LAUSR

One hundred twenty-three married and 93 dating adults completed a survey describing the role of forgiveness in their relationship, detailing relational transgressions that prompted forgiveness, the perceived severity of the transgression, and strategies used to express forgiveness. An inductive analysis of participant responses forms the basis to develop a typology of strategies that romantic couples use to communicate forgiveness. Specifically, dating partners tend to favor a minimizing strategy to forgive one another, whereas married couples tend to use discussion and explicit strategies. The discussion strategy was most commonly used to communicate forgiveness, especially following a severe transgression. For milder transgressions, partners tend to favor minimizing and nonverbal forgiveness. A new potentially detrimental forgiveness strategy, pseudo-forgiveness, is also uncovered among married participants and its implications are discussed.