Every behavior has a purpose
I had a moment in this conversation where I felt something I can only describe as called home. Not because Megan McCoy said something I had never heard. She said something I already know, something I am trained in, something I believe at my core, and I realized I had quietly drifted away from it in the middle of building something and seeing clients and moving fast.
I heard her say it and felt something close to shame. Not the destructive kind. The clarifying kind. The kind that says: slow down. You have been moving past this. Go back.
I am deeply trained in attachment theory. I have done the cycle work. I know this. And yet there I was, sitting across from one of the most rigorous researchers in the field of financial therapy, feeling re-anchored by four words I already knew. That is what this episode did for me. I think it might do something similar for you.
The expert who could not open her own accounts
Before we get into the research, I want to tell you something Megan shared that reframes her entire expertise. She was doing her PhD at the University of Georgia right when the Great Recession hit. Money was in every conversation. People were losing their homes. Couples were fracturing under financial distress. Her faculty at Georgia and at Kansas State were among the people who coined the term financial therapy in that period, and she found herself chasing them for their signatures at conferences, asking what she hoped were profound questions.
And while she was becoming one of the field's formative voices, her own relationship with money was, in her words, incredibly unhealthy. She was six figures into student loan debt and did not even know how to log in to find where her accounts were. She held a deep belief that caring about money and caring about people were incompatible, that wanting to help others meant taking the shirt off your back and never taking care of yourself. She said she was so avoidant and so scared that if you told her twenty-five-year-old self she would one day be running a financial planning program, that person would have literally gagged.
I love that she shared this. It is the most important thing she could have told us before the research, because it names what we are actually working with in this field. The experts are not exempt. The shame does not check credentials at the door.
What financial infidelity actually is, and what it is not
The academic definition, first formally introduced and measured by researchers Garbinsky, Gladstone, Nikolova, and Olson in a 2020 Journal of Consumer Research paper titled "Love, Lies, and Money," defines financial infidelity as engaging in any financial behavior expected to be disapproved of by one's romantic partner and intentionally failing to disclose that behavior. Their research found that roughly one in three people commit financial infidelity, and that it can negatively affect a relationship in ways that parallel sexual infidelity.
Megan's definition is simpler and reaches further into everyday life. Financial infidelity is the intentional hiding of financial information from a partner. The word that matters is hiding, and hiding can be very quiet. Not mentioning a purchase. Letting a bank notification pass without bringing it up. Saying it was on sale. She brought that one up in the episode and we all laughed, because honestly, who has not done some version of that?
The size of the behavior does not define whether it counts. The decision to conceal is what counts. And the decision to conceal is never random. It is always solving for something.
The Starbucks thing, and what it is actually about
Nick brought up the latte in the episode. The classic one. Don't get your latte and you'll save more money. I want to tell you the version of it that lives in my actual life.
My daughter Millie is almost six. She loves Starbucks. There is nothing at Starbucks she needs. She does not drink coffee. She loves a cake pop. But what she really loves is the time. We used to stop there between drop-offs when we had a window in the morning. She would look at the books on the shelf. We would slow down. For us, in our town, that Starbucks was thirty minutes of reading together where I was not rushing anywhere.
I stopped drinking coffee. So we stopped going. And I told myself we had replaced it. We probably have not, not fully.
This is the thing that keeps getting missed when couples work through financial conflict. We look at the thing, the line item, the purchase, and we skip over what it was giving someone. The connection function. The slowdown function. The this-is-the-one-thing-I-do-for-myself function. Ask what a behavior is for, and you learn something you can actually work with. Judge the behavior without asking, and you have missed the point entirely.
How financial infidelity actually shows up in couples therapy
Couples do not come into my office and say we have financial infidelity. They say we are not aligned. They say I feel like I am doing this alone. They say it always turns into a fight, so we have just stopped talking about it.
Underneath that, almost every time, is the same pattern. One person stopped sharing. The other person started sensing something was off. Both people are now carrying something alone. What started as one avoided conversation has compounded into a whole climate where money does not feel safe to bring up, and the distance is now about more than money.
