People who suffer from high attachment anxiety and high attachment avoidance, both reported that they have a low life satisfaction and how relationship satisfaction as well. It was in a new study where the researchers found that people who have attachment anxiety also reported low financial satisfaction.
Lead author Xiaomin Li, a doctoral student in the Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at the University of Arizona says, “This study suggests that romantic attachment orientation can affect financial behaviors and perceptions of partners’ financial behaviors.”
The scientific literature says that finances play a crucial part in well-being. The study highlights how attachment orientation can very much affect the well-being via finances.
Li says, “People’s own less responsible financial behaviors and their perceptions of their romantic partners’ less responsible financial behaviors were associated with multiple life outcomes.”
An individual's attachment orientation generally develops early in the childhood and lingers on throughout the lifetime for different types of relationships which also includes romantic ones. Attachment anxiety and attachment as well as attachment avoidance, both are considered to be insecure attachment orientations.
People with high attachment avoidance tend to be more dismissive of others and primarily reply on themselves wherein they engage in less responsible spending for their own gain.
Li says, “Some researchers have found that people with high attachment avoidance place a high value on materialism." And that is why they engage in compulsive buying or end up making purchases as a way of showing that they're doing better than others.
There could also be various other explanations for the anxious and avoidant behaviour.
People who are high in attachment avoidance may not really value their partner too much, while the ones with attachment anxiety might start distrusting their partners which in turn makes them insecure in the relationship.
Those high in attachment avoidance simply may not value their partner very highly, Li says. On the other hand, those high in attachment anxiety might distrust their partners as the result of their own insecurity in the relationship.
