Hrm. Both accepting who the other person is (beliefs, interests, attitudes, personality, individuality generally - that sort of thing). Not *agreeing* necessarily, but *accepting*. I don't think a relationship where one party is continually repressing their own self and identity can really qualify as "successful".
The old favourite communication, I guess. For, as someone said above, values both of talking about "deep" stuff (for want of a better identifying word) & just chatting generally. Although levels of that differ from person to person (some people being less chatty than others), I'd say not being able to communicate at all would indicate lack of success.
My personal opinion is that a relationship that consists of, oh, lets say around 50% or more of fighting is not doing well. To me, that would indicate a pretty fundamental mismatch somewhere along the line. Fighting from time to time, fair enough, but if it's becoming *all* or most of what you do together, then that's bad.
Being happy. I firmly believe that being happy is really damn important in life, because I don't believe that there *is* any kind of "point" to life. So enjoy yourself while you're here (yes, I do surround this with other stuff about being nice to other people & etc etc, but let's not go into my personal morality & what grounds I may or may not have for it here :-) ). So a relationship which is making the people involved unhappy isn't successful. The correct solution to this may be to work through the problems, or it may be to give up, but the situation itself is not a successful one.
Both parties getting what they need, and a reasonable proportion of what they want, out of the relationship. Fulfilment, for some value of the word.
I've been thinking about this quite a bit recently, what with Stuff and stuff. I haven't really written it down before. [prods brain]
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Date: 2004-02-16 08:21 am (UTC)The old favourite communication, I guess. For, as someone said above, values both of talking about "deep" stuff (for want of a better identifying word) & just chatting generally. Although levels of that differ from person to person (some people being less chatty than others), I'd say not being able to communicate at all would indicate lack of success.
My personal opinion is that a relationship that consists of, oh, lets say around 50% or more of fighting is not doing well. To me, that would indicate a pretty fundamental mismatch somewhere along the line. Fighting from time to time, fair enough, but if it's becoming *all* or most of what you do together, then that's bad.
Being happy. I firmly believe that being happy is really damn important in life, because I don't believe that there *is* any kind of "point" to life. So enjoy yourself while you're here (yes, I do surround this with other stuff about being nice to other people & etc etc, but let's not go into my personal morality & what grounds I may or may not have for it here :-) ). So a relationship which is making the people involved unhappy isn't successful. The correct solution to this may be to work through the problems, or it may be to give up, but the situation itself is not a successful one.
Both parties getting what they need, and a reasonable proportion of what they want, out of the relationship. Fulfilment, for some value of the word.
I've been thinking about this quite a bit recently, what with Stuff and stuff. I haven't really written it down before. [prods brain]