For love avoidant women, cheating can become a destructive pattern that ruins relationships and prevents them from finding real love and healthy relationships. To be love avoidant means to resist intimacy and to avoid meaningful and long-term relationships. One way to avoid intimacy is to cheat on a partner. This prevents you from getting too close and can also be used as a way to sabotage a relationship that is headed for serious intimacy. Are you a love avoidant cheater? If so, you can change.
Why Love Avoidance?
It’s hard to understand what love avoidance is. If you don’t like love and intimacy, why not just avoid relationships altogether? The truth is complicated. Many love avoidants had a bad experience at some point. This could have been sexual abuse or assault, but trauma is not a necessary precursor to being love avoidant. Sometimes it can’t be explained. A love avoidant may crave love and relationships but then get scared of intimacy. He or she may be afraid of trusting or of being betrayed, and so he or she puts intimacy at arm’s length or sabotages a good relationship before it goes too far. It’s typical for a love avoidant to be close and affectionate early in a relationship and then to pull away as he or she gets scared of the intimacy and the commitment.
A Love Avoidant Is More Likely to Cheat
Love addicts who cheat are not very common, but love avoidants are likely to commit infidelities as a type of coping mechanism. Experts sometimes call these saboteurs. These love avoidant types might start out in a relationship being affectionate and enthusiastic. However, when the two start to get close, the avoidant gets scared. Whether consciously or subconsciously, she copes with that fear by sabotaging the relationship. The sabotage may take the form of putting distance between herself and her partner. She may become distant and act uninterested. On the other hand, she may cheat. Internet affairs, online cheating and traditional infidelity are ways that the love avoidant can end the relationship and get distance from the intimacy that scares her so much. She gives her partner no choice but to call it quits.
Help for a Love Avoidant
Do you recognize these feelings and behaviors in yourself? Are you a love avoidant who runs from or cheats on a partner out of fear of intimacy? If so, you have reason to be hopeful. You can change your patterns and the way you feel about close relationships by turning to an expert in love addictions. It seems counterintuitive to consider love avoidance a type of love addiction, but most experts agree that it is. An experienced counselor or therapist can help you work through your fears and your urges to cheat in a relationship so that you can find love and live a satisfying and happy life with a partner.
