First I want to show you something cool. If you are running Windows, download this small file, close all your programs and run it. You trust me, right?

Now, there are two possible outcomes resulting from me posting that link.

1. You, being lazy or cautious, did not download the file; or if you did download the file, your attempts to open it were stopped by a Windows or third party software security measure. [Finally, if you had batch file fu, you opened the source code and saw the flimsy attempt to ruin your next few minutes.]
2. You are here to complain about the thousands of command prompt windows that spawned and made you restart your PC.

For those of you who didn’t know, the file was a Fork Bomb, which essentially creates copies of itself like a cell undergoing rapid mitosis. It will continue to multiply like rabbits until it overloads the computer or reaches the limit on the number of processes on your computer.

Now you may be asking (and you probably are) why would I post a link to such a annoying and potentially dangerous (if you had an important assignment in Word and hadn’t saved and disabled auto-recover) file? To emphasise the points I will make later in this post. But imagine if that first paragraph was in a different context. Would you trust me more if I gave it to you in person on a flash drive than if I sent you that message over MSN?

Trust has been and is one of the most important foundations of human society. It will probably remain so for the foreseeable and unforeseeable future (only being removed when an Orwellian society of brainwashed and conditioned humans serves their machine overlords willingly). It is essentially allows two people to remain in proximity to each other. Person A trusts person B not to maim, kill, psychologically torment, steal, etc. person A, and vice versa. It may not seem that there is a single element of trust in that kind of scenario, but it exists for most people (those who don’t count are usually grizzled war veterans who’ve seen more blood than any person should see) and allows us to walk outside relatively unafraid.

Not only is there this basic trust between strangers, there is also the greater amount of trust we afford in our education, health and public safety professionals. Teachers hold great power in molding the future of their students, and doctors hold the power of life and death over every patient. But perhaps the greatest trust of all of these three in our modern society is placed in the people who maintain justice and order.

Sometimes our trust is betrayed, by total stranger or close friends. It is in such painful situations that we all must turn to the judicial system, and place our trust in the hands of society’s most respected and most reviled people, police and lawyers respectively. We have taken great measures to ensure that this trust in the executive and the judiciary is not also betrayed, by separating who makes the laws, who makes judgements, and who enforces both. But we all still place great trust in ensuring that these people can bring justice when our trust with someone else is betrayed.

However, even if the police, the law and the courts were the best they could be, there would still be two main problems:

1. Their jurisdiction is limited.
2. Not all betrayals of trust can be acted upon.

This leads me to the meat of this post: trust in relationships. Not just relationships of love, but also friendships. Mainly, to what extent can you trust a friend? Clearly you have seen that friends can sometimes breach their trust, if you opened that program I linked to (I did put in some sarcastic hints though).

I’ve compiled a list of some of the things I consider one should trust their friends in:

• To keep confidential what I want to be kept confidential.
• To set me straight when I waver.
• To bring me up when I am down.
• To warn me of past, present and future mistakes.
• To not be lovesick for four years (I think?) and whine about it for a bit on an online blog. *cough*

Yeah, I messed that last one up. Anyway, while we can usually trust our friends to do at least two of these things, it is obvious we rarely, if ever, trust another person completely. This is the where the whole concept of secrets arises. Almost all of us keep secrets, and will take some to the grave. We do not want to open up about certain things, in the fear that either the information we reveal will be abused, or the information will damage our relationship. The first is related to how much we trust the other person, and the second is related to how much they trust you.

For example, in scenario one Bob tells Derrick he was the one who knocked over their teacher’s flower vase and broke it. Derrick, being a bully type of ‘friend’, tries to coerce Bob into giving his lunch so Derrick won’t tell the teacher. Already you can see that this is a scenario where Bob’s information was abused – and thus he misjudged how much he trusted Derrick.

In scenario two, Alison admits to her best friend Jane that she received the scholarship that Jane needed to get into university, as Jane comes from a low-income family. Such serious news requires Jane to have huge trust in Alison, trusting her in being truly remorseful and hopefully giving Jane support for her stress.

Hopefully my examples have made it clear that trust in a relationship is a two-way street, and only when the trust is strong both ways can people open up to their friends. In fact, you could probably create a mathematical function demonstrating the threshold level of total trust required for a person to open up.

Which leads me to my next point. In a sort of cycle, friendships and love relationships depend on two people opening up to each other in some way; and people opening up to each other requires them to have trust in one another that comes about from friendship/love (I guess it is possible to have a weird sort of friendship in which the two people don’t open up at all and know nothing about each other’s personality, hobbies, lifestyle, etc.; but unlikely).

So perhaps in order for a friendship or relationship to succeed, you have to be prepared to trust the other person more than you would like. Perhaps if you see everyone as being antagonistic to you, you need to be prepared to trust that this is not really the case. If you think you are being too hard on others, maybe believe in their trust in you.

Yes, this last bit was a response to Norman’s post.

But there is more. It appears I am the main writer on the subject of love, so it makes sense for me to delve further into trust in romantic relationships. Let us start with the initial stages. Actually lets start with a assumption. I am assuming that a romantic relationship is one that develops through the regular and intimate meetings of a couple throughout a lengthy time period (determined by the context and cultural standards of their backgrounds). i.e. I am not counting marriages by two drunk people in a Las Vegas chapel, or the odd case of a couple instantly connecting and knowing each other is the one.

Now, the first main test is the time one of the couple says the three words shared by 90% of all romance movies, dramas and novels – “I Love You”. How I Met Your Mother’s pilot episode is a perfect example of the dangers of the phrase if spoken too early. In NCIS, the romance between Tony DiNozzo and Dr Jeanne Benoit shows the erosion of trust of not saying the words. The problem is worse if the couple are friends, as it is more difficult to gauge the correct timing.

This conundrum sets up the rest of my view nicely. Namely, the limits of trust and their implications in romantic relationships are too dynamic and unique from couple to couple. Frankly, there is no one true path to romantic success. If there was I’d have made millions and bought out every deposed prince who has emailed me with an offer to claim some of their money from various global bank accounts.

How fickle love can be. Now I shall leave you with Dr. Feelgood by Mötley Crüe, which sounded awesome in the newly release Brutal Legend game for Xbox 360 and PS3 and featuring Jack Black, Tim Curry, Lemmy Kilmister, Ozzy Osbourne, Rob Halford and Lita Ford along with over 100 metal songs and most important the wit of acclaimed developer Tim Schafer.