Student Corner Trust & Love
By Kim Min-jeong
In the subway last Sunday, one drunken guy got on the train and started to shout at people. ``You know…. I love her but I can't trust her.'' He seemed really drunk and somewhat desperate. And I started to wonder if love has something to do with trust. Can we love someone whom we cannot trust? Does trust always come with love? Is love one thing and trust another? These questions never seem to go out of style.
Loving someone at first sight seems very romantic. But it has never happened to me. If I ever experienced love at first sight, it would be more like a sexual attraction, which might seem to be love but would not really be love, I guess. When I met my ex-boyfriend at first, I did not think that I loved him at the beginning of the relationship. It was more like a curiosity towards a man I liked. For me, love comes with trust and respect. I do not think that I can ever love someone whom I do not trust.
If I started a relationship without trust, it would end so soon. I also believe that respect can build love even stronger. We may often get confused about those feelings of love and like. Most people seem to have their own standards for these two. I cannot say which is right or wrong because everyone has his or her own beliefs, which have been built for life. But it can also be thought that love is one upgraded emotional level from like. And trust can help upgrade emotion from like to love.
If trust can upgrade emotion from like to love, can people who fall in love at first sight trust each other right away? Even in the movie, ``Titanic,'' it takes only a week for two people to fall in love to the point that they would die for each other at the end of the movie. Perhaps trust is just not even an issue when it comes to falling in love. It might not be necessary to take time to trust someone. I wonder how much time we need to trust someone.
Does knowing someone a long time mean that we know them well and can trust them more or less? I was in a relationship for almost for a year. I thought one year was long enough to know him. I did not fall in love with him at first sight. But I thought I could build trust in him and love him as time passed by. After ending my long relationship with my boyfriend, I realized I had just been living an illusion by thinking I knew him well. But now I know I just wanted to trust him. Trust might not even require time but it requires love. We might trust someone because we love them.
Love and trust could be like bricks and cement. When building a house, we place cement before we add a brick so it can settle and attach well. If we don't add enough cement, the house might fall to pieces. To build a strong house, we will have to add enough cement so that all the bricks can stay strong enough not to fall apart. Love and trust could be something that always should stick together and survive together in building a relationship just like bricks and cement in building a house.
Maybe love is not one thing and trust another. Love and trust will eventually be one even though the two of them started from different places. If one cannot stick to the other, a relationship could become very fragile and fall apart easily. Just like that drunken guy from the subway, distrusting his girlfriend might weaken the relationship more. Maybe he should not have tried to separate trust and love.
Trust can help upgrade an emotion from like to love. Although I often forget how much I may love some of the people in my life, I do believe that they will always be there for me. Just thinking of them makes me feel so safe. Love could be just like a safety zone, but only when it is surrounded by trust.
Kim Min-jeong is a senior studying international law and economics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.