Trust is Not a Binary

This is something I have been wanting to get a proper article together on for a while and will probably write up properly at some point, but in the meanwhile, here are my thoughts in the form of whatever words my brain had to hand.

We talk about trust in kink a lot and I think it is open quite unhelpfully framed as a binary thing – you either trust someone, or you don’t. Which is not really how that works – more on that below.

Just to keep everything clear, let’s just pop the dictionary definition in here – trust, as defined by Merriam Webster, is reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.

Firstly, how far we trust someone and with what is entirely dependent on a vast number of thing – I think, most significantly, how well we know them, how important the task is and our estimation of their ability.

You might trust a perfect stranger to hold your place in the queue for your, but you wouldn’t necessarily leave your shopping unattended with them. You might trust your mother in law to bake a great birthday cake for your friend, but you might not trust her not to also insult that same friend if they get into a conversation about politics. You might trust a valet to park your car, but not necessarily to leave a £20 note they see on the floor. You can therefore trust someone with respect to one thing and not to another.

Equally, not trusting someone with a particular task does not necessarily involve making a moral judgement about their character – a lot of the time, our first metric in deciding whether to trust someone or not with regard to a particular task is about our assessment of their capacity to do it.

I have friend I’m very grateful to for watering my plants when both my sub and I are away. That said, they are not exactly a ‘dog person’ and I wouldn’t ask them to dogsit. They’re lovely and I’m absolutely sure would do their best if I had no other choice in an emergency, but they just don’t have the experience or skills to appropriately supervise two little furry missiles with the prey drive of a peckish pod of orcas.

(Putting aside, of course, that I wouldn’t want to put them in that position either, but that’s an issue entirely separate to trust).

Which I think is something every reasonable person can understand, really, if they think about it a bit. I mean, just look at what people don’t trust *themselves* to do, on the basis they don’t trust their own ability – have credit cards and use them responsibly, drive while upset, clean wine glasses after a long evening with friends. We make that assessment all the time with reference to our own abilities.

So, while trust has an emotional component, it’s also about a practical assessment of someone’s ability to do something and sometimes. Not trusting someone to do something is not necessarily a question of their character – it can just be a fair assessment of the facts.

This is relevant to kink in a variety of ways, but what’s on my mind today is this logic pretzel I have seen subs twist themselves into which goes something like ‘I trust my dom, but I am not comfortable with x thing, because of y risk, but if I am not comfortable, does that mean I don’t actually trust them’.

The easiest way to sever that particular Gorgonian knot is to make the point that trust is, in fact, not a binary. It’s perfectly reasonable to separate your estimation of someone’s ability to do one particular thing from your feelings about them as a person.

And if you explain that and someone still takes it personally, I think that says more about whether or not you should trust them than anything else.