"Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do." Dr. Spock
That is a quote that people should always remember when it comes to all of their relationships. The relationship with your siblings, spouse, parents, children, family, and friends. Those are the most important relationships that you have in your life. We cultivate them. We nuture them. We instill values, principles, and morals in them. It is a quote that even I struggle to remember, but I remember, because trust is an important and imperitive part of all of my relationships.
According to Merriam-Webster trust is a: assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something b : one in which confidence is placed
The internet craze has placed our society on information overload. Too many of us place a confidence in what it is we find on the internet. Especially when it comes to finding love online.
The billion dollar business of online dating is growing exponentially. Trolling thousands of profiles and reviewing numerous photos of potential mates is a daunting and at the same time exciting task. We are trusting virtual strangers to be honest and truthful about themselves. But what we seem to forget is that online dating is basically an ad where you are selling yourself. You have to learn to choose the right words to make yourself sound personable, intelligent, witty, charming, and humorous, while simultaneously exuding commonalities of societal norms. The initial result being that of a relationship that will ultimately lead to a lasting, monogomous, committed relationship [marriage].
The anonomity the internet creates, the mystery it holds for us, its seductive aura is what we fall in love with. Its easy to troll the net and find like minded people. Its easy to say what you want as we sit behind our screens and vent, rant, inform and at times educate, through a veil of anonomity. But can we trust it? Trust seems to be a thing of the past. As everything can be broadcast within an instant of a transgression, wrong doing, immoral act, theivery- you name it and the internet has it.
I love the internet on a whole and as an author/blogger, I am not a believer of censorship of media, I just feel that I have lost trust in the moral fortitude of individuals. We [society] have no real need to know whose husband is committing adultery, or whose sleeping with whom, but because we are a society of instant gratifiers we seem to thrive on others misery.
I say this as I continue to receive correspondence from women on how they are feeling betrayed by men they have allowed into their lives; a large part of whom met these men online. But were they really betrayed? Or did they not trust themselves?
As a woman, I feel that too often we are shown red flags and/or indicators that speak to us intuitively, and we ignore them. Because deep down, we don't trust ourselves to know the difference. We have listened to our "intuition" in the past and have at times been wrong. So now I feel, that as we age, as we have accomplished all that we have set out to accomplish, we are exuding a certain amount of desperation. A desperation which blocks the energy to our intuition, ergo allowing ourselves to trust fully a person(s) that we truly do not know and have yet to vet.
I trust those within my circle until they show me otherwise. I do not feel that it is wrong to have an EXPECTATION of those around me, to be honest and open when it comes to their relationships with me. Call it naivete, but it is fair to say, that if you allow someone into your life and into your heart, that once you committ that act of committing yourself to them as a friend or lover that you are saying I TRUST YOU.
Trust yourself! You know more than you think you do!
Saundra aka SassyScribe
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