Divorce & Attachment Theory
Divorce & Attachment Theory
The effects of divorce are wide-reaching–including mental health impacts such as anger, decreased feelings of happiness, and emotional problems–but is there a link between divorce and attachment theory?
One of the strongest attachment bonds we form is with a marriage partner. And as with any attachment bond we form, we try to keep this relationship strong and stable at all costs.
Yet, recent statistics show that 34% of women and 33% of men aged 20 and over who have been married have also been divorced. And between ages 55 and 64, this statistic increases to 43%.
But why are these numbers so high? Although many factors can influence the high divorce statistics, research indicates that our early attachment bonds affect our mental well-being, relationships, and self-esteem in adulthood–and possibly even increase the risk of our marriages ending in divorce.
To answer all of your questions about divorce and attachment theory, this article will cover:
- The two fundamental elements of marriage
- How our early attachment experiences influence marriage
- The impact of our mental biases on marital success
- Ways insecure attachers can reduce the risk of divorce
Do you know your attachment style?
Take our attachment quiz and find out now – fast, easy, free.
The Two Fundamental Elements of Marriage
Divorce is a significant life transition, not only in the logistical sense but also because it involves dissolving an important attachment bond. To understand why divorce rates are so high and how attachment theory may factor into this, we first have to fully understand the construct of marriage.
According to research, there are two fundamental elements of a marriage. These are…
- That each person needs a partner who is present, available, and trustworthy, and who is willing to offer a safe haven—a safe base that their partner can retreat to for support and comfort. This safe haven also needs to offer a base to explore the world from.
- That each partner deems their spouse a trustworthy attachment figure and is able to work with them to create a mutually collaborative and rewarding attachment bond.
If one or both of these fundamental elements are missing within a marriage, this can ultimately lead to dysfunction within the relationship, separation, or divorce.
Therefore, when we consider the role attachment theory plays in divorce, it comes down to these two elements. What happens when a spouse fails to function as a trustworthy attachment figure? And what causes a person to be unable to recognize a trustworthy attachment figure and build a mutually rewarding attachment bond? Let’s explore these questions in turn.
How Our Attachment Style Influences Being a Trustworthy Partner
According to attachment theory, a trustworthy figure is someone who improves a person’s security by offering a safe haven that they can turn to in times of need and a secure base in which to learn, explore, play, and try new things. When both partners offer this sense of security, they welcome and accept their spouse’s attempts at closeness (such as cuddling and seeking emotional support), as well as their need for independence.
Yet, our ability to be a trustworthy partner in this way is often affected by our past attachment experiences. Research indicates that those with a secure attachment are likely to offer love and support to their partner in a way that makes them appear trusting, secure, healthily self-reliant, and helpful during challenges. On the other hand, someone with an insecure attachment style may struggle with offering this support to their partner.
When we’re in a marriage and coming from a place of insecure attachment, we may be triggered by our partner’s needs for:
a) independence and exploration in the case of anxious attachment
OR
b) intimacy in the case of avoidant attachment.
Let’s explore this in more detail, starting with anxious attachment.
Anxious Attachment & Allowing Independenc
People with an anxious attachment style often feel emotionally or physically abandoned by their attachment figure in childhood. As a result, they may struggle to encourage their marriage partner’s independence, as a partner’s autonomy could trigger a deep-seated fear of abandonment and worries that their partner prefers to be alone because they’ve done something wrong.
When someone with an anxious attachment experiences fears such as this, they may try to seek reassurance and demonstrate clingy behaviors, which can feel suffocating for their partner, who likely wishes for more of a sense of freedom.
Avoidant Attachment & Accepting Intimacy
Someone with an avoidant attachment style might find their partner’s proximity-seeking behaviors—such as emotional conversations or physical affection—difficult due to a deep-seated fear of intimacy after experiencing unreliable caregiving as a child.
When an avoidant attacher partner experiences proximity-seeking behaviors, they may shut down emotionally or become ultra-independent, effectively pushing their partner away.
