating a environment where people feel guilty about them? A better path is helping others to identify the cause of their mistakes and finding possible remediation.

Be honest. Specially, when your truth will lead to conflict and disagreement. Staying truthful to your beliefs is a strong source of self respect and confidence. It’s also a sign of respect for others because we give them the opportunity to decide whether to stick with us or not based on our true selves. Fear of conflict leads people to lie. We are afraid that conflict will deteriorate or even break our relationships. However, the fatal blow is usually the discovery of a long held lie or our incapacity to drag it for longer and exploding as a result.

Assume positive intention. Give other people the benefit of the doubt that you give to yourself when you’ve made a mistake. This is very challenging because we usually don’t have the full picture of what led someone else to behave in one way or the other. Even so, this lack of context should become the reason to see others in a better light rather than judging them. We can approach other people’s mistakes with curiosity and explore the path that led them to their outcomes.

Conclusion

As I’m writing this essay, I can’t escape the reminder of the countless times I’ve failed to act based on the principles that I described. This essay serves me as a place to come back and remember the person that I aspire to be, not the person that I always am. Humanity has prospered due to its extraordinary capacity of working together. Nevertheless, we never lost the tribal and competition instincts that pull us apart. Building trust requires fighting deeply rooted behaviors that we’ve inherited to survive in harsh environments. It is a worthy struggle because our lives feel lighter when we can trust the people that form an integral part of it.