Financial infidelity imbalances appear to hurt both relationship and financial health

When one partner in a marriage hides money matters and the other is honest, this mismatch predicts lower relationship satisfaction and less financial success for the couple. A new study published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing provides evidence that this imbalance damages a couple’s ability to form shared goals. The research suggests that mutual transparency is deeply tied to a couple’s overall prosperity and happiness.

Romantic relationships rely heavily on trust. Still, individuals sometimes hide significant financial details from their spouses. This behavior is known as financial infidelity. It involves engaging in financial actions that a partner would disapprove of and actively keeping those actions a secret.

Common examples include maintaining hidden bank accounts, accumulating secret credit card debt, or hiding a bad credit score. Previous academic work tends to focus on this behavior as an individual trait, rather than a shared marital issue.

Jenny G. Olson, an assistant professor of marketing at Indiana University, explained how her team’s previous work led to the current study. “My coauthors and I had published another paper in 2020 where we defined ‘financial infidelity’ (FI) and developed a reliable, valid scale to measure it,” Olson said. “The scale we developed measures individual differences in the propensity to engage in FI (‘FI-proneness’).”

The authors wanted to examine financial secrecy as a dynamic between two people, rather than just an individual flaw. “We quickly realized that prior academic work (including ours!) had examined FI as an individual behavior, but it’s actually experienced as a couple-level phenomenon,” Olson noted. “By definition, FI requires two people within an interdependent union. Because relationship partners form a single unit, whatever one partner does impacts the other partner and the couple as a whole.”

Specifically, the scientists explored a concept called financial infidelity asymmetry. This term describes a situation where one partner is highly prone to keeping financial secrets, and the other partner is highly transparent. The authors wanted to understand how this mismatch impacts the couple’s relationship health and financial stability.

The authors proposed a specific mechanism for why this mismatch might cause harm. They theorized that couples with mismatched transparency levels struggle to form shared financial goals. When partners operate with separate financial priorities, it tends to create friction and makes it harder to build wealth together.

To test these ideas, the scientists conducted a pilot study using real world data from a money management mobile application designed for couples. The sample included 622 couples who used the application. The researchers matched survey responses from one partner with objective bank account data from the application.

They measured financial dishonesty by looking at how many accounts each partner chose to hide from the other within the application settings. They found that a greater mismatch in hidden accounts predicted lower total financial assets for the couple. This imbalance also predicted lower relationship satisfaction for the partner who completed the survey.

Following the pilot study, the scientists designed a survey study involving 193 married couples recruited through an online platform called Amazon Mechanical Turk. Both spouses had to be physically present to participate.

Each partner independently completed a survey measuring their personal tendency to commit financial infidelity, using a twelve-item scale. They also answered questions about their relationship satisfaction and subjective financial well-being. Subjective financial well-being refers to how happy a person feels about their current financial situation and their future security.

After the independent sections, the couples answered joint questions about their combined household income and total financial assets. The researchers excluded retirement accounts, as these are usually managed by employers rather than the couples themselves. They found that couples with a greater mismatch in financial dishonesty scores reported lower total assets and lower relationship satisfaction.

The researchers compared this financial transparency mismatch to other personality mismatches within the couples. For instance, they looked at differences in traits like being a tightwad, a person who hates spending money, versus being a spendthrift, a person who spends freely. They also looked at differences in general personality traits like being highly neurotic or agreeable.

Statistical tests revealed that a mismatch in financial honesty explained the most variance in relationship and financial health compared to all other trait differences. A lack of financial symmetry seemed uniquely damaging to the marriage.

The authors then conducted a second survey study with 165 married couples, again recruited through the online platform Amazon Mechanical Turk. The procedures mirrored the previous survey study. In this study, the scientists added questions to measure whether the partners held separate or shared financial goals.

The questions asked about goals related to saving money, paying off debt, and planning future spending. The researchers replicated their previous findings. A larger mismatch in financial honesty predicted lower total assets, lower subjective financial well-being, and lower relationship satisfaction.

More importantly, this study provided evidence for the underlying mechanism. The mismatch in financial honesty predicted higher levels of individualized financial goals. These separate, independent goals then predicted worse financial and relational outcomes for the couple.

To rule out the possibility that a bad relationship causes financial secrecy, rather than the other way around, the authors conducted two experimental studies. They recruited 789 married individuals for the first experiment and 802 married individuals for the second experiment through a platform called Prolific Academic.

The participants read hypothetical scenarios about their marriage. The scenarios stated that the participant and their spouse had agreed to be completely transparent about their shared finances. Participants were randomly assigned to different conditions.

They read that either both partners were honest, one partner lied, or both partners lied. The first experiment focused on lying about spending money, and the second experiment focused on lying about saving money. After reading the scenarios, participants rated their relationship satisfaction and their intentions to save money for joint financial goals.

The researchers found that scenarios featuring mismatched honesty resulted in significantly lower savings intentions compared to scenarios where both partners were honest. Mismatched honesty also resulted in significantly lower relationship satisfaction. The negative effects of an unbalanced dynamic were virtually identical to the negative effects seen when both partners were dishonest, suggesting that having just one secretive partner harms a marriage as much as having two secretive partners.

“Our work speaks to the importance of mutual financial transparency within marriage,” Olson told PsyPost. “Partners must be on the same page. If one partner is engaging in FI behaviors to a greater extent than the other, partners may start pursuing more individualized (vs. shared) financial goals and ultimately experience lower couple level well-being (i.e., fewer assets, lower marital satisfaction).”

As with all research, there are some limitations to consider. It is infeasible to randomly assign real couples to commit actual financial betrayals. Because the researchers could not manipulate real cheating behavior, the non-experimental studies rely on correlational data.

Olson pointed out this specific limitation. “First, most of our evidence is correlational,” she said. “Random assignment is difficult (if not impossible) and potentially unethical. We can’t randomly assign partners to lie about egregious spending and see what happens.”

Correlational data means the researchers cannot definitively prove that the mismatch causes the negative outcomes in real life, only that the two variables are linked. The experimental studies used hypothetical scenarios to bypass this issue, but hypothetical responses may differ from real-world reactions.

Another limitation is the taboo nature of financial cheating. “Second, most partners report relatively low levels of FI-proneness; in other words, we observe very few couples in our data with high absolute levels of FI-proneness,” Olson noted.

“It’s possible that people are uncomfortable agreeing with statements like ‘yes, I hide gambling losses from my partner,'” Olson added. “It’s also possible that marriages with high levels of FI do not survive over the years.”

The sample populations were limited to online panels based in the United States. Future research should examine couples across different cultures and geographic locations to see if these patterns hold up worldwide. “We hope that future work recruits even larger samples of couples with more diverse FI-asymmetry patterns,” Olson said.

Finally, scientists could explore practical interventions to help mismatched couples. Scheduling guided conversations with a financial therapist might help partners align their goals and improve their mutual trust.

The study, “Financial infidelity asymmetry predicts couples’ financial and relationship well-being,” was authored by Hristina Nikolova, Jenny G. Olson, and Joe J. Gladstone.