The Holy Grail: Trust.

Perhaps I've implied it in the past, perhaps I haven't, but I'm sure for those of you who know me really well, it won't come as a surprise when I say that I have difficulties trusting the men I love in my life. And there aren't that many of them, but there are a few key offenders.

Last night after a terrible phone call with Steve at 3am, when he was so drunk he couldn't tell me where he was, where he'd been or where he was going, I lay in bed for hours, wide awake, stomach churning and wondering why I couldn't just grasp and find comfort in the feeling that 'it would just be ok'. Don't get me wrong. Drinking to that extent on a Monday night for no apparent reason, apart from the usual insurance industry sh*t of 'I have to as everyone else is' isn't good form. Infact, it's gratuitous, self indulgent and downright selfish. Especially when the net result is that you phone someone who loves you more than anyone at 3am, plague them with fear, distrust,and huge all consuming worry and leave them lying awake for hours facing another 6am start to get into London.

Steve doesn't help me to help myself sometimes. And he knows it. He's got the drinking gene unfortunately and he never knows when to stop when he starts, but that's him and it's all about unconditional love, warts and all. He puts up with my worrying and neurosis.

So lying there in my bed, my brain jumbling between thoughts like a washing machine on spin, I think about the issue of men and trust in my life.

"You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you don't trust enough." Frank Crane

"To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved." George MacDonald

"It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust." Samuel Johnson

Basically we're all f**ked...that's how I translate those. We trust someone we love, they are likely to break our hearts, but equally if we can't teach ourselves to trust, we spend our lifes wondering when the next person is going to wrong us. It's just a matter of time. Call me a pessamist, but you see it everywhere all around you, all the time. People cheat on each other, people tell lies, people disregard the feelings of those they profess to love.

Even with my very close friends I could relay many many stories of deceit, lies and betrayal. One of my best friends from university yesterday told me that her boyfriend, who she was to marry, has hidden a gambling addiction from her for 2 years and is now so severely crippled by his debt, they can't get a mortgage. She can't trust him and probably never will. A close friend whose boyfriend cheated on her several times, appears to have some kind of sex addiction. These good people have stood by their men and have paid a bitter price.

Closer to home. Why is it that I can't trust men? That 80% of my CBT therapy focussed on my inate ability to mistrust men in particular. Lets see...

Perhaps it's the fact my dad had repeated affairs with his students when he was a lecturer, the worst of which came at a time shortly after I was born and I was in the temporary care of my aunt because my mum was in phychiatric hospital with severe post natal depression. The cruelest of betrayals surely. I only discovered this during one of mum's more recent psychotic episodes and it still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, despite how much I love them both, of course.

Or my brother, who taunted me by finding my diaries with my innermost teenage thoughts, read them, showed his friends and not thinking this enough, wrote all over them in black marker pen, calling me a looser and an idiot. That day I stopped writing.

Or a boyfriend, who chose to take too many drugs and forget he had me and broke my heart.

We've all, I'm sure, been at the receiving end of some fairly shitty breaks in life. Today I'm just feeling in one of those moods to write it all down and get it all out. Perhaps it's the lack of sleep. Perhaps it's the knock from last night. Perhaps I'm just never going to be one of those people who can simply 'trust' as a default.

It's always going to be one of my achilles heels. Men and trust. Shame I love men so much ah?!