PH
Imagine your partner does something upsetting.
You might think, “They're stressed and made a mistake.”
Or you might think, “They're selfish and they'll always be like this.”
Researchers followed 130 couples for 12 months and examined these kinds of explanations, known as attributions.
People who made more negative or “nonbenign” attributions about their partner's negative behavior reported lower marital satisfaction one year later.
The association couldn't simply be explained by their initial relationship satisfaction, depression, or self-esteem.
This doesn't mean you should excuse genuinely harmful behavior.
But constantly interpreting every mistake as evidence of your partner's terrible character can be very different from seeing some mistakes as temporary or situational.
© Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1993)