Trust in intimate relationships - The increased importance of embeddedness for marriage in the United States

Due to the rise of a market for casual relationships, investing in a serious relationship now requires more trust than it did four decades ago. We develop a theory of trust and embeddedness in intimate relationships. One implication of the theory is that given the increased importance of trust, the effects of embeddedness on marriage chances should have increased. Analyses were performed on data from the Chicago Health and Social Life Survey. Various measures of embeddedness were employed. The hypothesis on the increasing importance of embeddedness for marriage found empirical support in the effects of each of these measures.