The numbers come first. According to TD Bank's 2026 Love & Money Survey — which polled 2,000 adults — 46% of Americans say a potential partner's debt or financial habits would influence whether they pursue a serious relationship. Millennials (51%) and Gen Z (49%) are more likely to say so than Gen X or Baby Boomers, who each came in at 39%.
That gap is not a generational quirk. It is a market signal.
Ashley Weeks, a wealth strategist at TD Bank, told Fortune the divergence reflects economic conditions, not a shift in values. 'There's a pretty big divide between Gen X and Boomer responses versus Millennials and Gen Z,' Weeks said. 'What we take from that is likely these are just a response to the existing stimuli that are out there in the economic space.' Those stimuli — student debt, inflation, housing costs — have made personal finance inseparable from personal life.
Weeks added that older relatives often miss the weight younger people carry. 'Sometimes senior generations — it seems like parents or grandparents — fail to grasp what the younger generations are going through,' he said.
Prenups Go Mainstream
More than half of respondents nationally — 54% — said they would consider signing a prenuptial agreement, a figure well above historical polling on the topic. Weeks attributed the shift to generational exposure to divorce and a desire to set terms rather than accept state defaults. 'By at least considering it, that's one way you can create your own rules,' he said. Weeks also noted, anecdotally, that clients who draft prenups appear less likely to divorce — possibly because the process demands the kind of financial communication that sustains a partnership.
Miami: The Most Financially Anxious City
The survey oversampled six metro areas. Miami stood out sharply. Seventy-three percent of Miami respondents said they feel pressure at least sometimes to appear more financially successful — the highest share of any metro surveyed. Sixty-five percent said they have at least one financial secret, compared with 56% nationally. Fifty-eight percent said they are at least sometimes scared or embarrassed to discuss finances with a partner, versus 48% nationally.
The consequences are concrete: 82% of Miami respondents said they have delayed at least one major life milestone because of their finances, compared with 69% of New Yorkers. Miami residents were also considerably more likely to have received financial help from family — 75%, versus 59% in New York.
New York showed lower rates of financial secrecy and milestone delays than Miami, though 30% of New Yorkers said they make financial decisions mostly on their own, against 21% nationally.
Weeks connected the broader pattern to a labor force participation rate that has fallen to its lowest level in 50 years outside the pandemic. 'I don't think humans have changed,' he said. 'I just think that the economic environment is such that that's the obvious thing to do when it takes so much to buy a house now, or to save up, or to get credit, or to pay off loans.'
What the Market Is Telling Us
When younger Americans treat a partner's balance sheet as a prerequisite rather than a footnote, they are behaving rationally — not cynically. Decades of government-fueled student debt, inflationary spending and regulatory barriers to homeownership have raised the personal cost of a bad financial match to a level prior generations never faced. The real story here is not that romance has become transactional; it is that bad policy has made financial self-defense a survival skill. Free enterprise rewards clear rules and honest accounting. Apparently, so does the modern relationship.
