Intimacy Avoidance: Does It Cause Marital Infidelity?

The road to infidelity is sometimes made of several different nudges in the wrong direction or it can be one single push. How people get there can make for fascinating study, especially since the causes of and motivations for infidelity can be as colorful as they are unique. One of these is intimacy avoidance.

Too many reasons to cheat
According to the book ‘The Monogamy Myth’ by Peggy Vaughan, about 40% of married women and 60% of married men will become involved in an extramarital affair. Already, about 15% of married women and 25% of married men have had sexual relationships with people other than their spouses. Although the causes of infidelity definitely vary, intimacy avoidance was stated as one of the top reasons.

What is intimacy avoidance?
This is the emotional condition where spouses refuse to become intimate because their connection to their partners is mainly brought on by conflict. As such, they create physical or emotional blocks to prevent intimacy. One of these is by becoming unfaithful.

Quite often, both spouses may be involved in their own infidelity cases, believing that they can be safer if they step out of their comfort zone or do things that are not characteristic of them. However, there are also married couples where only one spouse becomes unfaithful.

How intimacy avoidance causes marital infidelity
Spouses who engage in intimacy avoidance are the exact opposite of couples who prefer conflict avoidance. Intimacy avoidance couples prefer to engage in conflict such as fights and arguments in order to encourage emotional and physical barriers to grow between them. As a result, neither couple becomes too emotionally attached to the other.

Since emotions can keep them apart, the more important issues such as the fact that they are avoiding the type of closeness and intimacy characteristic of normal married relationships, are ignored. By performing acts of infidelity, from physical to the more troublesome emotional infidelity, they strengthen the barrier.

This is a waste of opportunity for spouses to take advantage of something that should come naturally for married couples. In this case, marital infidelity is just an end for spouses who refuse the chance to repair their marriage by being intimate. The more intense the conflict within their marriage is, the more couples feel justified in considering the prospect of engaging in marital infidelity. In fact, some of them may even feel that intimacy avoidance actually pushed them to have extramarital affairs.

Additional resources:
http://www.etrucker.com/apps/news/article.asp?id=44611
http://www.soberknowledgebase.com/article.aspx?id=11637&cNode=4W2C0X