It goes without saying that kindness is a requisite necessity in all healthy relationships. In dating, in particular, if you are not kind to your dates they will shrivel and die (the relationship, not your date) - unless you're really good in bed or have a lot of money.

Seriously, relationships without kindness are toxic and in time resentment, frustration and hostilities towards one another ride high.
To avoid this paucity of kindness you need to be vigilant. It's not like you go from kind to nasty overnight.

Nasty begins with frustrations. Your mate forgets something you asked him/her to do. They keep asking, "What?" because they are either not paying attention (really gets you mad), or they are actually experiencing age related hearing loss for which you should show compassion, but alias, it still makes you mad.

Regarding younger generations, they are losing their hearing from loud concerts and mega bass boosters on their car radios - totally controllable. They will see much frustration related to their loud music in years to come. But I digress. The list of annoyances that will frustrate you in a relationship are many, and they may be particular to each individual i.e. certain things that bother you are ignored by others. The actual annoyance matters not for now. You know your triggers, but in this conversation it's not about what gets you angered. What's important is how you handle these ubiquitous irritants.

When you first meet you tend to be kind... very kind because you'd like to go out again. At this stage of the relationship you know poor behavior will be met with silence - no more calls. The fact is, it's much hard to be nasty early-on unless your date is infatuated with you; they don't notice nasty; they let things run off their backs; or they have been in such abusive past relationships that "your" nasty is refreshing and seems kind.

If you want success in dating, mating, living together or in marriage you must be kind to one another. While this seems so very obvious, why do so many people treat each other poorly?

While waiting to meet a long married couple for lunch, I got to the restaurant early. I sat in my car listening to self-help tapes on how to be kind (okay, that's the fiction part of this story, but the rest is true). The couple pulled up and never noticed me. The lady got out of
the car while the fellow was still behind the wheel. She pointed at him repeatedly using her finger to fire off a 45 second salvo of words. Though I couldn't hear what was said, I pretty much know for sure the words, "I love you, honey-bun," we're not part of that conversation.
Why do people treat one another with such indignation, disrespect and outright hostility? The answer is that, early on, they get away with it in little ways. They then graduate to a professional form of disrespect called obnoxious-nastiness. There is no excuse for this
kind of behavior in dating or in dealing with people on any level.

Frustration and annoyance are human traits that probably cannot be avoided unless you might be a Zen master or Mother Teresa's twin sister. However, your response to the things that get you mad is under your control. And if your relationship is all that bad, it makes sense to move on.

Begin today. If you notice any form of kindness-lost, stop and say something nice. You can catch more flies with sugar. Of course that only makes sense if you are an entomologist performing studies on flies.

Kindness goes a long way in preserving your relationship. It keeps you from waking up one day asking, "What happened?"