There’s a lot of things to worry about in the dating world: STDs, pregnancy, your slutty teen past making it impossible to truly know love. Now there’s a whole new terrible obstacle standing in the way of finding love: your low credit score. The Times delved deep into the modern dating world and found people that not only were stymied in their attempts to find love because of bad credit, but a whole world of people who support picking a partner based on credit. Now your student loan debt isn’t the only noose around your heart.
A down economy and the fact that banks were credit-happy in the go-go aughts have combined to tighten the purse strings for people who are seen as any kind of risk. Some of the interview subjects said they brought up credit score on the first date or had their date broach the topic. The Times was also able to find people whose significant others’ had better credit then them and put off steps like marriage because a joint home loan would be impossible or kept them off of car leases to get better loan terms.
There are even dating sites centered around matching people up by credit score, because hey, aren’t we all just floating bits of data anyway? In the myFICO Forums, a message board devoted to credit chat, there’s a whole subforum devoted to relationships where you can find people struggling with the tensions caused by one partner having debt and the other good credit. So if you are trying to date someone, it might be better to match yourself up by credit score, so you don’t have yet another thing to fight about.