Article

Even people who have fallen in love and formed stable relationships differ from each other in countless ways. Conflicts that arise from these differences are inevitable. In the wake of such conflicts, relationship partners often realize the need to change how they perceive and relate to each other for the greater health of the relationship. Therefore, in romantic rela-tionships, people frequently invest time and energy in improv-ing their interpersonal abilities—their patience while listening to their partner’s problems, their willingness to accommodate their partner’s needs, and their proficiency in delivering timely and helpful support. Whether or not these efforts at self-improvement are ulti-mately successful, they have the potential to strengthen roman-tic relationships. Merely observing that a partner cares enough about the relationship to engage in such efforts could create more positive feelings between partners, increase felt secu-rity in the relationship, and improve perceived relationship quality. However, for these positive outcomes to occur, people must not only perceive that their partner is trying to improve but also believe that their partner is truly capable of achieving such improvement. That is, to the extent that people feel that interpersonal abilities are relatively stable and cannot be changed, they may be unmoved by their partner’s efforts at improvement and may not experience the same positive relationship outcomes. Therefore, in the present studies we investigate how people’s fundamental beliefs, that is, their implicit theories, about the stability or malleability of inter-personal abilities affect the connection between perceptions of their partners ’ efforts at self-improvement and their evalu-ations of their relationship