Financial secrecy between spouses may quietly erode both love and long-term wealth, according to new research on financial infidelity in marriage. The study, titled “Financial infidelity asymmetry predicts couples’ financial and relationship well-being,” was conducted by Hristina Nikolova, Jenny G. Olson, and Joe J. Gladstone. It adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that money and trust are deeply intertwined within modern marriages.
Published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing, the study found that when one partner is significantly more likely than the other to hide financial information, both relationship satisfaction and the couple’s financial well-being tend to decline.
What Is Financial Infidelity?
Financial infidelity refers to intentionally concealing important financial information or behaviors from a romantic partner, particularly actions that the other person would likely disapprove of.
Examples include maintaining secret bank accounts, hiding credit card debt, taking out undisclosed loans, or failing to reveal a poor credit history.
Previous research has largely examined financial infidelity as an individual characteristic, focusing on which people are more likely to behave dishonestly about money. However, researchers led by Indiana University marketing scholar Jenny G. Olson argue that financial infidelity should instead be viewed as a couple-level phenomenon because it inherently involves two people in an interdependent relationship.
What the Researchers Investigated
The researchers focused on what they describe as financial infidelity asymmetry—a situation in which one spouse is substantially more likely than the other to conceal financial information.
They hypothesized that this imbalance undermines couples’ ability to develop and pursue shared financial goals. When partners prioritize separate financial interests in secret, they may become less likely to save, spend, and plan together, ultimately affecting both their relationship and their financial future.
To test this theory, the researchers combined several approaches, including analyses of real financial behavior, surveys of married couples, and controlled experiments involving hypothetical situations.
Evidence From Real Couples
In an initial pilot study, the researchers analyzed data from 622 couples who used a financial management application designed specifically for partners.
The app allowed users to choose which bank accounts and credit accounts to share with their spouse and which to keep hidden. This provided researchers with a direct behavioral measure of financial secrecy.
The team compared participants’ survey responses with the number of hidden financial accounts within the app.
Couples who showed greater differences in financial transparency tended to report lower relationship satisfaction and possessed fewer total financial assets.
The findings suggest that differences in openness—not only outright deception—may negatively affect both emotional and financial outcomes. In these couples, the spouse completing the survey generally reported lower satisfaction when financial transparency between partners was uneven.
Survey Findings
To further examine these patterns, researchers surveyed 193 married couples recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Each spouse completed an individual questionnaire before answering joint questions about household finances.
Participants completed a 12-item questionnaire measuring their tendency toward financial infidelity, including how likely they were to conceal purchases or debt. They also rated their marital satisfaction and subjective financial well-being, reflecting how secure and satisfied they felt about their financial situation.
Couples also reported their combined household income and total financial assets, excluding employer-controlled retirement accounts.
Once again, greater differences between partners in their tendency toward financial secrecy were associated with lower total assets and lower relationship satisfaction.
The researchers also compared financial infidelity asymmetry with differences in personality characteristics and spending habits, including whether someone tended to be a tightwad or spendthrift, as well as traits such as neuroticism and agreeableness.
Financial secrecy differences proved to be a stronger predictor of relationship and financial outcomes than these other forms of mismatch.
The Importance of Shared Financial Goals
A second survey involving 165 married couples expanded on the earlier work by examining how partners approached financial goals.
Participants indicated whether they generally pursued shared objectives—such as saving together or paying off debt—or focused primarily on their own financial priorities.
The results closely mirrored those of the earlier survey.
Couples with greater differences in financial honesty reported lower total assets, poorer subjective financial well-being, and lower marital satisfaction.
The researchers also identified a possible explanation for these associations.
Greater financial infidelity asymmetry was linked to more individualized financial goals rather than shared ones. Those separate priorities, in turn, were associated with poorer financial outcomes and lower relationship quality.
The findings suggest that financial secrecy may undermine the collaborative planning needed to build both long-term wealth and a satisfying partnership.
Experimental Evidence
Because intentionally assigning real couples to deceive one another would be unethical, the researchers conducted two online experiments involving hypothetical situations.
The experiments included 789 and 802 married participants recruited through the academic research platform Prolific.
Participants were asked to imagine that they and their spouse had agreed to complete financial transparency. Depending on random assignment, they read scenarios in which both partners remained honest, one partner concealed financial information, or both partners acted dishonestly regarding either spending or saving.
Afterward, participants rated their expected relationship satisfaction and willingness to save toward shared financial goals.
The results consistently showed that situations involving unequal financial honesty reduced both relationship satisfaction and intentions to save together compared with scenarios in which both partners were fully transparent.
Notably, the negative effects of one dishonest partner were as large as those observed when both partners behaved dishonestly, suggesting that secrecy by a single spouse may substantially damage both trust and financial cooperation.
Study Limitations
The researchers caution that much of the evidence remains correlational.
Although the findings demonstrate strong associations, they cannot definitively establish whether financial secrecy causes poorer relationships and reduced wealth or whether struggling couples become more likely to hide financial information.
The experimental studies strengthen the evidence but relied on imagined situations that may not perfectly reflect real-life decisions involving significant financial consequences.
The authors also note that most participants reported relatively low tendencies toward financial infidelity. Individuals engaging in more serious financial deception may have been less willing to participate or may have already experienced relationship breakdown.
Because participants were primarily recruited online within the United States, the findings may not generalize fully to countries where cultural attitudes toward money, privacy, and marriage differ substantially.
What This Means for Couples
Despite these limitations, the researchers conclude that mutual financial transparency appears to play an important role in both relationship quality and long-term financial success.
They suggest that financial therapists, counselors, and financial planners may benefit from encouraging couples to establish shared financial goals, communicate openly about money, create joint budgets, and schedule regular conversations about spending and saving.
Future research could evaluate interventions such as guided financial discussions, digital tools that encourage joint planning, and educational programs for newly married couples. Researchers also hope to examine more culturally diverse populations to determine whether the patterns observed in this study extend across different societies.
