Trusting Without Proof is Kind of the Point
On anxious attachment and choosing trust without certainty
I have long believed that full transparency and disclosure were necessary for trust and safety in relationships. I’m a direct communicator and external processor, and I gravitate toward an anxious attachment style. I want to share everything with my loved ones. Open communication makes me feel safe, so I treat it as essential. I believe that if a loved one were to be fully honest and direct with me, I’d have nothing to fear: I’d see into their mind, and they’d see into mine, and there would be no walls between us. Communication → safety → trust.
I treat transparency as a moral good, something that automatically creates closeness and protection. My anxious attachment tells me that I want a kind of synergistic, mind-melding connection, and that to achieve it I need full transparency, constant contact, and unchecked access.
As I wrote in “Are We Too Stingy With Love?,” sometimes the vulnerability of caring without certainty of reciprocity is too much:
“We [may] talk ourselves out of loving someone that we’re not sure loves us back. Loving is vulnerable because we equate unrequited love with rejection.”
But maybe safety doesn’t come from knowing everything. And maybe trust doesn’t come from feeling safe. Instead, safety comes from making the active choice to trust.
This idea unsettles me, because it asks me to loosen my grip on certainty rather than demand more information. It asks me to tolerate discomfort and ambiguity. It asks me to choose the most generous interpretation of others’ actions instead of defaulting to rejection and hurt. It asks me to take others’ words at face value rather than searching for hidden meaning.
Part of what makes this so hard is the tension between autonomy and connection. Anxious attachment pulls us toward connection at all costs: it tells us that closeness means safety, while distance is dangerous. In that frame, transparency can start to feel like a requirement rather than a preference, a way to guarantee security. Learning to trust means allowing more space for autonomy: staying in relationship without needing constant access, reassurance, or control.
We can practice trust by choosing how we love, rather than waiting for others to love us in the way we want. We can’t control how our kids show love—sometimes it’s sweet hugs, sometimes it’s meltdowns—but we can choose to meet them with kindness, forgiveness, and empathy regardless. How I love my kids does not depend on how they love me in return.
Trust is a choice to participate in love on our own terms. It doesn’t require full access or constant proof, and it can’t come from disclosure on demand. Instead, trust is built through responsiveness: how someone shows up over time, even if it’s not as quickly or in the way we want. It’s built by noticing patterns, like how they repair after a rupture, or whether they respond to vulnerability with care.
I trust that my partner loves me even though he doesn’t share his every thought with me. I see it in how he shows up for me when I need him and how he keeps pouring energy into our relationship, listening to my needs, and improving himself to be a good partner to me. I see it in how he shares what’s important to him at his own pace, so that we continue to know each other, even though I often feel ready to share before he does. I even see it in what he chooses, with kindness, to keep to himself.
Trust is a leap of faith. Trusting without proof means allowing another person to have an interior world separate from our own — and accepting there will always be things we don’t know or understand. It means believing in their care for us, that they will share whatever they have capacity or availability to share at their own pace. At its core, trust is faith in the relationship itself.
Cultivating trust in others also means trusting ourselves—our perceptions, our ability to survive disappointment, our capacity to speak up for what we need. It means trusting that we don’t need total certainty to remain whole, that we can stay grounded even when we don’t know everything.
Safety, then, comes from noticing patterns in how someone shows up for us, and from choosing to believe in their good intent without requiring constant evidence. It’s choosing the kindest interpretations of their actions. It’s something we can nurture within ourselves—by choosing trust, tolerating uncertainty, and allowing both autonomy and connection to coexist.
Acknowledgments
I’m grateful to Spencer Carson, who has helped me work through these thoughts about relational trust. Many of the ideas in this piece have been shaped by our conversations.
And to Angela Han, an Instagram influencer whose views on trust have also shaped my own, especially that we create our own felt sense of safety by deciding to trust.