:
✓ Friendship
✓ Freedom
✓ Honesty
✓ Trust
✓ Understanding
✓ Communication

Thanks. But you do know that you can apply all those & all the positives but that still does not guarantee a successful relationship

door key,car key,garage key,shed key,safe key and finally chastity belt key(if you wear one )

and compromise

good luck

this is a good start

" honey where are my ----- keys"
" keys to what dear?"
key to my heart
keys to my luggage
key to this old hope chest
key to my truck ( this one he might know where to find)
key to my golf cart
key to the gun safe

I prefer a card swipe... it's a lot easier then carrying all those keys around

Yes indeed...honesty...is using your own picture on your profile

correction, pharmaceuticals...

if that fails one can always hope for stockholm syndrome.

date drugs or kidnapping


my you are quite the charmer I see

Once I thought I had the key to a woman's heart,
but it turned out that it was protected by a combination lock.

once I thought I had the keys to a man's heart
but it turned out to be his pick up truck

he still mad back on that dirt road where I left him

And ya better know how to delete ALL those files. Gotta clean that hard drive.

"And ya better know how to delete ALL those files. Gotta clean that hard drive."
love me ..love my chat hist--o--r--y....hmmmmm might need to think that over a minute or two..

amen!

My buddy was busted by his (now) ex-wife when she found his history of being on this site that was made for hooking up. He didn't do a full clean of his history and she....an IT person (0h the irony) discovered it. Course she had a hunch about it which is what led her to investigate. And, I would like to add that Facebook and cell phones are leading to a lot of breakups.

Friendship is a relationship in itself.
So a relationship is a key to a relationship?
Unless your thread title was meant to be something more like "6 keys to a successful romantic relationship."

Then I would disagree with friendship.
As the relationship of "friend" has a lot of boundaries that shouldn't be in a "romantic" relationship.

If you start off romantically dating by trying to enforce friendship boundaries, or expect the other person to magically know what your friendship boundaries are, then it's not going to go far.

Unless you are trying to say something like "In a romantic relationship you will come to realize in hindsight that dating and interacting up until this point held the warmth, camaraderie, gregariousness, common interests, desire to be together, and other things that I usually associate with a good friend."

Then I'd somewhat agree with that.


Freedom is the lack of responsibility towards others.
Personally, I would say a "key" to a successful romantic relationship is you are capable and happily willing to accept responsibility towards another person even though it may diminish your feelings of freedom.


Honesty as an absolute is too vague and subjective a term.
Not to mention, most people are honest.
But everyone is dishonest to some degree. Sometimes they aren't even aware of being dishonest. e.g. some people have built up natural emotional defenses where they don't realize when they are being emotionally dishonest.
But this relates to communication.
Instead of "honesty" I would say a key to a successful romantic relationship is willing and able to learn how to communicate effectively enough to learn how someone is being dishonest, why, and how to properly respond to it.


IMO you don't build a relationship from trust, trust is built from a relationship.
You build trust from knowledge and experience, you only get that as the relationship grows.


Personally, I think this is part of communication.
You not only have to realize how they are understanding your communication, you have to learn how they are expressing themselves to you and what that means.

I would replace "understanding" with "acceptance."
You may learn they aren't physically expressive, or don't "really" like it so over time as the relationship leaves the honeymoon phase they hold your hand less. But maybe they write you more love notes, or bake you cookies, or try to get off early from work more often in order to spend time with you, you have to accept how they know how to love you, express themselves, communicate.

what about compatibility and forgiveness

How about....loyalty