What makes you trust one person yet not another? I mean really. Here's how I see it.

What makes one person's word believable? Remember that saying, "A person's only as good as his word?"

In the Midwestern United States, I grew up on a dairy farm. In the evening when my Dad and brothers were done with the "after-supper" chores, salesmen would often come. My Dad invariably knew them by their first name. They were selling everything from soybean and corn seed to grain bins to hail insurance and more. You can imagine.

I was little then, and I remember them sitting at the kitchen table. It was summertime, so I could stay up later. June bugs were bouncing off the outside of the screens, and sometimes there was distant lightning on the horizon.

I liked listening to them talk on those evenings, sort of reassuring in a sense. I could feel they trusted each other. The words flowed freely. There was no pretension; just two people sitting across the table from each other---one a seller, one a buyer.

There would be much interaction, lots of body language: an eyebrow raised, a gentle pounding of the palm of a hand on the table to emphasize a point, or maybe rubbing an ear when trying to put a thought into words as a question, lips slightly askew; chuckle thrown in here and there, and even a loud guffaw erupted occasionally. If you didn't know differently, you'd have thought they were long time friends.

When it broke up, the salesman was happy with a sale, and my Dad was happy knowing he would soon have the product he needed for his business. They'd shake hands, and that was that. Everyone was happy.

So, Now On To the Internet

How do we get that same feeling of a one-on-one relationship? Why do we "connect" with one person but not another? After all, we really don't know anyone we haven't met, do we? What is that spark that ignites the fire? Why do we connect with some people and not others?