All attachment styles are capable of cheating. Secure being the least capable. Out of the three insecure styles—anxious preoccupied, fearful avoidant, and dismissive avoidant—the DA is for sure the most likely to cheat. And there are several reasons why.
Cheating is a subconscious block against intimacy.
The biggest reason is that cheating is a way for them to subconsciously block the intimacy between them and their current partner. Once they have been committed to somebody for a while, the fears around commitment, closeness, intimacy, vulnerability, being trapped, being stuck, and meeting someone else’s expectations get very high. The longer the commitment, the higher those subconscious fears usually rise.
The fears compete with the feelings, so fears suppress feelings for the partner. Over time, the dismissive avoidant does lose feelings for their partner. Their subconscious fears get really high, their deactivating thoughts really kick in, and they start to deactivate and become more and more distant.
They convince themselves they’re stuck in a bad relationship.
They tend to have very negative thoughts about their partner over time. “My partner doesn’t make me feel good. I don’t like X, Y, and Z about my partner.” A lot of times those are little things—things that could be worked through with effort—but they think that they’re big things in their mind. They really feel like they’re being controlled, they’re being over-criticized in their relationship, and they really start to convince themselves that they are essentially stuck in a bad relationship.
But they are human and they do have a need to be expressive and vulnerable. They just feel like the committed partner is unsafe for that vulnerability on a subconscious level.
The affair partner feels safe because there’s nothing at stake.
So when they turn to a new partner where it’s a low stakes game—because hey, if it doesn’t work out, oh well—they have nothing invested in this person. There are no subconscious fears rising around commitment, closeness, and intimacy that comes with a very serious relationship. So they can really open up to people that they barely know inside of a fling or a cheating situation.
And that release of vulnerability feels so good to them. Magnetic and exciting. But if they stayed with that partner for long, the same exact pattern would arise. Their subconscious fears would jet up, they would start to deactivate and pull away from that person—because they repeat their patterns, as all insecure attachments do.
The affair partner is rarely the one they stay with.
The person that they cheat with is rarely the person that they ever stay with. Time and time again, people who got together from an affair end up splitting up because they just can’t maintain the relationship. The whole reason they got together—the whole foundation or basis of that affair—was based on their attachment patterns that they just repeat with a new face.