Unfortunately, anxious and avoidant patterns of behavior such as the ones discussed above can affect how stable a secure partner feels in a relationship. When an insecure attacher clings or shuts down, their partner may experience feelings of hurt, anger, anxiety, mistrust, frustration, and a resistance to work together to solve the dilemma. Over time, if this dynamic continues, neither partner’s attachment needs are met, which can lead to the development of attachment wounds. As a result, resentment can form from both sides, which can lead to a dysfunctional foundation for the relationship.
If you want to learn more about attachment wounds and how to heal from them, check out our article “How to Heal From Attachment Wounds.”
How Our Attachment Style Impacts Our Ability to Form Collaborative and Rewarding Relationships
For a relationship to function effectively, we need to be able to both be a reliable person and be able to ask for support and rely on our partner in times of need, switching between the roles as and when necessary.
If someone experiences a secure and healthy relationship with their caregivers, they develop positive beliefs about themself and others—they view themself as worthy of love and affection and others as trustworthy and reliable. Due to this foundation of positive beliefs, secure attachers readily ask for support from their spouse when they need it, and offer a reliable safe haven when their partner needs someone to lean on.
Insecure Attachment and Divorce
In contrast to secure attachment, if someone’s early attachment bonds were insecure, they might develop a negative view of themselves and others, seeing themselves as not worthy of love and others as unreliable and untrustworthy. If someone doesn’t trust their partner in a marriage, this can cause serious difficulties. For example, if an avoidant attacher is distrustful of their partner, they’re less likely to ask for support when they need it and may appear emotionally unavailable. This creates an emotional wall within the relationship which can turn to resentment in the long run, as the avoidant partner isn’t having their needs met, and their spouse feels emotionally distant because they’re never relied upon.
In contrast, anxious attachers often believe they’re not worthy of love and that if they reveal their true self, their partner will leave. Because of this, they may suppress their emotions or cling to their partner to keep them close. Unfortunately, this can feel suffocating long-term, which often results in a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby the anxious attacher’s actions drive their partner to do the very thing they’re frightened of.
So, these two elements play a fundamental role in a healthy marriage. And both can be influenced by our early attachment experiences. However, they’re by no means the only factors affecting the risk of divorce. We’ve already briefly talked about the impact of our beliefs about ourselves and others on marriage, but we haven’t fully acknowledged the significant influence mental biases like this can have on marital success. Let’s take a look at this next.
Attachment Mental Biases and Divorce
The mental and behavioral patterns we learned in our early attachment experiences create mental biases in our minds that result in misconceptions of others’ intentions and behaviors. These can create big ripples in our marriages. But how?
Bowlby, the founder of attachment theory, shared an experience of one of his clients—a man who felt abandoned by his caregiver as a child. From his early attachment experiences, this man developed the mental bias that the people he loves always leave. When he entered into a marriage, he misconstrued many of his wife’s actions and intentions as attempts or wants to leave him. This led to suspicion that his partner would leave, which caused him to react in unhealthy ways. And just like we spoke about earlier, this bias became a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the man slowly pushed his partner away, making them more likely to leave.
But it’s not as simple as this. Bowlby described how, often when we’re in romantic relationships, we move between two mindsets—one of suspicion, like we have just described, and the other a more realistic one—that our partners are loyal and will never abandon us. Yet, intense feelings often activate our attachment systems, regardless of whether the emotion we feel is love or hatred. So, when we feel strongly about our partner in the relationship, our old mental biases and behavior patterns are often activated. It’s for this reason that we may find ourselves sabotaging our relationships when they become more intense–and potentially increase the risk of divorce in marriage.
Luckily, we don’t have to continue down this path for our whole lives—we can alter our mental biases and challenge our attachment-related patterns of behavior.
3 Ways Insecure Attachers Can Increase Marital Success
Our early attachment experiences can significantly influence our later relationships and, thus, the risk of divorce. But this doesn’t have to be the case—we can change. To do this, we have to take 3 key steps toward understanding ourselves and adapting our behaviors.
