What has made our friendships last is trust, but trust doesn’t just happen and it doesn’t happen quickly. You have to have enough experience, enough honest back and forth with another that you come to recognize that what they say is, in fact, what they really think, how they really feel.

As you probably know, being honest can be very uncomfortable, especially when you’re revealing things that feel very personal and make you feel vulnerable.

However, when you persist and really get to know each other, how and what you each really think and feel about things, your mutual understanding grows. Through this commitment, a safe space is created in which you can disagree without disconnecting. Your level of comfort with and admiration for one another increases as trust grows. Over time, you each understand that what the other says accurately reflects what they think and that their words will match their actions.

East Bay