We also confuse trust with familiarity.

For all of the advice in the magazines on "How to Keep your Love Alive," the salvation of love is not the prolongation of sexual desire but the shared lifelong cultivation of a romantic lightheartedness that softens conflicts and anxieties and focuses serious attention even as it undermines seriousness as such. It's hard to fall out of love so long as you're laughing together.

Building trust means thinking about trust in a positive way.

Sexuality is primarily a means of communicating with other people, a way of talking to them, of expressing our feelings about ourselves and them. It is essentially a language, a body language, in which one can express gentleness and affection, anger and resentment, superiority and dependence far more succinctly than would be possible verbally, where expressions are unavoidably abstract and often clumsy.

Trust is not bound up with knowledge so much as it is with freedom, the openness to the unknown.

Trust is a skill learned over time so that, like a well-trained athlete, one makes the right moves, usually without much reflection.

Trust opens up new and unimagined possibilities.