January 22, 2009

Marylou Andrew feels that many people don’t have even a basic understanding of how to behave in ways that will nurture trust and growth.

The Swedish-born philosopher and ethicist, Sissela Bok wrote, “Trust is a social good to be protected just as much as the air we breathe or the water we drink. When it is damaged, the community as a whole suffers; and when it is destroyed, societies falter and collapse.”

If you really think about it, trust plays an important yet often undervalued role in our lives. It is the basis and foundation of the most important relationships we have — parenthood, marriage and friendship. When there is a lack of trust in these relationships, children become estranged from parents, divorce takes place and friendships end.

Trust takes on more significant proportions in a marriage setting because here you have two people who are (in most cases) strangers to each other for many years of their lives and then are expected to live together in harmony for the rest of their lives. On a very basic and existential level, this is an incredibly scary thought.

This is not to say that I am against the institution of marriage, in fact quite the opposite. But after spending many years observing the marriages of family members, friends and friends of the family, it seems quite reasonable to say that trust comes marked with a big ‘fragile — handle with care’ sign in marital relationships in particular.

Perhaps there is a cultural issue at work here that needs to be explored. I realise this is a huge generalisation but we as a nation tend to be singularly untrusting. We don’t trust the government, most of us tend to be wary of our bosses, we are quite untrusting of our doctors, our children’s teachers, our neighbourhood shopkeeper, the butcher, etc., you get the picture. Whether or not any of it is valid is beside the point, the fact of the matter is that it exists.

Coming back to marriage though, in my humble view (as a singleton), most of the unions that take place in our society seem to be based on a complete lack of trust. For example, even before the nuptials take place, the prospective bride and groom and their families launch an ‘investigation’ to expose any skeletons in each other’s closets.

A few years ago an acquaintance of mine went through a similar experience. Her parents were anxious to get a good match for their daughter and were particularly pleased when she got a proposal from a Pakistani man living in the US. The man in question came to Pakistan, met with the parents and their daughter, the bride and groom seemed to like each other and matters were settled. But not quite, because this girl and her mom wanted to be sure about the guy’s ‘background’ and went to great lengths to hack into his email account (successfully I might add) and read his personal messages. As it turns out, there was nothing shady in his email and when he found out that his account had been hacked, he decided to call off the wedding.

Now I am not suggesting that people should enter a marriage without knowing something about each other’s past but surely some kind of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ rule should apply here as opposed to the ‘guilty until proven innocent’ formula that is at work.

‘Love marriages’ are also not exempt from trust issues. There is a couple — both of them are close friends of mine — who have been together for the last four years but each time the woman has to work late and has plans with her friends, her husband will be extremely suspicious and an argument will inevitably ensue. The odd thing is that they seem to love each other to death but the relationship suffers greatly because of the husband’s possessiveness and his unwillingness to trust his wife.

In both arranged and love marriages, the common denominator seems to be the insecurity of one or both parties, which leads to a lack of trust. These stories along with many others of the same ilk are enough to make me wonder why we hype up marriage so much when many people don’t even seem to have a basic understanding of how to live with their partner and to behave in ways that will nurture trust and growth.

Perhaps, instead of focusing so much on wedding preparations, it may be better to work on getting to know our partners; not by hacking into their email accounts or keeping tabs on where they are every minute, but by spending time talking to them and figuring out what makes them tick. A failure to do so will eventually lead to lack of faith and will, as Bok predicts, damage society as a whole. The process is already well underway.