Part Two — How to Practice
The Trust Triangle
“Don't trust what they say, trust what they do.”
Not every two-person Local Rule holds weight equally. A simple diagnostic, borrowed and adapted, gives you a way to actually check whether a Dyad is standing on all three legs it needs:
Authenticity — are you actually being yourself, or a managed, performed version of yourself, inside this relationship? A Dyad built on a performance can look stable for a long time before it collapses under the weight of the gap between the performance and the person underneath it.
Empathy — can you accurately model what the other person is actually experiencing, distinct from what you’d be experiencing in their position? This is harder than it sounds and easy to fake with sympathy instead.
Logic — is there a coherent, honest structure to how you’re actually treating each other, or is the relationship running on mood and momentum with no real throughline?
A Dyad missing any one leg tends to compensate, badly, with the other two — heavy on logic and empathy but thin on authenticity produces a relationship that runs smoothly and feels hollow; heavy on authenticity and logic but thin on empathy produces two honest people who keep failing to actually understand each other. A short practice: once a month, independently, each person in the Dyad rates the relationship’s current strength on all three legs, one to five, then compares notes. The value isn’t in the number. It’s in discovering where your two independent ratings disagree — that gap is usually where the next honest conversation needs to happen.