Is there such a thing as the “worst” attachment style for infidelity?
Sunday September 10, 2023.
Attachment Theory that it offers a useful framework for examining human behavior in our pursuit of being loved and not being alone.
But recent research suggests that your attachment style may be predictive of the odds of you being unfaithful in a committed relationship.
Most research has examined the association between attachment and infidelity in unmarried humans, before this study, there was little to no research examining the role of partner attachment style in predicting infidelity.
In contrast to research showing that attachment anxiety is unrelated to infidelity among dating couples, two longitudinal studies of 207 newlywed marriages claimed that partner attachment anxieties interact to predict marital infidelity, such that partners were more likely to engage in infidelity when either they, or their partner, were high (vs. low) in attachment anxiety.
In contrast to research on dating couples, these researchers found that Avoidant Attachment was unrelated to infidelity.
Even partner attachment avoidance was negatively associated with infidelity, indicating that spouses were less likely to perpetrate infidelity when their partner was high (vs. low) in attachment avoidance.
But, boy did they come down hard on Anxious Attachment. This is troubling to me, and I’ll explain why later.
Findings from the study
Humans who are anxiously attached are mathematically more likely to be unfaithful to their partner, causing the researchers to frame their findings rather bluntly by suggesting that Anxious Attachment “one of the worst attachment styles.”
The research found that anxiously attached humans have a greater probability to be unfaithful to their spouse.
High levels of attachment anxiety are linked to a fear of abandonment. Humans who are anxiously attached are often described as emotionally “needy.”
If an anxiously attached human does not get the reassurance they seek in their current relationship, they are inclined to look elsewhere, according to the research conclusions.
20% of humanity have an Anxious Attachment style.
A classic sign of Insecure Attachment is a lack of stable feelings about the relationship from one day to the next.
Humans with Anxious Attachment spend a lot of time thinking about what their counterpart desires.
They can easily move from feeling strongly attached, to seeking 50 ways to leave their lover.
How the study was conducted
The conclusions come from a study of over 200 (207 to be exact) newlywed couples. They were carefully tracked for nearly five years.
All of the study subjects were given tests of their personality, attachment style, and their level of relationship satisfaction.
The results showed that if either partner was anxiously attached, then they had a higher chance of being unfaithful. Wow. I’ve never seen researcher red flag an attachment style before.
Said lead author Russell, one answer to the issues that anxiously attached people face may be therapy:
“…interventions such as attachment based family therapy and attachment-focused group intervention have been effective at reducing attachment anxiety and thus may help prevent infidelity among anxiously attached intimates.”
I get a little nervous when researchers suggest therapy. It sounds too much like a Hail Mary pass…
Another idea they suggested is for the partner of an anxiously attached person to work on being more responsive:
“…intimates report reduced attachment insecurity when they are with responsive partners than when they are with unresponsive partners.”
In contrast to anxiously attached people, those who were avoidantly attached were less likely to be unfaithful.
Humans who are avoidant want to avoid getting too attached to the other humans…even attractive ones.
About 25 % of humanity has an Avoidant Attachment style.
Both Avoidant and Anxious attachment are both deemed insecure forms of attachment, as compared to the gold standard of attachment styles…Secure Attachment. Just over half of all humans are securely attached to their partner.
The securely attached are the least likely to be unfaithful. Perhaps because they possess the greatest partner empathy, according to research from Israel. They do not worry about their partner straying, nor do they ruminate constantly on the strength of the relationship.
Final thoughts on Insecure Attachment being labelled as “one of the worst attachment styles”
I suspect our gentle researchers, Russell, Baker, and McNulty believe that numbers never lie, but humans do.
Which might just be why they blurted out that partners with insecure attachment suck, which is kinda what they did.
It’s not helpful to disparage traits that describe vast sections of humanity (20% of humans are insecure, 25% are avoidant), with such judgement and finality. It’s emotional elitism. Please stop.
Did they find some drama in their 207 couples? You betcha. These were also young, newlywed couples. But even their small studies aren’t enough to extend such a crippling critique to 20% of humanity. Most of whom are not young newlyweds.
Infidelity has been reliably correlated with personality disorders. Only a fraction of humanity have serious personality disorders such as narcissism, or borderline personality disorder. It logically follows that these humans would not have a Secure Attachment style.
I fail to see the utility of indicting attachment styles as well, because the bias against Anxious Attachment is likely to be the result of a logical fallacy, (namely, a hasty generalization).
This deficit of logic is ancient. It has been called many things. We see it in social science research all the time. Which is why research must be read carefully if you’re going to apply it to your client’s lives.
How we treat, and describe our clients matter.
There can be no fu*king cultural room for a “worst attachment style” any more than there can be tolerance of of “worst skin color.” Logical fallacies abound is this age of sloppy sensationalism.
The researchers are also quite immodest in drawing their conclusions. They used an insufficient sample, and reached a faulty generalization.
This happens so damn much we have a plethora of words and phrases to describe this slop-fest of mediocre reasoning in academia.
It’s also called a biased generalization, jumping to a conclusion, a converse accident, secundum quid ( for you Latin buffs out there), and a neglect of qualifications.
This sometimes happens when researchers, in their enthusiasm for following the numbers, miss the human part of the science.
Be well, stay kind (unlike me in this post), and Godspeed.
RESEARCH:
Russell, V. M., Baker, L. R., & McNulty, J. K. (2013). Attachment insecurity and infidelity in marriage: Do studies of dating relationships really inform us about marriage? Journal of Family Psychology, 27(2), 242–251. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032118
