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The Role of Attachment Styles in the Dissolution of Relationships  

Attachment style an individual has plays a role in determining the way in which a person reacts to and copes with the dissolution of a relationship.  Cognitive appraisals of one's own emotion at the time of a romantic break up determines how they perceive the break up and determines coping strategies . Coping resources are the mental resources one has are to be used when one is experience a great amount of stress. Finally, people hold love schemas or models of what to expect from a love relationship depending on their personality and timing of coping, which changes the reaction of the individual to the break up. Different attachment styles (secure, anxious, and avoidant) each have their own common strategy for coping with the break up of a relationship that involve both cognitive appraisals and love schemas at the advent of a break up. 

People with a secure attachment style, typically characterized as being independent and comfortable with closeness and intimacy, use a strategy of open and empathic communication.  Securely attached partners will be likely to use preventive coping meaning they will use the coping resources that they have at the initial dissolution of the relationship to better manage emotions as the adjust to the end of the relationship Preventive resources of coping with the emotions associated with the stress of a break-up are confidence in ability, self-direction, financial and physical resources prior to the break-up, which secure people tend to posses. The love schema of secure attachment is having independence but also being close with their partner. Secure men and women tend to engage in less physiological dampening or the use of drugs and alcohol. 

People with an avoidant attachment style suppress their attachment and emphasize their self-reliance.  They are less likely to engage with their former partner, stay clear of reminders of them, and more often engage in non-social coping methods such as drinking or drugs.  People with this type of attachment style have love schemas that are the most uncomfortable with closeness to and independence from their partner.  Avoidant people best make use of combative strategies are best used when adjusting to the end of a relationship because they often do not have the preventative measures of coping.  Combative coping resources are best at reducing tension and problem solving, after the initial emotions of a break up have passed. 

People with an anxious attachment style will be the most distressed about the loss of a partner, especially if they were the more emotionally involved person in the relationship.  Anxiously attached people often use a coercive strategy where they make both demands and rebuke their former partner as well as using flirtation to restore the relationship or gain attention from their former partner. This ambivalence can be exemplified when they both yearn for their former partner and are angry about being abandoned by their former partner.