Survey: High Credit Score Could Make or Break Your Love Life

Credit score was rated above ambition, courage and sense of humor in a new survey.

August 21, 2017 1:02 pm

A high credit score might just be the answer to all your relationship problems.

A new study from Discover Financial Services and Match Media Group, parent of Tinder and other dating sites, shows that a good credit score was associated with being responsible, trustworthy and smart. Financial responsibility was ranked as a very or extremely important quality in a potential mate by 69 percent of the 2,000 online daters surveyed, reports Bloomberg 16 whole points ahead of cute. The sense of humor was next, with 67 percent, and modesty was down at the bottom, with 39 percent.

“If you’ve got a pretty good credit score, you probably have other good personality traits,” said biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, Match.com’s chief scientific adviser and a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute, to Bloomberg. 

She went on to call it a “Darwinian mechanism for measuring your reproductive ability” because it is an honest indicator of who you really are. If you have a good credit score, you’re managing money, family, friends, and more. And that’s the thing: a lot of people want a mate who is responsible, dependable, willing to not only commit to a relationship but maintain it. To have a high credit score, you have to constantly make responsible decisions, and carefully maintain your accounts.

Bloomberg reports that both sexes in the survey valued financial responsibility highly, with 77 percent of females and 61 percent of men.

A 2015 paper, Credit Scores and Committed Relationshipsshowed that dating someone whose score is similar to yours when you meet increases the odds of a successful relationship. The authors found that people with higher credit scores were more likely to “form committed relationships relative to other observably similar individuals,” reports Bloomberg. The bigger the mismatch in credit scores when dates meet, the higher the likelihood that the relationship won’t make it for the long haul.

Granted, this is not the only indicator of a strong relationship. But Kate Manfred, vice president of brand communications and consumer insights for Discover, thinks that maybe some day people will be more willing to share their credit scores.

She told Bloomberg that she envisions a day when “You pull out your phone and say, ‘Look, here’s my credit score, what’s yours? Let’s swap.’”

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