One thing I have noticed since we started building Calibrate, since I started asking about money more directly in couples work, is that people talk about money with me now in a way they never have before in my career. Personal, professional, it does not matter. I think it is because they know I am comfortable with it, so it becomes safe. Which points to something Megan names directly in her research: communication skills, and specifically the environment that makes it safe to say the hard thing, are among the most protective factors against financial infidelity.
Pursuers, withdrawers, and the cycle underneath financial hiding
In emotionally focused therapy, we track the cycle. One person pursues, escalates, works to fix the problem faster. Underneath that, the primary emotion is: you are going to leave me. I will end up alone. The other person withdraws, goes quiet, stays still. Underneath that, the primary emotion is: I am not going to be enough for you.
Both people are chasing belonging. Both people are protecting themselves. And both strategies make the other person's fear worse, not better.
Here is where this intersects with financial infidelity in a way I find myself thinking about constantly. When a pursuer is escalated and hurt, when the environment around money has become charged and critical, the withdrawing partner has one very logical response: why would I tell you? You are already telling me every day I am not enough. I do not need to give you more evidence of that. So I will handle it quietly. By myself. Over here. And now you have the conditions for financial infidelity, not because someone is a bad person, but because the cycle made telling the truth feel impossible.
There is one more piece I want to name here. A pursuer can soften, and often does, after enough EFT work. But a pursuer can only sustain that softening for so long if the withdrawing partner does not consistently come forward. And what happens over time, which catches couples therapists off guard, is that the pursuer burns out. They stop pursuing. And now they look like the withdrawer. A couples therapist walks in and sees two quiet people. What they are actually seeing is one person who exhausted themselves trying and quietly gave up. That is a profoundly painful place to be. And it often precedes, or follows, financial secrets.
Honest versus transparent: a failure of transparency, not honesty
One of the concepts I keep returning to in couples work is the difference between an honest relationship and a transparent one. An honest relationship means: if you ask the right question, I will give you a truthful answer. A transparent relationship means: I know you need this information, so I am going to bring it to you even though you did not ask.
Most couples think they want honesty. What they are aching for is transparency. Financial infidelity, even in its smaller forms, is almost always a failure of transparency rather than a failure of honesty. The person knew their partner needed to know. They just decided not to say it. Sometimes out of fear. Sometimes out of shame. Sometimes because they have learned, over years, that bringing things up costs more than staying quiet.
Chris and I have our version of this. He runs a custom car shop, and there is a constant flow of packages and parts coming into our house. He will sometimes tell me something is for work before I have asked anything. He knows I clock the incoming boxes by the end of a week. He is not hiding anything. But he has learned, from years of knowing me, that I will wonder. So he just tells me. That is not honesty, exactly. That is care. That is transparency. And it keeps something small from becoming something charged.
When hiding money is protection, not deception
This section deserves its own space, because it reframes the entire conversation.
Economic abuse is the use or restriction of money to control a partner. Megan's research found that somewhere between 94 and 99 percent of intimate partner violence situations also include economic abuse. It is not a coincidence. It is a strategy. Control the money, and you control the exits.
She told a story from her own early career that I have not stopped thinking about. She was working as a waitress, had a four-table section, and a coworker's boyfriend used to come in and sit at her coworker's biggest table every night. Just sit there. Annoying, she thought at the time. She avoided the whole situation. In hindsight, she realized he was cutting her coworker's income by 20 to 30 percent every single night. Stealing one of her four tables. And by irritating everyone around her, he was also quietly isolating her. That is economic abuse. It does not always look like what you expect.
This is why the Fraud Pentagon is a more useful frame than judgment. When financial infidelity shows up as a response to economic abuse, the intervention is not: stop hiding money. The intervention is: how do we create safety? What does this person need to actually get out? Those are completely different problems requiring completely different responses.
Money scripts, childhood, and the patterns we inherit
Megan walked us through the research on money scripts, the belief systems we develop about money, usually in childhood, usually from watching our parents, often without ever consciously forming them. The classic categories are money avoidant (money is dangerous or dirty), money vigilant (I must track and protect it), money worship (more money will fix everything), and money status (my worth is tied to what I have). Most of us carry some version of more than one.
Megan's own was deeply avoidant, layered with a moral belief that caring about money and caring about people could not coexist. She was not bad at money. She had a story about money that made engaging with it feel like a betrayal of who she was.
