Nathan, 35, was at his wits’ end. In the eight years since he’d married
Shelly, things had gone from bad to worse. Shelly’s temper tantrums, rare at
first, now occurred almost daily. Her outbursts also increased in severity;
she broke household objects and on one occasion even slapped him. But the
problems in their relationship didn’t end there. Nathan not only caught her
having online affairs, but strongly suspected that she was having real-life
ones as well. Though Shelly threatened to leave many times—almost as if
she was testing Nathan’s patience and tolerance—she didn’t pick up and
move out. He was sure that once this “period” was over, everything would
return to normal. He also saw himself as responsible for Shelly’s well-being
and didn’t want to abandon her when she was going through such a “rough
patch.” So he put up with the abuse and the affairs. Finally, Shelly
announced that she no longer loved him, had met someone else, and was
ending the marriage. Once Shelly decided to leave, Nathan accepted her
decision and didn’t try to win her back.
Now with the divorce behind him, Nathan is relieved that Shelly took
matters into her own hands and freed him from a difficult existence. He’s
even open to meeting a new person and making her part of his life. But he
still finds it hard to explain what kept him there for so long. Attachment
theory offers an explanation. For one, as we’ve seen, people with a secure
attachment style view their partners’ well-being as their responsibility. As
long as they have reason to believe their partner is in some sort of trouble,
they’ll continue to back him or her. Mario Mikulincer and Phillip Shaver, in
their book Attachment in Adulthood, show that people with a secure
attachment style are more likely than others to forgive their partner for
wrongdoing. They explain this as a complex combination of cognitive and
emotional abilities: “Forgiveness requires difficult regulatory maneuvers..
. understanding a transgressor’s needs and motives, and making generous
attributions and appraisals concerning the transgressor’s traits and hurtful
actions.... Secure people are likely to offer relatively benign explanations
of their partners’ hurtful actions and be inclined to forgive the partner.”
Also, as we’ve seen previously in this chapter, secure people just naturally
dwell less on the negative and can turn off upsetting emotions without
becoming defensively distant.
The good news is that people with a secure attachment style have healthy
instincts and usually catch on very early that someone is not cut out to be