See how interchangeable that is? To have one in a relationship is to have the other, and if one is missing, the other one also has found a serious hiding place within your heart.

As hard as it is to accept, and contrary to most Valentines Day cards and psychological advice, you can’t build trust. You can’t build what has and infinite value and place. It’s like being pregnant; you either are, or you aren’t.

Like pregnancy, trust can exist and grow stronger until its able to survive on the merits of the person working hard to earn it. But it’s not something you can quantify with percentages, feelings or examples. You either trust someone or you don’t, and the kicker in most relationships is that people confuse love and hope for a partner with trusting them.

If your trust has been betrayed, the most responsible thing you can do for yourself and your partner is to acknowledge that its gone, and that you don’t know the way to finding it again. You can’t tell a partner who has lied to you, deceived you, or made less of your emotions that there are tasks or behavior that can earn back the trust. Its unfair for you to think that a set amount of objectives can be timed with your emotional clock, and its not fair to burden a person with goals that may or may not achieve a desired result.

Case in point – for a long portion of our relationship, my wife could not trust me to do chores without being asked. I’m easily distracted, and general averse to domestic responsibilities. But because I love her, and want her to trust me, and tried multiple methods of trying to remember which chores to do on what days at what times.

Before, she didn’t trust me to do anything. And my initiation of doing chores didn’t make her trust me beyond those moments. But now, she trusts me to do more than slightly than the zero amount I was doing before. She can rely on certain things being in place. She trusts me to do the few things I have mastered, and maybe, she’ll trust me to do other things.

She’ll likely never fully trust me to be a domestic prince, but she trusts that I want to do the right thing, and with a few things, I meet that expectation.

You can trust someone to do some of the right things, but in matters of fidelity and honesty, it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. If you can’t trust who your partner is with, you can’t trust where they are. If you can’t trust where they are, you can’t trust what they are doing.

Trust is not a construct. It’s an existence based on the promise of continually met expectations. Should these expectations deviate at any degree with action or lackthereof, there is no trust.

Sure, there are people who look better than you, cook better than you, are funnier than you, smarter than you, and more engaging than you. But no one combines it like you do. Your spouse, partner or significant other will tell you; you are the one and only.

And its not just in an emotional sense. Perhaps if people realized how much they are the only person responsible for so much in the lives of their spouse or children, many marriages would be spared the injustice of premature ending. In my house, I’m the one who shovels snow, takes out trash, and reaches for things in high places. I get up when the baby wakes up at night, because he sleeps closer to me.

I check up on lightbulbs, do the vacuuming, make sure our heating filter is regularly changed, and bring up the heavy laundry. My wife can do all of these things, but I’m the only one who does them in our house. I’m the only one who bears the responsibility.

You can’t imagine how many responsibilities in life bear your name, and how much other people depend on you to maintain them. No matter how angry, how tired, how frustrated you become, you are the one and only for so many things that make your life and the life of your loved ones run efficiently.

So the next time you question how important you are to someone, or if what you do matters, think about the role you fill that only you can maintain. You may be surprised, and pleased, with how irreplaceable you are.

And chief among these emotions is hope. You can love someone and leave them. You can trust someone and not make yourself vulnerable to hurt. But when you hope for someone to reach potential and maturity, there is very little that can be done to shake that optimism. You can’t hope and act otherwise.

So when you get to a point where you are considering leaving a marriage, but there’s something holding you back, it’s the hope that you don’t have to leave. It’s a hope that the comfort you’ve known for so long, whether positive or negative in its affect, doesn’t have to be abandoned for the unknown.

Is that a signal that you shouldn’t leave? Probably not. But it surely is a signal that you aren’t ready to leave. You haven’t come to grips with removing yourself from the drama, the incompatibility, or trauma that has been the hallmark of your relationship.

Today’s entry is one of my favorite love songs, “There She Goes” by Babyface feat. Pharrell. Babyface is cool, but Pharrell is my favorite producer.

Enjoy, and for all of the guys out there, imagine replacing your sweetheart’s name in place of “she” in the lyrics; chances are, you probably do feel this way and haven’t said it or acted on it in a while.

Never take marriage advice.

People who offer advice mean well; we all assume that we’ve been through enough trial and error to impart some wisdom on some less-knowing person in a like circumstance. The problem is that no one ever discloses all of the things that didn’t work for their circumstance. Not failures, mind you; but 10,000 ways that don’t work.

A smart thing to do is to ask about best practices. Habits. Nuances that make life easier for married people. No one has a universal answer; it’s like trying to offer a bride a wedding dress that is commonly worn; it ain’t gonna happen. Never take advice. Instead, try to receive the lighter and more soluble characteristics of successful marriages.

Or at least, those marriages that are successful on the outside.

And one evil person can effect a family for generations.

It seems far gone, but if families knew how their bad habits, their proclivities and their poor judgment cascade down through to their children, grandchildren and beyond, would they make the same kind of faulty decisions? Would they be willing to be so selfish?

And this is particularly for men – the husbands and fathers who miss the enormity of our impact on our families. When we cheat, do we realize that our sexual gratification or emotional quick fixes of today create the disloyal sons and promiscuous daughters of tomorrow?

When we abuse our women, do we understand that the voice we think we’ve found embroils our sons in silent rage and drowns our daughters in submission to every other insecure man?

And when we are emotionally isolated, do we consider that the problems we think we’ll never overcome are the psychological burdens that will eat away at our family roots for generations?

As quiet as it is kept, there is no easy way to live the life of a family man. The expectations of fidelity, stability and accessibility can be consuming. Many of us have no manual, no proper example of how to do it. And for those of us fortunate enough to have a father available, it can take years to separate the hero worship from the villainous flaws; even among the most honorable of father figures.

Cheating, physical abuse and emotional distance is not just hurtful, it is attempted murder. Heart attack, stroke, mental disorder, drug abuse, sexual addiction and violence are all real byproducts that can revolve around the darkness of one man’s heart. The short sightedness of one person can create the failure of an entire family – and without insight and knowledge, they are completely disarmed of any tools to prevent its side effects.

It doesn’t seem fair. It doesn’t seem like something a real man would do.

If he only knew.

Right away, I realized that he was choking. How exactly, I was not sure; but in the seconds that surprise settled into panic between me and my wife, I fleetingly thought to myself, “God, please don’t take him from us.”

I’ve never had the feeling of my life flashing before my eyes, but I know what it’s like to see the life of a child flash before your eyes. To have so many aspirations and goals slipping away, before the smiling, gurgling sweetheart you know as baby even has a chance to mature.

And another thing; they tell you that time slows down in moments of crisis. I can tell you first hand that time couldn’t move faster when it comes to a life and death situation. And maybe it wasn’t quite ‘life and death’ as it was ‘baby has mucous,’ but I know what it felt like.

And it felt like my life was teetering on the edge, because my little boy’s life was in the balance.

My son is okay, and endured little more than an ambulance ride and some hours in the emergency room. But time has taken on a new definition for me. It isn’t something that speeds along leaving opportunity in its wake; it’s the only commodity we are ever promised in this lifetime. And ultimately, you’ve either invested it or wasted it; every second.

God deserves all glory for allowing our family more opportunities to invest.

But as this column indicates, rather startlingly, most athletes believe its business as usual.

A heartfelt letter from Ron Artest.