Seeing virtues in faults: Negativity and the transformation of interpersonal narratives in close relationships.

It is proposed that individuals develop story-like representations of their romantic partners that quell feelings of doubt engendered by their partners' faults. In Study 1, dating individuals were induced to depict their partners as rarely initiating disagreements over joint interests. Such conflict avoidance was then turned into a fault. In scaled questionnaires and open-ended narratives, low-conflict individuals then constructed images of conflict-engaging partners. These results suggest that storytelling depends on considerable flexibility in construal as low-conflict Ss possessed little evidence of conflict in their relationships