Evans Akpo

Respect is vital to any cohesive relationship, and most importantly – romantic love relationships.  “Respecting love” as the title projects becomes the key to a happy relationship that creates peace.  When respect is maximized in a relationship, it has a perfect impact on ourself and the people around us. The successful display of respect in relationships helps build success in all areas of our lives.

As I progress in my  next writing, I will help refine, clarify and articulate a definition of respect as it relates to a relationship. Men need respect as much as women need love in any relationship. We all have emotional, physical, volitional, spiritual and relational side to our being. Beyond that, we have responsibilities in various realm to project respect. In addition to love, only a life rooted in respect for our mate in a relationship produces a lasting value.

Interestingly, scientific findings traceable to the work of Dr. John Gottman, professor of psychology, University of Washington, suggest that women absolutely need love and men absolutely need respect.  Dr. Gottman research team spent twenty years studying two thousand couples who has been married twenty to forty years to the same partner. These people came from diversed background and had widely differing occupation and lifestyle. One thing was similar with all of them as they  talked to each other, Gottman calls it “a strong undercurrent of two basic ingredients: Love and Respect.”

Men need respect more than anything else, in similar vein, a woman knows what real love looks like when viewed from the lenses of  God’s word. Women love being loved, in same way, a man adores being respected.

Love and respect is the key to a happy relationship. It is not enough to know love languages and promises of eternal bliss.  One must show respect.

Reading Love and Respect helped me understand those differences. The Crazy Cycle is an insightful description of the breakdown in communication about what happens in all too many marriages. And, the author does an absolutely outstanding job of explaining how a wife can do her part to end the Crazy Cycle. By this I mean the author’s discussion of what respect and submission look like in the contemporary cultural context, as well as the author’s explanations of the importance of a wife’s respect to her husband. I encourage every wife to read and apply the rules of what is written in the book “love and respect”.