Trust Doesn’t Build Itself
About this series. In my practice, I’ve found that when people are frustrated by trying to “find the right person,” they’re actually struggling to develop an intimate connection. Connecting with another person requires two elements: curiosity and vulnerability. Fortunately, even though most of us were never really taught how to do this, connecting is a practice we can develop. Every person you sit across from is someone you can know right now, if you’re willing to allow yourself to be known. This series explores how to make a practice out of connecting with people.
Inspired by “Deep Dating: New Rules for Creating Intimacy” by the Inter Change Counseling Institute.
There’s a story we tell about trust in relationships: that it develops gradually over time, like a plant that just needs water and enough light. Be patient. Don’t rush things. Wait long enough, and trust will come.
I understand why this is appealing. We want to believe that building trust is an inevitable process. But, in my experience, that’s not really how it works. And if we are trying this one-and-only-first-date approach and using the intimacy formula, we need to know how to build trust.
People can spend years with someone and still not feel safe. And sometimes you can feel a surprising depth of trust with someone you’ve only known for a few hours, in a conversation that went somewhere real. Time is a factor, sure, but it’s not the deciding one.
Trust Is Something You Lean Toward
The most useful framing I’ve found is this: trust isn’t a state you eventually arrive at. It’s a direction you move in through small, deliberate acts of openness.
But here’s what often gets left out of that picture: vulnerability doesn’t just produce trust. It also requires it. Not a lot of it, but enough of a foothold to take the next small step. A moment of feeling, even tentatively, that it might be okay to let something real show. Trust and vulnerability are mutually reinforcing. Each one makes a little more of the other possible.
Sue Johnson, developer of Emotionally Focused Therapy and author of Hold Me Tight (2008), describes the core question of attachment as: “Are you there for me?” In her framework, trust builds through repeated cycles of reaching - showing a need or vulnerability - and being met with what she calls A.R.E.: accessibility, responsiveness, and engagement. The person who shows up consistently, can be found when needed, and responds with care is the person we learn to trust. And crucially, each small act of reaching and being met makes the next one a little easier.
A step toward trust is asking for what you need to feel safer or more at ease, rather than waiting for the other person to guess. It might look like naming something you’re afraid of instead of silently pulling back. It might look like telling someone you don’t trust easily and saying why, rather than staying guarded without explanation.
Saying “I don’t trust easily” to someone, out loud and honestly, is itself an act of trust. It’s leaning toward them even while holding the fear.
Across all kinds of relational contexts - in monogamous partnerships, in non-monogamous configurations, in kink dynamics, in queer relationships - the basic mechanics of trust stay the same.
The Foundation Underneath
There’s another layer to this that doesn’t get talked about enough: the relationship you have with yourself.
When the ground inside you feels unstable, when you don’t quite trust your own perceptions, when you need external reassurance to feel okay, or when your sense of self shifts dramatically depending on how a connection is going, it’s very hard to build trust with someone else. Because part of what makes it feel safe enough to be vulnerable is knowing that even if this doesn’t go perfectly, you’ll still be okay. That you can return to yourself.
This is what earned secure self-attachment looks like in practice. Not toughness or emotional armor, but a stable enough internal home that you can take relational risks without feeling like everything is on the line. You can offer something real, stay present with the uncertainty of how it lands, and come back to yourself either way.
That internal security doesn’t have to be fully formed before you start building trust with others. It grows through the same relational practice. Every time you’re honest and survive it, every time you’re vulnerable and find yourself still standing, you’re building it. The outer work and the inner work develop together.
The Past Lives in the Present
The trust challenges that show up in dating are rarely really about our present moments. They’re echoes of old injuries from past relationships and family dynamics. They’re reverberations of early experiences of being let down, or of having your full self met with rejection or indifference. For people who have faced marginalization or harm because of who they are or how they love, those echoes can run especially deep.
That’s not an excuse to stay guarded forever; It is important context. When you feel a wave of anxiety or protectiveness on a date, it’s worth asking: Is this about what’s actually happening right now, or is this an older feeling getting activated? Both can be true at once. But telling them apart makes an enormous difference - and so does having enough of a relationship with yourself to hold that question with some steadiness rather than getting swept into it.
This is one of the most meaningful things about the relational work I do with clients. We’re not just problem-solving surface behaviors. We’re getting curious about the deeper patterns - the ones that formed long before the dating apps or the first munch or the first time you tried to explain your relationship structure to someone who didn’t get it.
