The (mental) ties that bind: Cognitive structures that predict relationship resilience

It is proposed that the cognitive structures that help sustain relationships depend on individuals embellishing the significance of virtues and minimizing the significance of faults within hierarchical, integrated representations of their partners. As a means of measuring representation structure, dating individuals were asked to write narratives describing their relationships and their partners' greatest faults and to complete card-sort descriptions of their partners. The results revealed that satisfied individuals find redeeming features in their partners' faults, construct "yes, but" refutations that minimize specific faults, and link virtues to faults within integrated, more general mental models. Moreover, these structural effects emerged in analyses that controlled for representation content. Impressively, the very stability of relationships depended on individuals forming such integrative mental ties in their representations of their partners.