The Science of Trust in America: Why We Believe in Love, But Not Necessarily in Each Other
Sunday, November 9, 2025. This is for Brian in Buffalo.
“In God We Trust” appears on every dollar bill, which is probably why Americans handle both faith and money so anxiously.
We trust in God because we don’t quite completely trust anybody else.
The phrase is less theology than branding — a leftover Cold War jingle printed on currency that loses value every time we betray each other.
Trust is our national mood swing.
We romanticize it, litigate it, and outsource it to apps.
Once a social assumption, it’s now a bespoke product: custom-built, algorithmically monitored, but forever on backorder.
The Founding Suspicion
The United States was founded by men who distrusted power and wrote that paranoia into law.
Checks and balances were the eighteenth-century version of “it’s not you, it’s me.” Our political design rests on the belief that everyone, given the chance, will cheat.
That architecture of suspicion seeped into domestic life.
The modern couple resembles a two-party system: both sides negotiating budgetary and emotional appropriations, both accusing the other of executive overreach. In this republic of partnership, transparency is the new patriotism — and even love must pass oversight.
The Market of Faith
According to the Pew Research Center, only a third of Americans believe most people can be trusted. Capitalism itself depends on confidence — credit literally means belief — yet both our economic and romantic markets are remarkably shaky.
The American Family Survey found that financial strain now outranks infidelity as a top source of relationship stress.
Money anxiety erodes intimacy because it undermines the promise of safety. Couples now gripe about “financial infidelity” with the solemnity of a State of the Union address.
Surveillance as Reassurance
Digital culture has turned vigilance into a national pastime. The Kinsey Institute’s 2025 Singles in America study reports a growing epidemic of “authenticity fatigue” — the exhaustion of constantly proving you’re not a liar, bot, or emotional pyramid scheme.
We Americans tend to confuse visibility with virtue.
Couples share passwords, track each other’s locations, and call it closeness. Privacy looks suspicious; opacity feels like betrayal. Americans don’t say “trust me” anymore — we say, “check your notifications.”
The Gender Turn
New data summarized in Scientific American shows that men now rely more heavily on romantic partners for emotional intimacy than women do. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that most women no longer view marriage as essential to a meaningful life.
He’s trusting because he’s otherwise desperately lonely; she’s cautious because she’s learned. His faith is concentrated, hers is more diversified.
What follows is not conflict but correction — the psyche’s way of rebalancing risk and return.
American men, still apprenticed to the myth of wholehearted love, invest in blue-chip devotion; American women, tutored by experience, keep their assets liquid — not out of cynicism, but because of an abiding sense of realism.
The Body Problem
The so-called “sex recession” has little to do with prudishness. It’s about risk tolerance. But wait, I’m not changing the subject here.
Touch requires a kind of optimism Americans haven’t felt in years.
After a pandemic that made proximity itself suspicious, the body became foreign territory.
Therapists have described couples to me who talk endlessly, share feelings efficiently, and almost never touch. I’ve seen it too.
Emotional safety has replaced physical trust; we have become fluent in disclosure but more hesitant in skin contact. Americans remain fascinated by sex — theoretically.
In practice, we’d rather read about it, stream it, or fantasize about it.
The Maintenance Mindset
A 2025 survey found one in four Americans describing their relationships as “in a rut.”
The rut is rarely dramatic. It’s the slow leak of reliability — unanswered texts, unreturned gestures, the creeping sense that nobody’s steering the ship.
Couples Therapy thought leader John Gottman, in his epic masterwork The Science of Trust (2011), calls these moments “sliding-door opportunities.”
Each bid for attention from our partner invites a choice: turn toward, turn away, or turn against.
Trust, in Gottman’s model, is not grand declarations but micro-acts of responsiveness — the thousand small turnings that tell a nervous system, “You’re safe here.”
In his laboratory, couples with high “turn-toward ratios” — essentially 5 positive responses for every negative one — show lower heart rates, higher oxytocin, and better conflict repair.
They build, in effect, a sort of emotional credit history score.
