In this work, entanglements in a polymer melt are modeled as a system of parallel springs which form and decay spontaneously. The springs are assumed to be nonlinear, and a certain fraction of them is torn apart by a certain strain. Based on these assumptions, a model of behavior in simple shear is developed. This model is shown to predict a behavior comprising that of a Wagner fluid, and is generalized to a tensorial model of single integral type. The integrand depends on a product of a material function, modeling reversible behavior, and a material functional which takes irreversible processes into account. Irreversibility of network disentanglement, which may occur when deformation changes or reverses direction, can be modeled in this way. It is shown that the two well-known Wagner constitutive equations with and without irreversibility assumptions are special cases of the model developed. In case of a deformation which does not change directions, the new material function and the material functional are multiplied to yield Wagner's damping function. When the rate of spring formation is a function of temperature, the developed model is shown to predict thermorheologically simple behavior. A constitutive equation for non-isothermal flow of polymers is developed with this assumption.