I recently wrote a column about loyalty, which got me thinking about trust. I wondered who is in my life that I trust, and who that I don’t trust. It didn’t take me long to realize that I trust everyone in my life because I shed those whom I don’t trust.

As I pondered trust, I recalled a woman I once dated, who told me she was a widow. Later on, I learned from an independent source that she was divorced and not widowed. When I inquired about this discrepancy, she admitted that she was divorced, but that her ex-husband died a year or so after their divorce, so she figured that qualified her as a widow. If she wanted to consider herself a widow, that was fine with me, but the problem was that my trust was broken, and I started questioning the veracity of all her stories. As Friedrich Nietzsche observed, “I'm not upset that you lied to me; I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.” Unsurprisingly, a month later, we were no longer dating.

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
—Ernest Hemingway

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