Betrayal, he found, begins not with infidelity but with inattention. Love dies of micro-neglect, not macro-sin. Gottman’s genius was in recognizing trust as a biological rhythm. The pulse of a relationship tells the truth long before the words do.
Trust and Health
The World Health Organization now classifies social connection and trust as determinants of physical health.
Suspicion elevates cortisol; reliability lowers it. Gottman’s data show the same pattern — trusted partners regulate each other’s stress responses. Biology, apparently, keeps better records than memory.
Every American era claims to rediscover “realness.”
Ours just commercialized it. The Bumble 2025 Dating Report and Match/Kinsey survey both identify authenticity as the trait people most desire — yet the “unedited” selfie still takes four tries.
In truth, what partners want is coherence. They can forgive hypocrisy; they just can’t forgive inconsistency. Americans will overlook the crime if you at least keep your fucking story straight.
FAQ
Why is trust such an American obsession?
Because it’s our civic religion. We were born doubting kings, raised to question institutions, and then instructed to believe, ultimately, in ourselves—the least reliable witness of all. “In God We Trust” appeared on our currency in 1957, not as an act of faith but as an act of branding. A year earlier, in 1956, Congress had enshrined it as the national motto, a kind of theological nod in an otherwise secular age.
Did social media destroy trust?
Not really, instead, it merely democratized suspicion. Americans have always loved a juicy scandal; now the internet just made every American an investigative journalist with a ring light.
Can trust survive in a low-trust culture?
Yes, but it then becomes artisanal. We tend to trust mostly in small and local ways now — our barista, our dog walker, perhaps even our therapist. In 2025, trust has gone farm-to-table.
What’s the quickest way to rebuild it?
Reliability. Period. Gottman proved it empirically: say it, do it, Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. It’s just math. And math has no pity. In an age addicted to serial reinvention, consistency and reliability feel downright erotic. You only get there when the math is on your side.
Final Thoughts
Trust has always been America’s paradox — our most aspirational virtue and our most chronic deficit.
We print it on our money, and yet we hoard it like gold.
We demand transparency from others while rationalizing our own creative opacity. Sometimes we even call it a healthy boundary.
Still, we keep trying. We repair, renegotiate, and risk again, because hope — like debt — compounds interest. The best interpersonal bonds are forged in serial rupture and repair.
In 2025, stress has gone from symptom to system—it runs the place.
Gottman once wrote that trust is “the act of attunement under stress.” It’s what keeps both marriages and democracies alive: the stubborn belief that even after everything, we can still turn toward each other.
That, at heart, is the most American faith of all. We might not trust easily, but we still eagerly keep showing up for the experiment.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
American Family Survey. (2025). American Family Survey 2025. Brigham Young University Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy. https://familyesurvey.byu.edu/2025-survey
Bumble. (2025). Bumble dating trends report 2025. https://bumble.com/en-us/the-buzz/bumble-dating-trends-2025
Gottman, J. M. (2011). The science of trust: Emotional attunement for couples. W. W. Norton & Company.
Kinsey Institute & Match. (2025). Singles in America: 14th annual report. https://match.mediaroom.com/2025-06-10-Match-and-The-Kinsey-Institute-Unveil-14th-Annual-Singles-in-America-Study
Morning Consult. (2025). State of dating and romance in America 2025. https://pro.morningconsult.com/analysis/state-of-dating-romance-in-america-2025
Pew Research Center. (2024, May 10). Americans trust each other less than they once did.https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/05/10/americans-trust-each-other-less-than-they-once-did/
Scientific American. (2025, January 3). Men actually crave romantic relationships more than women do.https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/men-actually-crave-romantic-relationships-more-than-women-do/
The Gottman Institute. (n.d.). Bids for connection and the science of repair. https://www.gottman.com/blog/
Wall Street Journal. (2025, March 21). American women are giving up on marriage.https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/relationships/american-women-are-giving-up-on-marriage-54840971
World Health Organization. (2025, June 30). Social connection linked to improved health and reduced risk of early death.https://www.who.int/news/item/30-06-2025-social-connection-linked-to-improved-heath-and-reduced-risk-of-early-death