The Rise of Online Sports Betting — And Why Gambling Belongs in This Conversation Too
A few years ago, gambling addiction and marriage rarely came up together in premarital work. Now it comes up regularly, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
Since a 2018 Supreme Court decision opened the door for states to legalize it, online sports betting has gone from a niche activity to something available on the same phone your partner is scrolling next to you on the couch. It’s now legal in 39 states and Washington, D.C. In 2025 alone, Americans legally wagered roughly $165 billion, and about 1 in 5 U.S. adults placed a legal sports bet that year — up from roughly 1 in 8 just two years earlier. What used to require a trip to a casino now takes about ten seconds and a thumbprint.
I’ve sat with couples who are living the consequence of that ease. Not people who fit the old stereotype of someone with a gambling addiction — often the opposite. Successful, disciplined, otherwise responsible people who describe watching a habit that started as harmless fun on football Sundays quietly turn into something that drained a savings account, maxed out cards, or built a debt their partner didn’t know existed until it was already a crisis.
Why I take gambling addiction as seriously as substance or sexual addiction
Something worth knowing: gambling disorder is currently the only behavioral, or “process,” addiction formally recognized in the DSM-5 — the diagnostic manual clinicians use. Alongside substance addictions like alcohol and opioids, the American Psychiatric Association places gambling disorder in the same category, recognizing that it produces the same patterns of compulsive use, loss of control, and continued behavior despite serious harm, even without a substance involved. Other behaviors people colloquially call “addictions” — to shopping, to internet use, to sex — haven’t yet cleared that same scientific bar. Gambling has. That tells you something about how real and how serious the clinical evidence behind it is, even though it can be easy to dismiss as “just betting on the game.”
What the research shows about gambling addiction and marriage
The numbers here are hard to look away from. Research compiled by the National Gambling Impact Study Commission found that the lifetime divorce rate for problem gamblers runs around 39.5%, more than double the general population’s rate of 18.2% — and for those who meet criteria for pathological gambling, that figure climbs to roughly 53.5%.
A more recent systematic review of gambling disorder within couple relationships found a consistent pattern across the available studies: gambling disorder was repeatedly associated with separation and divorce, financial devastation, family dysfunction, and significant emotional strain on the partner, who often absorbs the fallout of a problem they didn’t create and frequently didn’t know the full extent of.
That last part matters most to me. Like the other topics in this series, what tends to do the deepest damage isn’t only the gambling itself. It’s the secrecy that grows around it — money quietly moved, accounts hidden, losses covered up with new debt rather than disclosed. By the time a partner finds out, it’s often not just the financial hole that has to be dealt with. It’s the discovery that they’d been kept in the dark about something enormous for months or years.
What used to require a trip to a casino now takes ten seconds and a thumbprint.
Why this belongs in premarital and precommitment work
This connects directly to something I’ve written about before in this series: money is already the single strongest predictor of relationship conflict and divorce, even without gambling in the picture. Add a behavior specifically designed by app developers to be compulsive, immediate, and easy to hide, and you have a real risk that deserves a direct conversation before you’ve merged your finances or built a life together.
A few honest questions worth asking each other, ideally with someone helping hold the space:
- Do either of you place bets — sports, casino apps, fantasy leagues, or otherwise — and how often?
- Has betting ever affected your finances in a way you didn’t tell your partner about?
- Do you have full visibility into each other’s accounts, or are there ones the other doesn’t know about?
- If one of you has struggled with this before, has it actually stopped, or just gone quiet?
None of this is about assuming the worst of your partner. It’s about making sure that if this is part of either of your lives, it’s named honestly now — while it’s still solvable together — rather than discovered later as a financial and emotional crisis.
The bottom line
Gambling addiction and marriage intersect more often than people expect, and it isn’t a fringe issue anymore. It’s sitting in nearly every pocket in the country, and the couples I work with are proof that it can affect anyone, regardless of income, education, or how “together” a relationship looks from the outside. Bringing it into premarital and precommitment counseling isn’t about suspicion. It’s about building a relationship where nothing important is happening in a browser tab your partner doesn’t know about.
Let’s Talk About It, Before It Becomes a Crisis
If gambling addiction and marriage — or the secrecy around it — is part of your relationship, now is a far better time to address it than after the damage is done.
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Sources
- American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed., text rev.). Gambling disorder is classified as the only behavioral addiction recognized under Substance-Related and Addictive Disorders.
- National Gambling Impact Study Commission. (1999). Final Report. Divorce rate estimates for problem and pathological gamblers.
- Systematic review: Gambling disorder in the context of couple relationships. (PMC, peer-reviewed systematic review of couple-relationship outcomes associated with gambling disorder.)
- RG.org (2026). U.S. Sports Betting Statistics: Handle, Revenue & Tax. Data on legal sports betting adoption and adult participation rates, 2023–2025.
That’s the series. If you missed any of the earlier posts, you can find the full series here: Starting the Road Together →