HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: In Love And In Debt: How Student Loans Put Pressure On Young Couples.

Disproportionate student debt can make that already-challenging conversation all the more complicated. A survey by the National Foundation for Credit Counseling found that 57 percent of respondents had reservations about being in a relationship with someone with a large amount of debt, with 37 percent saying that they’d wait to get married until the debts were repaid, and slightly more—46 percent—saying they’d be open to getting married and jointly paying off the debt.

Those reservations result in real—and documented—difficulties for people with large amounts of debt when it comes to getting married. Dora Gicheva, an assistant professor in economics at the University of North Carolina, studies how debt affects education and relationships. She recently published a study on how people with large debt burdens fare when trying to settle down.

“There are a couple of previous economic studies that find student loans to affect other areas of graduates’ lives, for example their career choices, so it seemed reasonable to expect marriage decisions to be affected as well,” says Gicheva. Her research found a negative relationship: $10,000 of student-loan debt decreased the probability of marriage by 3 to 4 percent, with the effect diminishing with age for women but not men.

While there’s little legal ramification of marrying someone with a massive amount of student-loan debt (debt incurred before marriage is not joint debt), Karen Carr, a certified financial planner who teaches and advises at the Society of Grownups, says that differing amounts of loans can be stressful for couples—particularly if the amounts are extreme.

Indeed.