But wait, that’s not all! In an odd yet fittingly dystopian new development, it seems credit scores have infiltrated the dating game. Now, in addition to barring you from signing a lease or earning a Bachelor’s degree, your credit rating can also ruin your love life—although the fiscally aware singles flaunting their FICO scores on dating apps might disagree with this glass-half-empty assessment.
If you’ve been active on the apps in the last few years, you may have come across some of these unsolicited testaments to a potential match’s credit-worthiness yourself, typically conveyed via a screenshot of their Equifax, Experian, and/or Transunion ratings among their profile photos. Reports of credit score–flexing on the likes of Tinder and Hinge date back to at least 2023, and its continued prevalence seems to suggest that good credit has become an increasingly valuable (or at least increasingly vaunted) asset among today’s daters. So much so, in fact, that there is now a dating app specifically for credit-conscious singles seeking high credit–scoring matches. Enter: Score, the dating app for people with good credit.
First launched in 2024, Score made headlines for requiring users to pass a soft credit check confirming their credit rating fell within the “good” to “excellent” range. Unsurprisingly, this credit-based matchmaking gimmick sparked its share of controversy. While Score founder Luke Bailey peddled the platform as the first of its kind to address the importance of financial compatibility in relationships, critics took issue with the arguably classist implications of a dating app equating credit-worthiness to relationship-worthiness.
Score bills itself as an earnest, taboo-busting disruptor rising to meet the needs of a fiscally conscious generation.
But if Score generated discourse, that seems to have been the point. The platform quietly shut down in August 2024 after a six-month stint, with Bailey maintaining that Score was only ever intended to be a short-term pop-up designed “to make people aware of their credit health and to start a bigger conversation.”
Two years later, Score’s creators have apparently decided it’s time to continue that conversation. Late last week, Bailey announced a re-launch of the dating app, telling TechCrunch the decision comes after finding that Score’s short-lived existence only had a short-lived impact: “When we shut it down, we assumed the conversation would continue without us. It didn’t.”
Under the new tagline, “Dating for People With Good Credit” (which, per the app’s website, appears to have been quietly swapped in favor of “Love, Verified”), Score 2.0 will replicate the same credit-based compatibility schtick as the original. This time, however, the platform claims to be prioritizing “a more inclusive approach” in response to earlier criticism. In the interest of said inclusivity, Score Redux will feature two membership levels: a “Standard Tier” open to all users regardless of credit standing, and a “Verified Tier” for those who’ve confirmed their good-to-excellent credit score via Equifax.
Despite seeming like a publicity stunt or perhaps an identity theft scam, Score bills itself as an earnest, taboo-busting disruptor rising to meet the needs of a fiscally conscious generation and definitely not trying to steal your personal information. (For the record, Bailey told TechCrunch the app doesn’t store or sell any sensitive data and secures everything using an encrypted infrastructure.) Per the press release announcing its return, Score is a dating app “built around financial responsibility and meaningful connection” that was “designed to elevate conversations around personal finance in romantic relationships by bringing financial compatibility into the matchmaking equation.”
I am not particularly convinced that credit-based compatibility is the future of dating.
That may be a long way of saying that money still matters in matters of the heart, but Score isn’t wrong in saying it; it’s no secret that finances can make or break a relationship. But what does someone’s credit score really tell us about who they are as a person, much less a romantic partner? Moreover, what do the credit-conscious daters signing up for Score and plastering Tinder with CreditKarma screenshots think they’re telling us?
You might initially assume someone showing off financial stats on a dating app is trying to flaunt some amount of wealth, but a high credit score does not necessarily equate to a high net worth or even a debt-free lifestyle—take it from me, a woman with six figures of student loan debt and a sparkling credit score! Good credit may suggest some degree of fiscal responsibility and/or executive functioning in that it generally indicates you’re the kind of person who can remember to make regular payments or at least knows how to set up autopay, but that’s about it.
To be fair, Bailey does acknowledge that credit is not a reliable measure of wealth, stating that Score instead views it as “a reflection of consistency and reliability.” Essentially, the app’s premise seems to be rooted in the idea that good credit equals general life stability, which theoretically translates to relationship stability.
I understand the logic here. And yet, I can assure you that I am more than capable of being both romantically and financially unstable while maintaining deceptively good credit. Avoiding intimacy comes as naturally to me as refusing to look at my bank account.
Ultimately, I am not particularly convinced that credit-based compatibility is the future of dating. However, I do think it may signal something troubling about whatever that future does hold. As easy as it is to write Score off as an ill-conceived tech bro bit, I fear it also strikes me as another vaguely dystopian product of the AI-ification of humanity—one that seeks to erode and streamline human connection by reducing the nuances of love and attraction to a sterilized, algorithm-driven function of compatibility.
Still, if comparing credit scores is your idea of romance, far be it from me to kink-shame you. I’ve interviewed more than enough relationship experts in my day to know that financial stability and transparency is widely considered a key pillar of healthy long-term partnership. Considering I am a single woman whose own finances are, to use a technical term, “in shambles,” I’m certainly not in any position to counter the prevailing wisdom on this one.
I am, however, in a position to continue using my God-given free will to pursue great love over great credit—regardless of how it might affect my FICO score.
Article Appeared @https://www.cosmopolitan.com/relationships/a70410094/credit-score-dating-app/