Hope is a sad substitute for reality. More often than not, it travels on the wings of words—both what we tell ourselves we want to be, and what we tell others we think they want to hear. It serves as a loudspeaker, amplifying one voice while rendering us nearly deaf to anything that would contradict it.
Unless we consistently correct the veering that hope can take us into, we will believe we've been betrayed by reality, rather than admit that our fancy with hope had us progressively begin to veer away from truth. It is then we say we cannot trust, or our trust has been broken, or another has broken our trust, when it is never any of these things. It is in fact we who have broken with reality, and broken our trust with it.
Rather than hinge our hearts on hope, we can cultivate acceptance. With people, there is one guarantee against never being betrayed: trust them to be who they are and make it a requirement to cleanse our perception of all hope so we can see with great accuracy exactly who they are, in both the relative world of action and the absolute world of essence.
Otherwise, in the face of such betrayal, we tend to swing toward despair, as a world with such lies must be meaningless. However, such nihilism is just as naive and detached from reality as hope. In place of nihilism, we develop discernment.
If we want to guarantee a world in which we can live with an open heart, we must make the onus of responsibility our own when it comes to the study of another's heart, behavior, motivations, and actions. What lies not just on top of the words but inside of them, not what is said but how it is said, what is not said, where it gets specific, where it gets vague.
Know those we allow into our inner sanctum the way we would know a canvas we were painting throughout the whole of our life. Look for the moments the thief or the burglar appear, the cold one, the scared one, the lover, the sneak. Be willing to put that information into our internal repository to be weighed against when we are determining whether or not to open the next door and invite this person in.
But do know, it is us, with all of this information and due diligence, who are making the choice. We are not looking to catch them or punish them. We are simply reading for the behaviors that emerge at various pressures, speeds, and intensities. And then matching up how well those behaviors meet our ideas for how we want to be cared for and tended to. There is no right or wrong, only a resonance between behavior and desire.
It is right to want to have our heart stolen. It is right to want to feel the solidity of a stone wall of rejection or the charm of emptiness in the face of abandonment. The difference between experiencing it as right and beautiful or as nightmarish is how honest we are and how deliberate we are in admitting to ourselves that in the background, we are always doing the calculations required to create that precise experience, and we chose this person because we knew we could indeed trust them to provide it.