The rheology of complex fluids such as polymeric liquids is highly non-Newtonian in nature and manifests itself as an extra stress component in the Cauchy stress tensor. At the purely macroscopic level, the extra stress tensor is linked to the velocity field through, say, a partial differential equation. An alternative approach consists in finding an expression for the macroscopic extra stress tensor in terms of the microscopic dynamics of the polymer chains. We present a thermodynamically based approach to the design of a class of such micro-macro models for dilute polymeric liquids and show that the thermodynamic background of the model naturally yields stability of the steady state when the fluid occupies an isolated vessel.