Respect
This is the fourth entry in this series describing what having a great relationship means to me: Trust, Honesty, Loyalty, Respect, Transparency, Compassion, Understanding and Love. Please always keep in mind that this series is about your closest, most intimate relationships and the work it takes to build them and keep them.
R.E.S.P.E.C.T. this is what it means to me (thanks Aretha!). Respect is defined as a deep admiration for someone or due regard for someone’s feelings or wishes. Pretty obvious that you cannot have a great relationship with someone without respect.
When it comes to my adult relationships, having a deep admiration for someone is my first hurdle. I will admit that I have pretty high standards, so impressing me is not an easy task. But, I look for something impressive in those around me as I need something to respect about you before I want to invest in you. Intelligence, humor, trustworthiness, reliability, hard working, committed, perseverance, bravery, tenacity: these are some of my favorites, and when a person has several of these, those are my people. However, I was brought up that every human being is born deserving my due regard for their feelings and wishes. Every person is as valuable as every other person whether I admire them or not. My judgement of them is irrelevant to my regard.
Children deserve respect just like grown folks do. I am not going to say that I was taught this growing up. I am going to say that I was shown this growing up. I was not made to feel like a second class citizen simply because I was a child. My thoughts, feelings, wishes were important and valuable. My parents showing me respect enabled me to respect myself. I feel that this was perhaps the most important gift they gave me as everything else I am rests on the foundation of my own self respect. (As a side tangent that I just can’t omit - I believe that the lack of self respect is the core issue of our societal problems. If you cannot respect yourself, you cannot respect others. If you cannot see your own value, you cannot value others. If you don’t respect and value yourself and others, why be moral? why be kind? why work hard? why be considerate? why be helpful? why make any effort at all?)
In your partner relationship, I cannot say long enough or loud enough how important respect is. In one of my previous posts, I talked about how men have a core need for respect, and I 100% believe that to be true. If you are in a relationship and do not feel admiration for your man, get out. You are being cruel to someone you profess to love. Respect is, of course, also important to women. Women want their partner to admire them too. We just want that respect to be expressed through how we are cherished. Male, female, not really the issue here. The issue is that the respect between a couple must be implicit (always to be found, no qualification or question, absolute). Respect must be like gravity. You don’t even think about it, you just walk in it, you live in it, you breathe in it.
