Our Vote: Either Way Kinda Sucks

Begley, on new research into why some people are more upset by emotional infidelity than sexual infidelity:

According to “attachment theory,” how you are raised leaves a lasting impression on how trusting you are in intimate relationships. (Some of the most interesting work on this is by Phillip Shaver of the University of California, Davis.) In a nutshell, people whose parents were warm and loving and reliable sources of emotional support tend to be “securely” attached, forming successful adult relationships that are not marred by excessive clinginess or jealousy. But people whose parents were distant or cold tend to be “avoidant”: they are either dismissive of close relationships (and therefore prefer autonomy to commitment, and are often promiscuous) or afraid of them. (That is, the “avoidant” attachment style comes in two forms, fearful or dismissive. The former is often of the “once bitten, twice shy” variety, in which someone is afraid of being hurt in a relationship. But dismissive people actively scorn relationships.) The Penn State duo hypothesized that people who are dismissive of relationships would be more distressed by sexual than emotional infidelity.
As they will report in a study to be published in the February issue of the journal Psychological Science, securely attached people were, as predicted, much more upset about emotional infidelity than sexual infidelity: 77 percent said they are much more likely to find emotional infidelity more upsetting than sexual infidelity. That held for men as well as women—no sex difference. They also found that men and women who are fearful of relationships are more upset by emotional infidelity; again, no sex difference. Only men and women who are dismissive of relationships, the scientists found, are more upset by sexual straying than by a mate’s finding his or her soul mate in someone else. Because “more men than women are dismissive of relationships, and because such people are concerned more about sexual infidelity,” they write, “what looks like a gender difference is in fact an attachment effect”—that is, a product of how people feel about forming close relationships. Conclusion: Mars-Venus differences in jealousy are the result of attachment style and not of our caveman genes.

Source newsweek

Reblogged from newsweek