“I trust you.”

I never knew how important those three words were until today.

…I trust you.

More important than saying I love you is knowing that in a relationship there is trust. The only thing missing from some of my past relationships was that one crucial ingredient.

Trust.

I loved. Oh, how I loved. I cared, more than any one person had a right to care. I could give away my heart and I could sell my soul, but the one thing I refused to give to anyone was my trust. So many times betrayed, so many times broken, discarded, abused.

Trust meant nothing more to me than opening myself up one more time to be treated as though I was less than worthy of compassion, companionship, honesty, integrity, caring…unworthy of faithfulness and fidelity.

Sure, I might give myself to another, and might even do so completely, but I could never fully accept them in return because I did not trust myself or them enough to let them inside of me.

For the longest time, I sought to trust others by learning how not to mistrust them. But I was wrong.

Trust is earned and so is mistrust. Neither is usually extended immediately to anyone. By not extending trust to another, that doesn’t automatically mean that person is not worthy of my trust. In fact, many times, trust is internal and has little to do with the other person at all.

I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to explain in the past to others, “…it’s not that I don’t trust you,” but they didn’t understand. And I tried so hard to make them understand. It’s important to me to be understood. One doesn’t have to agree with me, but I need to be understood completely. I will talk circles, repeating myself, until I feel I have been understood completely.

But you… You were different. You didn’t care that I didn’t trust you. You didn’t care about the past or even much about the present. Your eyes were focused on our future. You knew my trust had to be earned, and you never once felt you were above proving you deserved that trust. You waited patiently until I came to a point where I too could see in front of me and stop looking behind me.

It wasn’t an easy process. You had years of walls to knock down. You had scars to soothe away. You had a ghost of the past haunting your every move while the shadow of the present day was hanging over us both.

Other men had tried and failed. You refused to fail.

Other men gave up, not just on love and trust, but on me. They gave up on me.

You are the only person who never gave up on me.

Tonight, as I sit here waiting for you to come home, talking about you with a friend, I had to stop a moment and catch my breath when I realized….

…I trust you.

I trust you.

I am not only willing to invest all of myself in you, but I find that I have opened myself up to you and have allowed you into those places where no other has walked. No one has touched those parts of my heart, my soul… ever.

Just you.

Not because you are so wonderful, or special, not because you are better than all the rest, not because there is something about you that makes you different.

Sure, this may all be true. But that’s not why.

I let you in because…

…I trust you.

Completely.

And in realizing that I trust you, I found an even greater gift.

I trust myself now too.

There is no doubt in me. Fear? Sure. I’m scared. There are things that terrify me about the path we travel together, the plans we’ve made, the dreams we hope to share. But trust isn’t the absence of fear.

Perhaps it is the absence of doubt. There is something so surreal about sitting here tonight waiting for you and realizing this inside of myself.

I’m tired now, and I’m going to go to bed, and I know that soon you will come in, slide under the blankets next to me, kiss me gently on the forehead and hold me in your arms throughout the night…

And I trust that this is a scene that will play at many times in our coming years together.

But tonight is a night I will mark in my mental calendar, because tonight is different for me. Special.

You may never know just how much this realization inside of me means to me right now in this moment. I could try to tell you, but I’m not sure even then you would completely comprehend the relief, love, warmth, and safety that knowing I can trust you brings me.

So before I drift off to dream of you and awake to those dreams being a reality in my life, let me just take a moment

to say the three most important words I can ever express to another. No, I won’t say I love you, though I do. Tonight, I say goodnight, by saying, “I trust you.”