Getting Hurt Isn’t the Worst That Can Happen
Even if you do everything right (lean toward trust, stay open, communicate honestly), you will still get hurt sometimes. That’s not a sign that something went wrong. It’s a sign that something real was happening.
Getting hurt in relationship with other humans is data. It tells us what we care about, where our wounds are, where two people’s needs or nervous systems didn’t quite meet. When we approach that hurt with curiosity rather than as evidence that people can’t be trusted, it becomes instructive. We learn something. We get to grow.
The goal isn’t to become invulnerable. It’s to become someone who can be hurt and stay in relationship with it, with ourselves, with the other person, and with the discomfort of not knowing how it all turns out. That capacity to return to yourself, even mid-hurt, is part of what secure attachment to self actually makes possible.
How to Turn Any Date Into Something Meaningful
We tend to put a lot of energy into picking the right venue for a date: the right restaurant, the right activity, the right vibe. We look for something that signals effort without trying too hard. And setting does matter - a little.
But I want to make a case that we’ve mostly got it backward. The most memorable, most connecting dates rarely happen because of where they took place. They happen because of what occurred between the people.
The activity is often the least important thing.
Why Busyness Gets in the Way
Think about the design of a classic first date: a restaurant with a table between you, a movie where you sit in silence, or drinks at a noisy bar. These formats are structurally safe: They provide enough external stimulation that the conversation never has to go to any genuinely risky places. You can fill three hours and barely know the person at the end of the night.
That’s not always bad. Sometimes the lower stakes are what allow connection to happen at all. But there’s a ceiling on how close you can get when you’re spending most of your attention on the menu, the ambient noise, or finding things to comment on instead of actually making contact.
The best setting for a real connection isn’t the most impressive one. It’s the quietest. It’s the one that makes you and the other person the most interesting thing in the room.
This is true whether you’re on a first date with someone you met on an app, a coffee with a new connection from your local queer community space, or a date with a long-term partner that you’re hoping will feel like more than just dinner. The setting that supports connection is the one with enough quiet to actually hear each other.
Two Questions Worth Asking
Once you’ve reduced the external noise, two simple questions can take things somewhere real.
The first: how connected do you actually feel right now? Not as an aspiration, but in this moment, what’s the quality of contact between you? Naming this out loud, even tentatively, tends to amplify whatever connection is already there. It signals that this is a space where you can both say honest things.
The second question is harder: what’s in the way of feeling more connected? When you look closely at what’s actually happening in an interaction, you can usually find something - a slight guardedness, a dynamic that hasn’t been named, a bid for control or approval, a tension that’s been quietly shaping the whole conversation. These things influence every interaction until someone notices them.
When you name them: “I notice I’m being a little guarded and I’m not totally sure why,” you shift from being run by the dynamic to being in relationship with it. That move is available to anyone, regardless of connection or stage of knowing someone.
Dating as a Place to Grow
Here’s something I genuinely appreciate about dating, even when it’s hard: it surfaces our patterns faster than almost anything else. It asks us to be emotionally present with people we don’t yet know well, to regulate our anxiety in real time, to navigate vulnerability and uncertainty in ways that reveal exactly where we’re growing and where we’re getting stuck. The relational skills being asked of you are the same: presence, honesty, attunement, and the willingness to be a little changed by the person in front of you.
The dates that feel like failures: the ones where you shut down, over-shared, or couldn’t find the thread, are often the most instructive ones. What happened? Where did you lose yourself? What was the feeling underneath the behavior you’re least proud of? These are the kinds of questions that, when you sit with them, actually move something.
You don’t have to be a perfect dater to have meaningful dates. You just have to be willing to be present, take small risks, and stay curious - about the other person, and about yourself. The depth you’re looking for is available in more places than you think.
And while I’ve mostly been talking about dating throughout, I offer that these practices, ideas, and thought exercises can be applied to any human relationship to a satisfying, meaningful, and connecting degree. You can deepen intimacy with your sister, your neighbor, your coworker, and your kids. Vulnerability + curiosity = intimacy. You can start right now.
If you’d like support deepening relational intimacy in your life, I’m here for that. I’m Dana, an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist working in person in San Francisco and via telehealth across California. I work with adults across relationship structures, orientations, and identities, and I’d love to hear from you.