Trust

Trust: the reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence.

I have none. I used to have it. I'm really not sure when I lost it. It might have been in a horse trailer at the age of 5, or at church camp at age 14 when my first love told me he didn't want to be with me anymore and I had to watch him suck face with another girl all week. Maybe I still had a little at the age of 17 when I completely trusted my boyfriend only to find out later that he had been cheating on me the whole time. It was completely gone by the age of 30 when I found that my husband was still doing things behind my back that he had sworn to have given up months ago. Regardless.... it's gone. I know only a handful of men who I can rely on the integrity, strength, or ability of. They're men after all. We know what they think with.

I was on a walk with some co-workers today and the subject of Facebook and trust came up. Her husband has an account and she doesn't. Mostly because she doesn't have time to keep up with it. Her husband's justification for needing the account was for a car club that he is the president of. At first she said things were fine, but then she started seeing some unusual activity on his account that made her feel a little uneasy. This lead to her starting to second guess everything he said that was out of the ordinary. She would wake up in the middle of the night to find him on the computer, which was new..So she finally checked the computer history and found that he had tried to find his old girlfriend, which lead to more uneasy feelings. She finally brought it up to him, they talked and he reassured her that there was nothing going on. She's still uneasy, and still checking his internet history.

My coworker has never had issues with trust before. She never thought her husband would do anything. Now he's recently become Facebook friends with the skinny blonde coffee girl (who rumor has it had a four month affair with a customer last year), and my friend is suddenly scrambling to lose all the baby weight she gained with their second child so she can "compete," with this cute young thing who now has easy Facebook access to her husband.

What is all of this technology doing to our relationships? Where we used to have to "guess" what our old flames were up to, now we can become friends with them on Facebook. Or there are the random people out there who just befriend you because you have mutual friends. Soon curiousity takes over and you're commenting on their page. Next you send them an email, which leads to a chat, which leads to a meeting, which leads to..well..depends on where you are in your marriage/relationship at that point. It's just too easy now. I know..I've been there. Yes, I did my own contributions to the marriage falling apart. I think my actions then have a direct correlation to my trust issues now.

So what does trust in this internet world look like? Is it having access to your partners accounts anytime, anywhere? Is it just having that "what's going on" conversation with your partner and trusting them to tell you the whole story? Is it just complete trust in God that if your partner does fail you, you're going to be ok, because God is always there?

I sure don't pretend to have the answer. I know it's going to take me a long time to learn to trust again, and that I'm going to have to find an extra patient man to work through all of it with me.