LIFE BITES! Love OR Respect In Relationships? Which Is Better?

Okay, in today’s three minute morning, I’m going to discuss love and respect in relationships, and why it’s so much more important to be respected than loved.

Of course, it’s great to have both, it’s preferable to have both, but it’s very possible to be loved without being respected.

When that happens, a lot of damage can be done, and we see it everywhere. Especially within families.

Very often family members love each other very much, very deeply, but they don’t treat each other with a lot of respect.

And that’s where the danger comes in. Getting close to someone, loving them, caring for them, caring about them, but not respecting them.

Now you’ve left yourself wide open to a lot of damage, and for doing damage in return.

If you’re loved but don’t have respect in relationships, then people aren’t necessarily going to treat you well.

If you love others but don’t respect them, then you can end up doing a lot of damage to them, too.

At the very least, you could inconvenience them on a regular basis.

For example, being late all the time, or just forgetting things that they’ve asked you to do, and you said yes, and you agreed to do it, and then just didn’t bother, because you don’t respect them, and don’t care if you let them down.

But you do love them. They may be a family member who’s dear to you, and that you genuinely love them.

Although the person down the block, who you don’t care that much about, but have respect for you’ll follow through.

If you say you’re going to do something for them, then you will, because you know that they’re going to be disappointed in you and you don’t want that.

In large part because they will call you out on it, press back,and hold you accountable for not meeting the standards that you had agreed to live up to.

So, this is why it’s so much more important…. to have respect in relationships than to be loved and I’ll give you a quick example in my own life…

I knew my mother loved me, and she’s a wonderful, kind woman who is now passed on.

In my 20s, for a short period of time, I lived in the same city that she and my brother were living in. My brother still lived at home with her. He was a number of years younger than me.

I’d be talking to her on the phone, and she would invite me over for dinner because they were making dinner and they were going to eat soon.

It was a ten minute drive away from me and when I got there, they were both already halfway through the meal. Which I never really understood. Why wouldn’t you wait ten minutes?

That way we could all eat together. It just seemed kind of rude not to.

It’s a very small example, but things like that happened all the time, and then of course larger things happened.

And that’s the point.