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EMILIE POOLER'S SUSPICIONS WERE AROUSED ONE NIGHT when she called her Lawrenceville, New Jersey; home and her husband, Patti Rybinski, didn't answer.

"I was with the girls visiting my family, and he was home alone," Emilie recalls. Later, when she did get hold of him and asked where he had been, he didn't lie. "Well," he said, "there's this woman whose husband died ..."

Paul, 39, and Emilie, 34, both test developers at Education Testing Service in Princeton and parents to two young girls, consider themselves prudent by most standards. They agree on most financial decisions. They own a three-bedroom town house, never carry a balance on their credit cards and splurge only on vacations.

But Paul has a comic-book collection--about 9,000 strong, most acquired before they were married--and it's Emilie's pet peeve. "When I found out that they were worth about $34,000, I thought, 'Great, we can sell them and use the money as a down payment on a house.' But I had to come to the realization that the collection isn't mine; it came before the marriage. If he wants to keep it, that's fine--so long as he's not using our money to buy more!"

Paul now sells 20 to 30 of his comic books at a time on eBay and uses the profits to purchase one or two comics in stellar condition. "My collection is getting smaller but is of more value," he says. "I consider it an investment."

The night that Emilie called, Paul was with the widow--rifling through her late husband's comic books, in the hopes of adding to his own collection. He never did tell Emilie how much he spent.

Keeping secrets about money is not only tempting in our cultural carnival of consumption, it's also on the rise. The ability to spend and borrow money impulsively has never been greater, with ubiquitous ATMs, Internet banking and online shopping, to say nothing of refinancing deals and new credit card offers arriving almost daily in the mail. Consumer debt, excluding mortgages, has doubled in the past decade. It now averages close to $20,000 per household. This isn't just fodder for economists; it gets between the sheets in almost every marriage in America.

In addition, because the age at which people wed is rising, partners bring extensive monetary histories to their union, just as they accrue complex sexual pasts. Many individuals enter marriage with undisclosed financial allegiances outside the relationship. Given the avoidance, accessibility and ambivalence that now swirl around about money, it's creating an explosive new dynamic in relationships. However small the money deceptions are, however well they are rationalized, they can nevertheless create fissures in a relationship that feel like flagrant betrayal to the other partner. What's worse, a breach of fiscal trust is more destabilizing to marriage than a sexual affair. The kicker is, it can hurt couples long after their relationship bites the dust.

The Last Taboo

If you are in a serious relationship, no matter how long you've been together or how much money you have, your next fight is likely to be about money. Money is inextricably connected to our hopes and our dreams, our sense of security and self-worth, almost all of our core emotions and familial expectations.

Disagreements about money are also more intense, and more negative, than those about other topics. Due to an invisible web of intention that underlies financial transactions, we endlessly attribute unspoken motives and consequences to the financial choices people make. When tweaked, the delicate threads of these decisions, woven throughout our homes and around our daily activities, can instantly become high-tension wires.

Even in platonic relationships, a simple task--say, determining how much to spend on a birthday gift--can give rise to a tangle of contradictory assumptions: Are gifts a symbol of how much someone is valued, or merely a token of affection? Should you spend about what you expect someone to spend on you, or think nothing at all about reciprocity?

Discussing money, however, has always been a social taboo, one we've been taught to avoid since childhood ("Don't ask how much that cost! That's rude!"). You probably know more about your friends' sex lives than how much money they make or owe. And discussing it with a lover is more fraught still, as no one wants to be perceived as a gold digger.

The Negative Dowry

Most adults--67 percent of women, 74 percent of men--enter marriage with at least some debt. Of those with debt, about half owe more than $5,000, primarily from auto loans, credit cards, student loans and medical bills, research associate David Schramm of Utah State University found in a study of 1,010 newlyweds. This "negative dowry" places a tremendous strain on new marriages at a time when couples would rather be focusing on future financial goals. "It's pretty common to find out that the person you married has more debt and less income than you realized," says Scott Stanley, professor of psychology at the University of Denver and coauthor of You Paid How Much for That? How to Win at Money Without Losing at Love. "Essentially they had other relationships with money going on that you didn't know about. The opportunity to feel betrayed is huge."

Yet the way a couple deals with money disagreements and disappointments can predict the long-term success, or failure, of the relationship. "Money is the intersecting point where couples make most of their decisions," says Stanley, who with colleague Howard Markman conducted a survey of nearly a thousand committed couples across the country. "Money arguments have added potency because they allow for power and control dynamics to be triggered. It's an area of conflict where one partner can make unilateral decisions that affect both partners, sometimes for the rest of their lives."

Take the case of Donald, a farmer who got a loan from the bank to purchase seed in the spring. The whole economy of his farm and family depended on his planting. While he was accruing $35,000 for repayment in theft joint bank account, his wife, Susann, was discovering Internet gambling. Soon the account balance was zero.

Donald, in turn, lost all possibility of profit from the family farm's production and was burdened with debt for years to come.

"If your spouse makes a bad decision, even if you had no knowledge of that decision, when you're married you're treated as one financial entity," Stanley says. Even after a divorce, debt acquired by either party during the marriage is often considered communal responsibility.

Spouses--But Not Partners

Hidden financial dealings not only have legal and long-lasting consequences, they also take a high emotional toll on couples as well. Like all secrets, energy is required to maintain the deception, undermining the most important aspect of a good relationship--the intimacy that comes from letting down one's guard.

There are three important elements of safety in relationships: the ability to talk freely, safety from physical harm and a sense of security about the future, says Stanley. "The last thing in the world you want in a marriage is to feel that you have to protect yourself against your partner, or that you have to wall off a portion of your life. Money is a very potent context in which these forces get acted out."

By hiding information about expensive purchases, risky investments or debts that have accumulated to the point of crisis, he says, relationship land mines are planted that can explode with great force when triggered by outside events (when, say; creditors come calling or the Lexus is repossessed).

Even income secrets are not unusual, observes Barry McCarthy, a psychologist in Washington, D.C., and coauthor--with his wife, Emily--of Getting It Right the First Time: How to Build a Healthy Marriage. People may withhold information about theft wages, assets and bonuses.

One husband, for example, claims he makes $120,000, and he and his wife live a fairly modest life. But the man actually makes $400,000 and keeps a separate bank account. He doesn't trust his wife. That's a typical pattern in financial dishonesty, says McCarthy--one spouse commits the "infidelity" but blames the other as the cause.

Should the hidden account be discovered, the partner who was formerly kept in the dark will think the other is hedging his bets and safeguarding individual interests over the couple's interests. "There's a sense that 'maybe you have this separate account in case you want to leave me,'" points out Scott Stanley. "The symbol becomes the problem itself."