Beyond thinking

Welcome to the new year 2025 – and welcome to the retrospective 2024!
If I look at these last twelve Entries in my “travel diary”, most of them were about the most important elements which constitute the “oligoamorous construction kit”: precisely those elements which are essential for a solid basic structure.
For example, the January-Entry was about the connectedness between all those involved in a multiple relationship and the February article centred on the certainty of being accepted with your whole personality in such an arrangement.
In March, in which we celebrated an incredible 5 years of Oligoamory, I once again strongly encouraged everyone to give the magic of love between more than two people a proper chance before it is suffocated under a tangle of prejudices and resentments amongst themselves. Nevertheless, in April, in the 100th Anniversary Entry, I immediately included advice on how to ensure favourable resource management in this regard – both materially and ideally.
Consequently, I dedicated the May-Entry to the perceived level of satisfaction in our relationships – especially with regard to the challenges of modern life.
In June, I reminded us not to forget that all the relationships we entered into as adults, with their inherent responsibilities, were the result of the shaping of our personal freedom; to this I added in the July-Entry the paradox of the mutual gain that would result from the voluntary self-restraint of all the participants involved in such relationships.
Consistency and sustainability, the basic principles of any form of genuine commitment, were once again my theme in August – which prepared the way for the September-Entry, in which I appealed to remain true to the core values of ethical multiple relationship conduct even in less favourable situations. To illustrate this, I chose an almost melodramatic example for the October-Entry, in which I outlined how our search for comfort and acceptance would be able to plunge us into treacherous depths, misunderstandings and seemingly inexplicable despair if we unquestioningly were willing to surrender to the expectations of our normative society.
Life as a person with a desire for multiple relationships in a standardised society with its dog-eat-dog mentality also accompanied us into November – along with the need for authentic wokeness, beyond glaringly simplistic populism.
I concluded this colourful package in December with a call to not only endure the “in-between” that our way of life inevitably entails, but rather to embrace it as a source of one’s own self-confidence.
When I look back at this colourful list from the past year, I am delighted on the one hand by its diversity – and its significance.
On the other hand, the content also makes me think again – especially in view of the present global situation which is proving to be extremely challenging and thus the omnipresent discord that can currently be felt in far too many places.
After all, “places” is not just a fixed term that describes actual locations such as Kharkiv or Khartoum. “Places” can also refer to environments for encounters, such as our interpersonal relationships.
And in the end, the world’s lack of peace also seeps its way into these places; it strains, wears them down and exhausts them with the daily large and small reports from the outside world: from diffuse, threatening global wars and crises to more personally tangible points of contact such as climate change, inflation or labour shortages.
And once such constant drops of insecurity have started to undercut the stone of our steadfastness and tolerance, a treacherous morass of increasing irritation forms underneath, in which also our social flexibility is threatened to submerge.
Our close relationships ultimately begin to suffer as a result – no matter how nicely that Oligotropos may write about resource management, freedom of choice or awareness…
These days, there are election posters plastered all over my federal republic. Some of them feature keyword slogans such as “Hope” or “Confidence” ¹.
These are certainly fine words that our country will truly need in the future. And as far as our relationships and the love within them are concerned, we absolutely need hope and confidence as well.
However, when the constant drops of insecurity fall and fall, their frequency even seems to become stronger and more regular… – then sooner or later hope and confidence also become such a diluted substance that even they can no longer carry us through our everyday lives.
At some point we have waited long enough – for the miracle that won’t come anyway; for things to take a positive turn one day; for things to turn out not to be so bad after all and for us to be able to hold out a little longer.
No.
At some point we simply run out of steam, our patience is at an end; even our confidence is finally worn through, so that we feel sore, defenceless and exposed – an unbearable state, there’s nothing more we can do.
In this state of mind, our focus becomes rushed “What? The weekly shopping bill has increased by another €20 – there was such a rise just a few weeks ago…!” “The car is broken again – has the mechanic been sloppy despite all his assurances when I picked it up the other day?” “Our colleague – what’s wrong with her that she’s using us as a mental dust bin during the lunch break – only to burden us with extra work half an hour later for some unpleasant little thing…?” “And then our loved ones, how they keep looking at us…, am I too tired, too fat, too imperfect, not sexy enough in their eyes once again???”
That’s how a lot of people are feeling at the moment. Too many. And because we feel this way, and under stress, we start to cling to insinuations and assumptions. We feel ashamed of ourselves for all too human little things (which also happen to us); at the same time, we try to assign blame somewhere, because that’s all we can do at the end of our tether – and damn it, someone else will have to improve the situation or at least change it to make it more bearable for us right now.
When we have long since overstepped achievements such as sustainability, freedom of choice and authenticity in this way and they already ring hollow because they no longer provide any support; when even hope and confidence are depleted in such a situation – I asked myself what we are currently lacking the most.
What we lack above all these days is trust.
Above all, the trust that comes from a wealth of accumulated experience, about which the American writer, journalist and cultural critic Henry Louis Mencken once said that “it is a feeling of being able to believe a person even when you know that you would lie in his place.”
Or rather, this trust that is open-mindedly bestowed, of which the German poet Damaris Wieser wrote some time ago that it is “the abolition of the constant control we exert over our fellow human beings”.
Indeed, even more: precisely the kind of faith that the Lebanese-American philosopher Khalil Gibran called “an oasis of the heart that is never reached by the caravan of thinking”.
A wealth of experience? Something that is bestowed?? Beyond thinking???
Does this really have anything to do with this much sought-after and urgently needed trust? Did the English writer Samuel Johnson have a point 300 years ago when he wrote that “there can be no friendship without trust, no trust without integrity” ?
