Is interpersonal wisdom individual or collective? Distinguishing the effects of ideal-partner consistency and normative desirability on relationship outcomes.

Social-cognitive and evolutionary perspectives suggest people should experience better relationship outcomes when their romantic partners better match their stated partner preferences or ideals. Nevertheless, recent work has questioned the strength of these effects by suggesting they are primarily driven by metrics of ideal-partner consistency that confound the partner qualities people uniquely value with those that are normatively more desirable (i.e., normative desirability) or common (i.e., normative commonality). The present research used six different metrics of ideal-partner consistency-some of which controlled for normativity and some of which modeled it directly-to precisely estimate the effects of ideal-partner consistency and normativity on relationship satisfaction and behavior across five different studies, some of which included longitudinal data and observations of behavior. Consistent with theoretical perspectives, higher ideal-partner consistency was associated with elevated relationship satisfaction and more constructive relationship behavior, both concurrently and over time. Nevertheless, these associations were significantly weaker when normative desirability was controlled. Perhaps most novel, the extent to which people's partners matched the normative ideals (i.e., ideals preferred by the sample) was a stronger predictor of relationship outcomes in most cases than the extent to which people's partners matched their own idiosyncratic ideals. Taken together, these studies (a) offer novel evidence that even the most conservative measures of ideal-partner consistency predict both observed relationship behavior and changes in relationship satisfaction and (b) further suggest that "collective wisdom" in what qualities comprise a good romantic partner may predict relationship outcomes better than the qualities that people uniquely value in a partner. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).