#1 Explore Your Attachment Style
Our past experiences never truly leave us; they sit in the background of our minds, affecting the way we think, feel, and behave in our adult lives. The only way to change this is to become aware of our early experiences and challenge our mental biases.
So, in order to successfully provide the two fundamental elements of marriage, we need to explore our previous attachment experiences and learn about our attachment style. Think about the needs you had as a child that may have gone unmet, the worries you had, and the relationship between you and your primary caregiver. Did you have any expectations that they didn’t meet?
By understanding your early attachment relationships, you can begin to understand why you feel, think, and behave the way you do in your current marital relationship.
Do you know your attachment style? Take our attachment quiz and find out now.
#2 Uncover Your Mental Biases
You may notice that, as you explore your early attachment experiences and attachment style, you begin to uncover the mental biases you hold about yourself, others, and the world. This is the first step of uncovering your cognitive biases.
Once you’re aware of these, you can start to challenge them in your daily life. When you notice yourself using cognitive biases, ask yourself, “Where is this coming from?” “Is this belief a reflection of my partner or a past relationship?” And, “Do I need to calm myself before responding to this situation?”
It’s okay if you find this process hard; it can be challenging to do on your own. Sometimes, it’s easier when you have a mental health professional to support you: A therapist or counselor may help you delve deeper into your early attachment experiences, helping you to understand the belief system you developed as a result of these and how this belief system impacts your current relationships.
#3 Change the Way You Treat Your Spouse
We often treat our spouse in the way that we witnessed our caregivers treating each other or even how our caregivers treated us. So, if our caregiver’s displays of love were unhealthy, we may mimic these in our marital relationships.
For example, if you had a punitive, critical caregiver, you may have felt like you were getting things wrong a lot. As a result, you may have become critical of yourself, berating yourself for making mistakes or not being “perfect.” This can reflect in your relationship—perhaps you have high expectations of your spouse and become angry or irritated when they don’t meet these expectations. Maybe you find yourself picking faults in them or being critical of their behaviors.
Whatever the case, you can change the way you treat your spouse. This process starts with building trust so that you both feel safe and secure in the relationship, creating open communication, and seeking couples therapy if necessary.
But it’s important that you know that whatever changes you choose to make will take time. You’re trying to change the script that you have lived your whole life by so far, which won’t happen overnight. These changes can feel slow and patchy—working sometimes but not others. What’s more, they require a lot of effort and motivation, which can be difficult, but change is still entirely possible.
Final Word on Divorce & Attachment Theory
Marriage is one of the most vital attachment bonds but also one of the most frequently broken. Such breakdowns may be due to how our early attachment experiences can influence our capacity to offer our partner a safe base to explore and a safe haven to emotionally rely on, and our ability to see partners as trustworthy people that we can count on.
Furthermore, our early attachment experiences can create biases in our minds that influence the way we feel, think, and behave toward our spouses. Unfortunately, this too can increase the risk of divorce in insecure attachers.
But divorce is not always the only option–there’s always the option to change. Through learning about your attachment style, challenging your mental biases, and adapting your behaviors towards your spouse, you can begin to change the narrative.
During this process, it’s important to be kind to yourself and remember that your attachment style isn’t a weakness or flaw. Instead, it’s simply a reflection of the relationships you experienced up until now. By recognizing the impact your early relationships are having on your current ones, you can begin to change the patterns and develop healthier, more secure relationships.
Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. Attachment and Loss. Basic Books.
Bowlby, J. (1979). The Bowlby-Ainsworth attachment theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2(4), 637-638.
Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development. Basic Books.
Gurrentz, B., & Mayol-Garcia, Y. (2021, April 22). Marriage, Divorce, Widowhood Remain Prevalent Among Older Populations. United States Census Bureau.
Mikulincer, M., Shaver, P. R. (2016). Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change. Guilford Publications.
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