Okay, let me just start by saying that I grew up with not one, but two brothers, so my trust issues started pretty early on in life.
If you’ve ever had to deal with a brother (or multiple brothers, for that matter), then you know that you most definitely cannot trust them ever .
RELATED STORIES
Okay, maybe it’s a little different once they’re older and theoretically more mature, but after years of being lied to and deceived, it’s a little hard to take what they say at face value, even if that face now has a beard and a mortgage.
For one thing, my brothers used to always lie to me about food.
We all really loved Kraft Macaroni and Cheese — I mean, come on, who doesn’t? But when we were kids, my brothers would hide all the boxes my mom bought and then convince me that she didn’t actually buy any, all the while saving the cheesy, delicious goodness for themselves.
You just can’t get over that kind of hurt.
Then, of course, there was trust when it came to TV time.
Don’t even get me started on the missing remote situation, as expressed here. There’s also all the times one of my brothers would take the batteries out of it before giving it to me so I couldn’t even watch what I wanted to.
Unless I felt like getting up off the couch to manually change the TV myself. Which wasn’t often. (But remember when that was a thing you could do?)
And who could forget about all the secrets you mistakenly told them?
I’m not sure why I kept thinking I could trust my brothers growing up, but I always seemed to spill some secret to them, fully believing that they would keep it to themselves, only to later get in trouble for it when they told that secret to my parents.
And since I wasn’t really able to teach them our national no-snitching rule (you know, involving stitches and whatnot), I eventually just had to learn to shut up around them.
I do want to make it very clear here that I’m not saying *all* of my trust issues are thanks to my brothers.
No no, there have been plenty other men who have come into my life over the years who have done a very good job themselves of making sure I don’t feel like I can open myself up to people.
But I will say this: those men never once assured me they were going to feed my Tamagotchis while I went to my friend’s cottage for a week, only for me to return to a damn graveyard of digital pets.
Yeah, I’m still not over it.
