The Prediction of Marital Satisfaction Through Attachment Styles and Love Story

Background: Generally, people tend to create stories relevant to their romantic beliefs based on their personalities and personal experiences. Objectives: The current study aimed at investigating and determining the role of attachment styles and the Sternberg love story to predict marital satisfaction. Methods: The current descriptive-correlational study was conducted on a population including all couples in Qeshm Island, Iran. The 400 participants (200 couples) were selected through stratified sampling method. To collect the needed data, three different instruments were employed namely couples satisfaction index (CSI), the Sternberg love story index, and experiences in close relationships questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed through correlation and multiple regression analyses. Results: The results of the study revealed that the male dominant love story, male and female social receptivity, and male entertainment significantly and positively predicted the marital satisfaction. On the other hand, female and male anxious and avoidance attachment, female dominant, female and male submission, and female self-pleasure negatively and significantly predicted marital satisfaction. It is noteworthy that the relationship between entertainment love story in females and pleasure love story in males was not significant. Totally, 49% of marital satisfaction variance in males and 77% of marital satisfaction variance in females were accounted by predictor variables. Conclusions: Variety of male and female love story and attachment styles can affect marital satisfaction.