“The Way I Am Is the Way You Ought to Be”

People often become evangelists for their own lifestyles. When it comes to relational status, people are rarely content to simply say “being single works for me” or “being in a relationship suits my disposition.” Results from four studies suggested that this tendency to view one’s own relational status as the universal ideal emerges in part from a desire to rationalize one’s own relational status. Building on existing evidence that people are motivated to rationalize circumstances they perceive as likely to persist, we predicted that participants’ perceptions of the stability of their own relational status would lead them to rationalize that status. In Studies 1 and 2, we found evidence for an association between perceptions of stability and idealizations and ruled out an alternative explanation. In Studies 3 and 4, we found evidence of the effect of stability on people’s judgments of same- and different-status others in contexts in which relational status should carry little objective weight.