There are two very different things that get called trust, and I have spent most of my adult life confusing them.
The first is the kind that means: I believe you will reach the same conclusions I do. I believe you will endorse my decisions. I believe you will be on my side, which is defined as the side that agrees with me about the relevant situation.
The second is the kind I actually mean when I say I trust someone: I believe you will be present in the situation with me. I believe you will actually think about it. I believe you will tell me what you see, even if what you see is not what I want you to see, because I have watched you do that in other situations with other people and I can extrapolate.
These are different things. They produce different relationships. I have been learning, slowly and somewhat the hard way, that the second one is the kind that reliably functions.
What I Actually Track
My brain is pattern-forming in ways I can’t always explain to other people, and one of the things it forms patterns around is how people behave when they don’t think anyone important is watching.
Are they the same person to the waiter that they are to the person they’re trying to impress? When they describe a situation, does the description match the situation as it develops? Do they do what they said they would do in the small instances, the ones where there’s no consequence for not doing it? When something took them five minutes and they did it to save me five hours–but they didn’t point it out — I notice anyway.
I am not consciously running this analysis. It runs. What I get back from it is a read on whether the person in front of me is safe to process things with — not whether they’re likely to agree with me, but whether they’re likely to be honest in the processing.
The people who pass this test are the ones I will tell almost anything to. The people who don’t are the ones I become extremely pleasant and extremely surface-level with, and will continue to be pleasant and surface-level with indefinitely — because I am genuinely not trying to make anyone’s life harder. I just won’t be doing any real thinking in front of them. Or if I am, they probably didn’t even notice unless I made a face. Unconsciously, of course. FaceCrime forever. Resting bitch face for life. The emperor wears no clothes — be glad I’m not your therapist.
I wear no affectation.
The Argument Trap
The reason the first kind of trust fails is straightforward: agreement is not a process, it’s a destination. If what we’re doing is finding our way to a pre-agreed conclusion, then we’re not actually thinking together — we’re confirming each other’s existing positions.
This can feel like intimacy. It often feels like intimacy. The particular warmth of being understood, of saying a thing and having someone say yes, exactly, that’s exactly it — that warmth is real and I don’t want to dismiss it. But it’s not the same as the warmth of being thought with, and eventually the difference becomes apparent.
Different situations call for different things, and sometimes the agreement warmth is what’s needed. But compounded — over time, over a whole life — the distinction starts to matter in a way it didn’t before. Trusting that the process you’re running home to in your hardest moment is safe rather than a roll of the dice: that’s what I’d call the compound effect of this kind of trust. The interest that builds isn’t financial. It’s the difference between a relationship that can hold weight and one that can only hold weather.
Thought-with is rarer. It requires the other person to be willing to push back — to say wait, I don’t think that’s quite right, to introduce a variable you hadn’t accounted for. To ask you to repeat something because you were talking too fast, and probably too loud. To ask if a word is real, or what you meant, or whether you’re sure that’s what you meant. It requires them to be more interested in the actual thing than in your comfort level about the actual thing.
And here’s the part I want people to understand: when someone asks me those clarifying questions, when they push back or ask me to slow down? That is not annoying. That is evidence. If my brain were somewhere else, I wouldn’t still be in this conversation. The fact that I’m here, going slow, repeating myself — that’s the signal that it’s worth thinking through together.
That’s thinking-with. That is harder. It is also the only version of trust that holds up when circumstances change.
What This Has To Do With Writing
Every piece of writing I do is, in some sense, an exercise in processing things with a reader I haven’t met yet.
I’m not writing to confirm what you already believe. I’m not writing to make you comfortable. I’m writing to think something through in front of you and to trust that you will be present in the thinking — that you will follow the argument where it goes, note where it fails to hold, bring your own experience to bear on the places where mine is insufficient.
This is why I write in the register I write in: direct, specific, willing to say the uncomfortable thing. Not to perform directness, but because the alternative — writing toward agreement rather than toward truth — produces the kind of content that sounds like something and means nothing. The internet has enough of that. God knows I’ve read enough of it.
What I want is the second kind of trust in the essay form. The one that says: I am going to think this through honestly. Come with me if you want. Push back where you see the gap.
A Note On The People Who Get It
I said earlier that people either love me or hate me with not that many in between, and I want to be clear that I don’t experience this as a tragedy.
The people who get it — who track the same things I track, who find the processing more interesting than the agreement, who are not exhausted by a conversation that doesn’t resolve into everyone feeling validated — those people are the reason I think the operating system is worth keeping.
The interactions don’t have to be long. Five minutes is enough, if both people are actually in it. It’s based more on how we act in the situation together than on how much we’ve decided in advance to like each other. Or to claim we do to others.
That’s the whole model, really. Come in. Be present. Process the situation with me. I’ll do the same for you.
That’s what I mean by trust. I thought I should finally just say so. The kids took to my thinkaloud authenticity naturally — it took me a while to… process what was really happening and trust the adults enough to tell them, too.