Nick shared his. Growing up gay in rural Kansas, he came to see money as the great equalizer. If he achieved more, made more, reached a certain level, he would be enough. That belief drove a lot of financial decisions through his twenties and into his thirties without him ever consciously naming it. It was not until he started unpacking it that he could see how thoroughly it had shaped what he did with money and why.
Researcher Ashley LeBaron-Black at BYU has shown that financial socialization, what we learn about money from our parents, shapes not only our financial behaviors in adulthood but the health of our romantic relationships. The patterns we absorbed watching our parents argue, avoid, or never mention money at all are the same patterns we bring into our own households. And we assume everyone else feels the same way we do about money, because we have never known anything different.
Joint accounts, ambient transparency, and why visibility is not the same as surveillance
Megan mentioned Emily Garbinsky's research on joint accounts, and it is worth understanding in its full form, because it changes the conversation considerably.
Earlier research showed that couples with joint accounts had lower rates of financial infidelity and less impulsive spending, but it had a chicken-and-egg problem: did the joint account create that dynamic, or were more aligned couples simply more likely to open one? Recently, researchers were able to approximate an experimental design. They gave a sample of couples a significant enough incentive to be randomly assigned, some to joint accounts and some not. The couples who were placed into joint accounts, not self-selecting into them, still did better across all three measures. There is something about the shared visibility itself that changes behavior.
Megan is careful to say she would never tell clients they must have a joint account. There are power and safety situations where separate accounts make complete sense. Late-in-life marriages, blended families, relationships where one partner controls the finances as a form of control: all of these are contexts where a joint account could cause harm rather than prevent it. But for couples who do not have those dynamics, the research suggests the instinct is worth paying attention to.
The mechanism is not surveillance. It is ambient awareness. The joint account creates a low-stakes version of transparency that does not require a formal conversation every time. The Jiminy Cricket effect, as Megan put it: that little awareness of knowing another person will see this, changes the calculus of the second frappe.
"Think of everything we missed."
Near the end of the episode, Megan shared something from a financial advisor colleague. He had a client come in after the death of her husband. He told her how much money there was. Far more than she had ever known existed. And instead of relief, she broke down. All she could say was: think of everything we missed. The vacations they did not take. The time they could have spent with grandchildren. The ways she had quietly made herself smaller than necessary because she thought they could not afford more.
Her husband had protected her from the number, in his mind. What he had actually done was take decades of choices away from her without her knowing. And now she was grieving the money alongside the man. Two losses at once, the second one laced with anger she had nowhere to put.
I think about that story constantly in the context of what we are building at Calibrate. A plan built on incomplete information is not a plan. It is a guess. And someone is going to have to live inside that guess for a very long time. The plan belongs to both people or it belongs to neither of them.
What a financial advisor can actually do when they notice something
Nick raised the question every financial advisor has quietly faced: what do you do when both members of a couple call you separately before a meeting, each asking you not to bring up a different account? What is the ethical, practical move?
Megan's answer is that the plan built on incomplete information is built on sand. The financial advisor does not need to name what is happening as financial infidelity. But they can say: I am noticing some tension around certain accounts in your household, and I want our plan to be based on the right information and to make sense to both of you. How can I make it safer for us to talk about this together?
She also pointed out a structural reality of the advisor relationship that makes this harder. A therapist's goal is to eventually get fired, because that means the client is healthy and no longer needs them. A financial advisor's goal is often the opposite: to retain that client, and then their children, and then their grandchildren. That fundamental difference in incentives makes it harder to hold clients accountable or to say the thing that might cost the relationship. But doing the right thing, Megan said, sometimes is the hard thing.
Researcher Sonya Lutter at Texas State has shown that people who work with financial planners, not financial therapists, just financial planners, show positive growth in relational satisfaction and emotional wellbeing. The relational work is already happening inside financial planning conversations. The question is whether advisors have the language and the comfort to support it.
How to actually start this conversation tonight
Most people wait until they are already activated. Scared, suspicious, hurt. And then they try to have a calm productive conversation about money. The nervous system does not care about your good intentions once it is in threat mode.
