What the association between money and relationships reveals about modern intimacy

A ₹4,200 bill at the end of a date—for an hour of padel, along with passionfruit martinis and truffle fries at a Bandra rooftop—shouldn’t be existential, but inurban India it often is. Neither of the two people on the date says anything. The pause is familiar. In modern urban India, the choreography around who pays has become one of the clearest expressions of money and relationships.A single evening can now carry a visible price tag, and settling the bill makes it impossible to separate dating and finances from attraction. 

Money and relationships have never been neutral

Money triggers Pavlovian reflexes people often recognise as inherited. Men reach for the bill not always out of generosity, but because they’ve been trained to. Women pause not because they are unable to pay, but because money has long signalled safety, seriousness, and intent. Both navigate equality in theory and older scripts in practice. This friction sits at the centre of money and relationships today. 

That inheritance, however, does not always land evenly. For many men, earning remains entangled with identity. Maria Jose Kurian, a Chennai-based men's mental health researcher, says insecurity often runs deeper than men consciously recognise. "A lot of men are only now discovering they can be more than just an ATM, but they don't yet know what that 'more' looks like. On good days, it's easier for men to feel happy about their partner earning more, but on bad days, that insecurity becomes very loud. Am I not good enough because I'm not providing enough?"

In intimate relationships, love may begin instinctively, but how it survives discussions around money reflects what people absorb growing up. Emotional patterns rarely arrive fresh. They are inherited and reinforced long before anyone names them. The strain visible today—dating fatigue, relational burnout, a rising divorce rate—is less a failure of feeling than the stress of asking instinctive love to carry economic pressure without having seen how.

Historically, intimacy has always mirrored social order. From the Kama Sutra's understanding of love, duty, and material life as intertwined pursuits, to colonial dowry systems that formalised financial power, to post-liberalisation dual-income households that unsettled the single-provider model, money was never meant to sit outside love. Today's tension feels less like a crisis and more like a transition. 

Dating and finances in urban India 

Popular culture teaches that romance should be effortless, fully formed, and immune to logistics. Songs as grand gestures, rom-coms, and slogans like ‘love is blind’ or ‘love is all you need’ make practical conversations feel like intrusions. Money becomes the thing that ruins the mood. Romance was framed as separate from logistics, even as dating and finances kept intruding.

"ON GOOD DAYS, IT'S EASIER FOR MEN TO FEEL HAPPY ABOUT THEIR PARTNER EARNING MORE, BUT ON BAD DAYS, THAT INSECURITY BECOMES VERY LOUD"

Maria Jose Kurian

For Aakanksha Gupta, founder of marketing and PR agency The Other Circle, avoiding money felt like self-protection. "I grew up watching my family struggle with money as it had power over everything—emotions, choices, stability—so my response was to avoid it completely. I never dated thinking what can this person provide for me? I dated based on chemistry and shared interests, but money showed up anyway.” 

Meanwhile, for Protima Tiwary, a Bengaluru-based freelance copywriter, the problem was the absence of language. "I had to build a language for talking about money that didn't exist before," she says. "I wanted to talk about ambition, but not as a salary figure. I meant it as a quality of life, the ability to step back, slow down, disconnect, travel sometimes, pay for convenience without having to overthink.” Conversations around money feel unromantic because they expose vulnerability. Avoiding them doesn’t remove the imbalance, it hands control to assumptions. 

Why money feels so personal in relationships

For many women, money has long functioned as a means of autonomy, allowing the ability to leave a relationship, and refuse or not endure what feels wrong. Kanika Vora, a New Delhi-based environmental lawyer, grew up watching money determine the boundaries of her mother's life. "I watched my mother stay in an abusive relationship because she had no financial independence," she says. "Her fear of how she would raise us kept her trapped. She sacrificed her entire life." 

Research on women's financial inclusion echoes this reality: access to income reduces vulnerability to intimate partner violence, making money less about indulgence and more about exit and choice.

