The Story of Trust...I mean Us

This is going to be sort of a weird one. Part of it is my mood (it’s late, I’m tired, and anyone that knows me understands how sharply my moods shift (that last is a joke...I hope)) and part of it is that I’ve spent the day reading four-hundred-year-old texts actually looking for gender discrepancies to be angry about. I know; I could simply continuously cut myself with a dull razor and I would probably be less upset. But education is pain! Or is that love? I can so rarely keep them straight.

Seriously, though, I just watched The Story of Us; it’s a delightful little movie starring Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer, directed by Rob Reiner, about marriage--specifically the day to day of marriage and what happens when the romance disappears. As I watched it this time I found myself thinking a lot about trust. Michelle Pfeiffer’s character has a great line in the movie where she says “there are some hurts that never really go away;” I like that line because I think it’s true, but as I watch these two characters play out and I think about that line, I started thinking about the reality of it. Specifically, when trust is lost--when you no longer trust someone you care about to listen to you, to know you, to love you--how do you come back from that?

I think this idea is applicable to all relationships, marriages, friendships, family--that’s why I’m considering it here. The really odd thing is that while it can happen all at once, the most dramatic examples are those where one painful act destroys everything, it can also happen slowly over time. A little pain here and there; a thoughtless comment that really hurts; a dismissal of someone else’s dreams or joys; an enduring selfishness that disallows one party to see or understand the world through the other’s eyes.

None of those things have to be big deals right? How often does someone you love say something that really hurts your feelings? And I’m not even talking big things like, “my you have certainly gotten fat” but something small like, “you were at that wedding?” when you were a bridesmaid. And it all plays into this vortex of emotional slop: you feel like you’re constantly being taken advantage of, like the person you used to trust doesn’t actually understand you at all, like they never actually paid attention to what you said or who you are, like the onus is always on you to keep things going, steady, calm, on and on and on.

Meanwhile, most likely, they’re experiencing some variation of the exact same cycle or, even more likely, they have no idea that all the little things they do are constantly ripping you apart but they know you keep getting angrier with them, colder with them, irritated with them. And then, before you’ve even finished your Big Mac you’re sitting there in awkward silence wondering when it stopped being fun to be around each other wishing desperately it would all just go away.

This movie does a really fantastic job of portraying all of this, and as I sit here with all these thoughts running through my head I can’t help but ask how do you come back from that? I honestly don’t know. It’s hard to be a good friend (and I use “friend” here to cover everything from lover to family member); relationships take a lot of work, and when that moment hits, the little thing that feels kind of like a heart attack, and you realize you don’t trust them at all with anything you say, do, or feel, how do you continue to do the work of the relationship? How do you even know if you want to do the work of the relationship?

I’ve been the person on the hurting end more than once in my life and I always hated it; it feels awful to hurt someone like that, even when you know you have to. But having been on the other side I’m not sure if I don’t quite envy the hurter. For one, if you’re the one that hurts you know whether you’ll do it again (assuming you aren’t a complete idiot); for another the hurter has a sense of closure following whatever episode occurs. If you’re the one that suddenly realized you can’t trust anymore you land in this horrible limbo of “what the hell do I do now?” Even if you know the other person is really sorry, that they didn’t mean to do it, that it wasn’t intentional, [fill in the blank] some part of you is broken that never heals right. Just like the movie, “some hurts never really go away.”

And it isn’t like keeping score, though, I think a lot of people mistake it as such. I think I would draw the line between the two with the oh-so-concrete concept of perspective. I know; perspective is such a subjective measurement to use, but I think it is the right one. Mostly I think it’s the right one because the only difference between keeping score and breaking is the person, the context, and the hurt; that has to be decided subjectively case by case. And a whole host of other things get mixed into the slop like self-awareness, thoughtfulness, loyalty, affection, genuine feeling, etc. I mean it’s such a mess right? There is no way to parcel this out neatly; there is no way to say “here are the 12 steps of trusting someone again.” When you are literally struggling with yourself you cannot ever get away or get enough distance to figure it out.

And this goes back into that post a long time ago about knowing when to walk away from someone; when they are good for you and when their brokenness is simply shredding you by proximity. I mean, that’s part of the trusting right? In agreeing to trust someone you accept that they won’t destroy you, or, at the very least, they won’t make your life so painful you wish they could destroy you. But once you reach the point where every moment spent with them is pain, how the hell do you fix that?

It was a good movie. Probably no one else has ever thought this hard about it. It’s the curse of being an English major movie watcher.