When one partner in a marriage hides money issues and the other is honest, this discrepancy predicts lower relationship satisfaction and less financial success for the couple. New research published in International Research Journal in Marketing We show evidence that this imbalance impairs couples’ ability to form common goals. This research suggests that mutual transparency is deeply tied to a couple’s overall flourishing and happiness.
Romantic relationships rely heavily on trust. Still, individuals may hide important financial details from their spouses. This behavior is known as financial infidelity. This includes engaging in financial activities that your partner would not approve of and actively keeping those activities secret.
Common examples include maintaining hidden bank accounts, accumulating secret credit card debt, and hiding a bad credit score. Previous academic research has tended to focus on this behavior as an individual characteristic rather than a common problem between couples.
Jenny G. Olson, assistant professor of marketing at Indiana University, explained how her team’s previous research led to the current study. “My co-authors and I published another paper in 2020 in which we defined ‘financial infidelity’ (FI) and developed a reliable and valid scale to measure it,” Olson said. “The scale we developed measures individual differences in the propensity to engage in FI (“FI propensity”). ”
The authors wanted to examine financial secrecy as a dynamic relationship between two people, rather than just an individual flaw. “While previous academic research (including ours!) had studied FI as an individual behavior, we quickly realized that it was actually experienced as a couple-level phenomenon,” Olson said. “By definition, FI requires two people in a union who are interdependent. Relationship partners form one unit, so everything one partner does affects the other partner and the couple as a whole.”
Specifically, the scientists investigated a concept called the asymmetry of financial infidelity. This term refers to situations where one partner is more likely to maintain financial secrecy and the other partner is more transparent. The authors wanted to understand how this discrepancy affects a couple’s relationship health and financial stability.
The authors proposed a specific mechanism for why this mismatch causes harm. They theorized that couples with mismatched levels of transparency struggle to form common financial goals. When partners operate with separate financial priorities, it tends to create friction and makes it difficult to build wealth together.
To test these ideas, 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. Researchers matched survey responses from one partner with objective bank account data from the application.
They measured financial fraud by looking at the number of accounts each partner chose to hide from other partners within the application settings. They found that greater discrepancies in hidden accounts predicted lower total marital financial assets. This imbalance also predicted lower relationship satisfaction for the partners who responded to the survey.
Following the pilot study, the scientists designed a research study involving 193 couples recruited through an online platform called Amazon Mechanical Turk. To participate, both spouses had to be physically present.
Each partner independently completed a survey measuring their personal propensity to commit financial infidelity using a 12-item scale. They also answered questions about relationship satisfaction and subjective financial well-being. Subjective economic well-being refers to the extent to which a person is satisfied with their current financial situation and future security.
After the independent section, couples answered joint questions about their total household income and total financial assets. The researchers excluded retirement accounts because they are typically managed by employers rather than the couples themselves. They found that couples with greater discrepancy in financial dishonesty scores reported lower total assets and lower relationship satisfaction.
The researchers compared this financial transparency discrepancy to other personality discrepancies within couples. For example, they looked at the differences in traits such as being a straight-laced person, who hates spending money, and being a spendthrift, who spends money freely. They also looked at differences in general personality traits, such as being highly neurotic or affable.
Statistical tests revealed that financial honesty discrepancies explained the most variance in relationship and financial health compared to differences in all other traits. The lack of financial symmetry seemed to be uniquely damaging to the marriage.
The authors then conducted a second research study with 165 couples who were again recruited through the online platform Amazon Mechanical Turk. This procedure mirrored previous research studies. In this study, the scientists added questions to measure whether partners had separate or shared financial goals.
Questions asked about goals related to saving money, paying off debt, and planning future spending. The researchers replicated their previous findings. Greater discrepancy in financial honesty predicted lower total assets, lower subjective financial well-being, and lower relationship satisfaction.
More importantly, this study provided evidence of the underlying mechanism. Financial honesty discrepancies predicted higher levels of individual financial goals. These separate and independent goals predicted poorer financial and relationship outcomes for couples.
To rule out the possibility that bad relationships cause financial secrecy rather than the other way around, the authors conducted two experimental studies. They recruited 789 married people for the first experiment and 802 married people for the second experiment through a platform called Prolific Academic.
Participants read a hypothetical scenario about their marriage. The scenario stated that participants and their spouses agreed to be fully 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 the lie about spending money, and the second experiment focused on the lie about saving money. After reading the scenario, participants rated their relationship satisfaction and their intention to save money toward joint financial goals.
The researchers found that saving intentions were significantly reduced in scenarios where honesty was mismatched compared to scenarios where both partners were honest. Disagreement in honesty also greatly reduces relationship satisfaction. The negative effects of an unbalanced power relationship are virtually the same as those seen when both partners are dishonest, suggesting that having just one secretive partner is just as harmful to a marriage as having two secretive partners.
“Our research speaks to the importance of mutual financial transparency in marriage,” Olson told SciPost. “Partners must be on the same page. If one partner engages in FI behaviors to a greater extent than the other, partners may begin to pursue more individualized (rather than shared) financial goals, ultimately leading to decreased couple-level happiness (i.e., fewer assets and lower marital satisfaction).”
As with all studies, there are some limitations that should be considered. It is impossible to randomly assign real couples to commit real financial betrayals. Nonexperimental studies rely on correlational data because researchers were unable to manipulate actual cheating.
Olson pointed out this particular limitation. “First, most of our evidence is correlational,” she said. “Random assignment is difficult (if not impossible) and can be unethical. You can’t just lie about exorbitant spending and randomly assign partners to see what happens.”
Correlational data cannot conclusively prove that a mismatch causes negative outcomes in real life, only that the two variables are related. Although experimental studies have used hypothetical scenarios to circumvent this problem, hypothetical responses may differ from real-world responses.
Another limitation is that financial misconduct is taboo. “Second, most partners report relatively low levels of FI propensity. In other words, we observe very few couples in our data with high absolute levels of FI propensity,” Olson noted.
“People may feel uncomfortable agreeing to statements like, ‘Yes, I hide my gambling losses from my partner,'” Olson added. “Marriages with high FI levels may not last many years.”
The sample population was limited to an online panel based in the United States. Future research should examine couples across different cultures and geographic locations to see if these patterns hold true around the world. “We hope that future studies will collect larger samples of couples with more diverse patterns of FI asymmetry,” Olson said.
Finally, scientists can consider practical interventions to help discordant couples. Scheduling a guided conversation with a financial therapist can help partners align their goals and increase mutual trust.
The study, “Asymmetry in Financial Infidelity Predicts Couple Financial and Relationship Well-Being,” was authored by Kristina Nikolova, Jenny G. Olson, and Joe J. Gladstone.
