Trust, Technology, and Romantic Love

Trust stands as one of the most beautiful moral gifts that any two individuals can give to one another.  Romantic love underwritten by mutual and profound trust between two individuals is a most rhapsodic relationship between two individuals.  Alas, I fear that technology is unwittingly undermining trust at its best between romantic partners.

I claim that technology is “unwittingly undermining” trust because it is most unlikely that any supposed that trust between lovers would diminish as a result of technology.  I do not claim that trust has diminished between all lovers.  I merely claim that this is so in a great many cases.

As we all know, a most interesting consequence of cell phone technology is what I shall refer to as “whereabouts accountability”.  Thanks to technology people can be reached 24-7; and owing to that very reality, it is increasingly the case that people call wanting to know where their partner is and was.  Thus, a telephone call these days is as likely to begin with “Where are you?” as it is to begin with a warm greeting.

Not only that, we expect our romantic partners to answer when we call.  Nowadays, there are increasingly few exceptions to this expectation.  Air travel remains the most notable one for the moment.  For the moment, no one expects a person to answer if she or he is on a plane that is in flight.  However, that may change in the near future.

I suppose that a surgeon in the operating room or a firefighter answering a call is not expected to answer a call.  No doubt there are other instances.  Alas, the well-defined exceptions where a person is not expected to answer a call serve to prove the point.

Now, there is a vanishingly thin line between “just calling to see how a person is doing” and “calling to find out what a person is doing and where the person is”.  And the slide from a routine call to see how a person is doing to a routine call to what a person is doing and where the person is the slide from trust to an increasing absence of trust.

In this odd way, technology lends itself to a most disconcerting form of self-deception.  This is because people can deceive themselves in thinking that they expressing concern for the well-being of their romantic partner when in point of fact they are only calling because they want to make sure that their romantic partner is not doing something unacceptable.

Needless to say, the difference between wanting to make sure that one’s partner is all right and having the concern that one’s partner may be up to no good constitutes a fundamental difference between a loving relationship that is sustaining and a relationship that sits upon the rock of instability and suspicion.

Alas, a most interesting point here is that not reaching a romantic partner can serve as a basis for suspicion in a way that it typically did not a mere 15 years ago when, of course, it was an accepted part of life that people could not be reached 24-7.  Accordingly, insofar as people were suspicious it took more than not being able to reach the person whenever, since that was typically not an option in the first place.

So here we have a most surprising result: The cell phone was introduced as a marvelous means of reaching others regardless of geographical location, and so deemed ever so superior to the land-line.  The surprise, alas, is that the cell phone has also turned out to be, albeit ever so unexpectedly, a catalyst for suspicion precisely because one is able to reach another whenever.

As far as I can see, the phenomenon to which I have drawn attention arises only between romantic partners—and not between friends.  And this is particularly interesting, since there is the thought that romance is none other than friendship at a higher level.  Thus, one would have thought that if “whereabouts accountability” is not a factor in friendship, it should not be a factor in romance.  Given that one of the most striking difference between friendship and romance is sex and living together, then it seems reasonable to ask: How is it that either or both of these factors occasion the mentality of “whereabouts accountability”?  To that question, I do not have an answer.

I suspect that part of the answer, though, is that there is an on-going affirming quality to friendship precisely because the nature of friendship does not easily lend itself to either friend taking the other friend for granted.  People understand that friendship is dynamic.  By contrast, it is often the case with romance that the most important work is thought to be that of “getting one’s partner” and then everything else can be taken for granted.  We know that this cannot possible be right; for love should never, under any circumstances, be about taking the other for granted.  In this respect, then, love at its best should also be a form of friendship.