The pattern changes across gender, with the pressure often coming from external factors. New Delhi-based psychologist and PhD researcher Arjun Gupta, who studies masculinity and social power, notes that men who are personally comfortable earning less often unravel under sustained social scrutiny. He recalls a case where a man's in-laws repeatedly framed his lower income as proof that he was "less of a man," to the point where he was excluded from basic decisions, including naming his own child. "Even when the couple itself isn't struggling," points out Gupta, "the stories families and communities hold about these men start to eat away at their sense of self."

Mumbai-based content creator and  musician Sahil Makhija offers a counterexample. "Two decades ago I earned more than my now-wife; then she earned more than me for 10 years," he says. "It never affected how I saw myself." Raised in a non-traditional environment where provision was never tied to masculinity, Makhija reinforces Gupta's observation that money-related anxiety is often produced around relationships, not within them. 

Why do couples fight about money?

Arguments around money rarely sound like arguments about money. By the time couples are fighting about fairness, the real questions are already in play: effort, recognition, safety, and control. Many couples believe they are fighting about fairness when they are negotiating money-related stress in relationships.  

Kurian notes that money is frequently pulled into conflicts where it isn't the real issue. "A relationship problem comes up, and suddenly the question becomes, Did this happen because I'm not earning well?" She adds, "The fear of not being a good enough provider sits very close to the sense of self for many men." 

“WE SAY WE WANT KIND MEN, BUT WHAT WE OFTEN RESPOND TO IS GENEROSITY THAT UNDERSTANDS POWER. THE BILL MATTERS”

Protima Tiwary

Aakanksha describes downplaying her wins to avoid triggering this insecurity. "Over time," she says, "it starts to feel like your success is wrong." She recalls a familiar dinner-table scene: "If we're at dinner, the bill arrives, and my partner doesn't even look at it, that's when something shifts. Why am I expected to pick it up every time?" What appears to be a small moment tends to accumulate. Resentment rarely arrives loudly; it builds in quiet arithmetic. In volatile economies, money becomes a proxy for stability. Rent, plans, and who pays are measurable in ways care is not.

Financial compatibility in relationships 

In 2026, money enters romance early on—scanning prices on the menu, hesitating over an Uber upgrade, quietly calculating sustainability. To be able to lead a certain kind of lifestyle has become shorthand for financial compatibility in relationships.

Rohan Kohli, founder of nightlife platform Cabal, describes how quickly this pressure sets in. "When you live in a bubble like Bandra [in Mumbai], you start performing for that world—the places you go, the circles you move in." 

With urban inflation outpacing wage growth, particularly in housing and food, young adults are budgeting not just for living, but for intimacy too. What is often dismissed as transactional  often reflects emotional risk management in a high-cost, low-certainty world.

Tiwary notes, “We say we want kind men, but what we often respond to is generosity that understands power. The bill matters. I will notice it if he doesn’t pay.”

In queer relationships without preset roles, that power becomes visible faster. Kolkata-based Kaushik Saha, who runs an interior design studio, observes, “Couples have to decide for themselves. That makes differences in income or family support very visible.”  

The real question about money and relationships 

"Equality in modern relationships isn't about splitting every bill in half,” says Saha. “It's about noticing whether both people feel seen and supported." This isn't about money ruining love. It's about love being asked to mature. 

"EVEN WHEN THE COUPLE ITSELF ISN'T STRUGGLING, THE STORIES FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES HOLD ABOUT THESE MEN START TO EAT AWAY AT THEIR SENSE OF SELF"

Aakanksha Gupta

Across relationships in urban India, arrangements no longer run on autopilot. They require language, practice, and emotional education to dislodge old reflexes. As Makhija puts it, "Deepti [his long-term partner and now wife] and I understand that money fluctuates. We talk about it. We adjust." Most couples fail to nail this at the first attempt, and so the grace is in the redos—sometimes multiple attempts at learning how to name what one needs. 

That's the work: building a shared vocabulary may be the only way money and relationships stop feeling like opposing forces and start reading like partnership.  

Love has always mattered. But in 2026, its definition asks to embrace honesty, resilience, and communication. And if it can hold that, perhaps love really is all you need.