Faith Grants Permission to Love

Faith grants permission to love. As it takes the sun to open the petals of the flower, so it takes faith to open the human heart. Like religion, love requires a leap of faith. To love another, we have to risk believing and trusting in that person, which means to risk becoming vulnerable to sorrow as well as joy. By so doing, we let the other into our hearts, so that the fragile, living connection of caring might grow between us. And how priceless is that living connection.

Faith has two interwoven components, belief and trust. Belief is the objective component, and trust the subjective. Thus, I believe certain things about my loved ones, things concerning their character and behavior. Based partly on these convictions, I also risk trusting them. I let them into my heart; I disclose myself to them; I render myself vulnerable to them.

Psychologist Erik Erikson said we largely determine whether to trust others on the basis of our family of origin experience in our first year or so of life. That determination establishes for us the trustworthiness not only of other persons, but of life itself. While we can still learn to trust after these first years, trusting becomes more difficult as we age, and the longer we go without a successful love relationship the more distant from trust we grow.

We enter into new love relationships already with a history and attitude toward trust. For some trusting comes easy; for others, it seems well-nigh impossible. Due both to our history and personality, our nurture and nature, we trust others in differing degrees and rates of speed. Being either too trusting or too cynical, however, will eventually prove costly.

Trust is the last thing to be developed in a love relationship, and the first thing to be lost should the relationship go awry. This is as true for men as for women, for there are no significant differences between the sexes regarding the capacity to trust. Yet it is more difficult for men to permit themselves to become vulnerable to other men, than for women to open themselves to other women. This does not hold true between men and women, perhaps due in part to men not seeing themselves in competition with women.

When I counseled couples, I told them that if they were going to succeed at rebuilding their relationship, they would have to reestablish their faith in one another. This must be done in stages. It’s almost like beginning over again, only with the major difference that they have some history and pain between them to resolve.

I would tell them that if they said they would do something, or be somewhere at a certain time, they had better be true to their word. Their relationship had entered a probationary period, wherein they would have to prove themselves to each other all over again—maybe even to themselves. The issue is not only “how trustworthy am I to the other”, but also, “how trustworthy am I to myself?”

When you have faith in another, you believe that they genuinely care for you, and will strive not to hurt you. You risk trusting that they are loyal, honest, consistent, confidential, committed, understanding of and sensitive to, you. You believe that this person is there for and with you, and will not easily reject or abandon you. At the same time, you hopefully believe yourself to be just as trustworthy. Mutual faith grounds mutual love.