So, today I was posed the following question by a friend:
“When does one start to let ones guard down and trust the other person in a friendship or relationship”
I thought it quite interesting that he posed that question to me today as I am having trouble with friendships at the moment.
I am just gonna share some of my thoughts on that.
Relationship
In a relationship, the trust needs to be there right from the beginning. Your guard needs to be down right from the off. If you go into a relationship with your guard up and don’t trust the other person right from the word go, then you might as well not be in the relationship. If you do stay in the relationship, it will become very hard for you to let your guard down and trust the other person. The longer you have the guard up, the harder it is to lower that guard. The only reason that the guard needs to go back up in a relationship is when trust is violated. There should be no guards for any reason other than that.
Friendship
For a friendship, it works on the same principles as a relationship. However, there do need to be boundaries in place in a friendship – boundaries are different to guards though. Boundaries stipulate the course and direction of a friendship and charts what is and what isn’t allowed in the friendship. Guards will just alienate you from the friendship. Trust between friends is very important. It is normal to be cautious when entering a new friendship, you can generally see how your soon-to-be friends are with their other friends. If you don’t like what you see, then don’t go into the friendship at all rather than go in with a raised guard. As with a relationship, the raised guard becomes harder to lower the longer the time passes. If you do like what you see, then you can go into the friendship with guards lowered. It is, however, still normal to be cautious.
The only thing I will say about friendships is that if that trust is violated, it will make it harder to make future friendships as you will be wary of everyone’s motives and won’t want to get hurt again.
A caution if you are a friend: when you violate a friends trust, you not only lose a friend but make it harder for them to trust again and gain new friends. Be careful what you do!
So, my thoughts are that trust is needed from the beginning for relationships and friendships. If it isn’t there, then don’t venture any further with them, take a few steps back and let them pass you by.