Tailoring dyadic coping strategies to attachment style: Emotion-focused and problem-focused dyadic coping differentially buffer anxiously and avoidantly attached partners

Abstract

Attachment insecurity is associated with lower satisfaction and lower felt security in romantic relationships, especially during times of stress such as coping with a global pandemic. Heightened external stressors for couples are associated with poorer relationship quality, but how couples cope with stress together, or their dyadic coping strategies, is associated with the maintenance of relationship satisfaction. In the current study, we followed 184 couples living together during the COVID-19 pandemic to test whether specific coping strategies buffered people higher in attachment anxiety and avoidance from lower satisfaction and felt security in the early weeks and ensuing months of the pandemic. Our findings demonstrate that perceiving more emotion-focused dyadic coping—being affectionate and using intimacy—buffered the negative association between attachment anxiety and relationship satisfaction and felt security, both concurrently and over several months of the pandemic. In addition, problem-focused perceived dyadic coping backfired for people higher in attachment anxiety; they felt less satisfied when they perceived more problem-focused coping—which involves being solution-focused and using instrumental support—in their relationship. In contrast, people higher in attachment avoidance were buffered against lower relationship satisfaction when they perceived more problem-focused dyadic coping and were not buffered by emotion-focused coping. The current findings suggest the importance of tailoring coping strategies to a partner’s attachment style for relationship quality and felt security during times of stress.