The first thing I have started handing out for free to everyone: get in motion with your partner. Go for a walk. Side-by-side body movement changes what the conversation can hold. There is real science behind it, but you do not need the science to notice that the kitchen table with full eye contact is a terrible venue for the most vulnerable financial conversations you will ever have. When you sit down across from someone and ask them to focus, their nervous system reads that as: something is about to happen.
Before you open the conversation, do some work on your own. Journal. Call a friend. Voice memo it out. If the first sentence you can come up with is straight criticism, you are not ready yet. That sentence needs to go somewhere before you bring it to your partner.
Megan's script from the research is worth keeping: start with what you observe (I have noticed our savings is lower than it was), then say how it is affecting you (it is causing me some worry), then frame it as a shared problem (I want us to figure this out together). That entry gives your partner room to respond without immediately being on defense. And it might give them the opening to say the thing they have been holding.
Common questions about financial infidelity in relationships
Financial infidelity is the intentional hiding or withholding of financial information from a partner. It is not defined by the size of the behavior but by the decision to conceal it. This includes secret accounts, hidden debt, undisclosed purchases, minimizing spending, and avoiding money conversations. As formally defined by researchers Garbinsky, Gladstone, Nikolova, and Olson in the Journal of Consumer Research (2020), financial infidelity is "engaging in any financial behavior expected to be disapproved of by one's romantic partner and intentionally failing to disclose this behavior to them." Their research found approximately one in three people commit financial infidelity. Garbinsky et al., Journal of Consumer Research, 2020
Dr. McCoy's research uses the Fraud Pentagon framework to identify five drivers: financial pressure or stress, opportunity (particularly when one partner manages all the finances), rationalization, competence in concealing, and arrogance about the impact. Additional causes include compulsive spending driven by underlying mental health dynamics, and economic abuse where a partner is hiding money as a form of self-protection and exit planning. Shared financial goals and communication skills are the two most consistently protective factors identified in the research.
Economic abuse is the use or restriction of money to control a partner, and research shows it is present in 94 to 99 percent of intimate partner violence situations. This is critical context for financial infidelity: sometimes what looks like financial deception is actually financial self-protection. A partner hiding money or building a separate account may be preparing to leave a dangerous situation. Before calling a financial behavior a betrayal, the first question should always be: what is this protecting?
Research by Emily Garbinsky (Cornell, previously Notre Dame) found that couples with joint accounts show lower rates of financial infidelity and less impulsive spending. A more recent quasi-experimental study randomized couples into joint versus separate accounts and found the same effects, addressing the earlier concern that the correlation was simply because more aligned couples were more likely to open joint accounts in the first place. The mechanism is ambient awareness: shared visibility creates a low-stakes form of transparency that does not require a formal conversation every time. Joint accounts are not appropriate for every couple, particularly in situations involving power imbalance or abuse, but the underlying research on shared financial visibility is meaningful. Garbinsky, E.N. et al., Journal of Consumer Research, 2020
A financially honest relationship means: if you ask the right question, I will give you a truthful answer. A financially transparent relationship means: I know you need this information, and I am going to bring it to you even though you did not ask. Financial infidelity, even in smaller forms, is almost always a failure of transparency rather than a failure of honesty. The person knew their partner needed to know. They decided not to say it. Most couples think they want honesty. What they are aching for is transparency.
Financial therapy is the integration of financial planning and therapeutic practice, focused on how people think, feel, and behave with money. As defined by the Financial Therapy Association, it is "a process informed by both therapeutic and financial competencies that helps people think, feel, communicate and behave differently with money to improve overall wellbeing." It addresses cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and relational aspects of financial health. It originated as a two-practitioner model, with a therapist and financial planner in the room together, and has evolved into a spectrum of cross-trained practitioners. The Financial Therapy Association, founded in 2010, has developed a certification pathway (CFT-I) and academic programs, particularly at Kansas State University and the University of Georgia.
Start by getting in motion: go for a walk rather than sitting across from each other at a table. Side-by-side movement genuinely changes what the nervous system can hold in a difficult conversation. Before the conversation, do enough of your own processing that your first sentence is not criticism. Then open with what you are observing, how it is affecting you, and where you want the relationship to go. "I miss feeling like we are on the same team" is a different entry point than "why did you do this." Give the conversation a direction before it starts.