The German ethymology dictionary “Duden²” (and the Online Ethmology Dictionary) defines:
»‘to trust’ – the common Germanic verb Middle High German trūwen, Old High German trū[w]ēn, Gothic trauan, English to trow, Swedish tro belongs in the sense of ‘to become firm’ to the word group discussed under ↑true. The original use of the word in the sense of “believe, hope, have faith in” developed into the meaning “to trust”.«
You’ve read the details on ↑true here on my bLog already in Entry 66:
»The current form dates back to Middle High German triuwe. Comparisons from other Germanic languages are Gothic triggws “faithful, reliable”, Old English [ge]trīewe “faithful, honest” (modern English true: “faithful, truthful, proper, genuine”) and Swedish trygg “sure, confident”. The word group belongs to the Indo-European *deru “oak / tree,”. The adjective true therefore actually means “steadfast, firm like a tree”.«
Ok…, after so much linguistic history, let’s realise that “trust” is in a sense intrinsic – I can only experience it (as I can with the stability of a tree…) when I commit myself to it or rely on it to see whether it will endure.
The German proverb, which can still be read as an inscription on the beams of some old half-timbered houses in my country, is therefore also appropriate:
“Trust springs from loyalty – and also leaves with it.”
That trust requires fidelity or – as I often prefer to say here on my bLog – loyalty, I have already noted in the aforementioned Entry 66, when I quoted Wikipedia: “Treue (mhd. triūwe, nominalisation of the verb trūwen “to be firm, to be sure, to trust, to hope, to believe, to dare”) is a virtue that expresses the reliability of an actor towards another, a collective or a thing. Ideally, it is based on mutual trust or loyalty[…].”
Which puts Samuel Johnson well on track with his approach to integrity – because the definition of integrity as a component of loyalty is one of my favourite Wikipedia quotes since the early Oligoamory-values-Entry 3: “…the continuously maintained consistency of one’s personal value system and ideals with one’s own speech and actions.”
Trust is therefore something that we humans actually can only “experience”. We can neither be convinced of it nor get others to trust us through factual thinking or intellectual arguments. So Khalil Gibran’s oasis is indeed safe from mere reason. This is in a way good news from a spiritual and romantic point of view – but for our crazy times it also holds the challenge that we cannot decide to trust by merely keeping our wits about us, but that this step must be taken on a different level.
The contemporary aphorist Dirk Hintze has expressed this seemingly tricky, almost contradictory correlation in an extremely clever way:
“Trust is a borrowed gift.”
After all, when applied specifically to our interpersonal relationships, we bestow our trust primarily when we, for our part, have already learnt from the recipients that they are, to use a metaphor, a “safe depository” for it. Thus, trust has obviously already been reciprocated by the other party, e.g. in some form of predictability, reliability or the aforementioned integrity.
This basic idea is confirmed above all by the cross-check: if you remove predictability, reliability and integrity from a relationship, then that’s immediately the end of the story – and it becomes clear that although acknowledgement and appreciation are “bestowed” in the form of trust, this “gift” immediately disappears into thin air as soon as the experiences that gave rise to it are no longer perceived.
And Khalil Gibran is absolutely right when he describes that no thinking is necessary for this, indeed it is even detrimental: the experience of trust is an inner treasure trove of situations to which we have intuitively given meaning at the moment of encounter. The vast majority of these past experiences we could therefore no longer even recall on the basis of reason – today, however, the result is that another person has our trust – or not.
Damaris Wieser, in turn, substantiates that “trust” is part of the sphere in which love and freedom are at home as well. Because their antagonists (opponents) are called control and security – and trust is not about the latter: the branch is going to hold – and I “expect” that before I put my foot on it – I put my foot on it – and it will hold in fact.
The fact that nowadays, on the other hand, we lapse into micromanagement when under stress – and have to scrutinise every branch in the forest, no matter how far-fetched, as meticulously as it is superfluous – therefore explains a great deal about our present situation…
All that remains for me to do is to raise my hat to Henry Louis Mencken, who, in my reading, expanded the scope of trust to include “more than the sum of its parts”, just as I often wish for here on the Oligoamory-bLog: the experience of trust in others exceeds even my own ethical self-demand. Through my trust, I receive back even more than my own commitment.
All the more so because the “door of trust” swings in both directions: it’s not just about constantly demanding trustworthiness from others, but also regularly demonstrating it yourself through your own predictable and predominantly unambiguous behaviour.
Accordingly, what we really want to experience, especially in our close relationships, is what is known in research as “Identification-based trust”. It consists of the following four important dimensions of experience:
- Close coordination, openness and regular communication (who would have guessed…?)
- Identification with the values, goals and needs of those involved
- Community between the confidants
- Mutual sympathy and the development of an emotional bond
Will we ever be able to reach this ultimate stage beyond private relationships? I believe that our society as a whole would have to be organised much differently than it is at present.
To do so, we sometimes even may have to invest trust, just as perhaps an intrepid dandelion plant instinctively trusts in sufficient light and nutrients as it breaks through a paved surface.
For our world has long since proven that such seemingly unfounded optimistic confidence is far less absurd than it may appear at first glance.
When, in November and December 1989, a significant part of the “Iron Curtain” fell in what was then Czechoslovakia in the course of the “Velvet Revolution“, an anonymous graffito appeared on a wall in the capital Prague shortly before Christmas – with the words:
“In a world full of mistrust, trust is the revolution.”
¹ Electoral campaign Bündnis90/Die Grünen on the occasion of the upcoming federal election in February 2025
² Duden Volume 7: Das Herkunftswörterbuch, Ethymologie der deutschen Sprache, reprint of the 2nd edition (1997), Verlag Bibliographisches Institut & F.A. Brockhaus AG
Thanks to Enrique on Pixabay for the photo!