Dating Tips and Advice 24: No Love without Respect?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ No Love without Respect? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Have you have tried basing your relationships on 'love' and found that something is not quite working? Maybe you end up as friends, but not lovers? Maybe you feel a fondness for each other, but not too much else?
Perhaps love in itself is not enough. Perhaps it takes more for someone to be attracted to us as a potential partner. Behaving in 'lovable' ways may help some people be attracted to us a friend, but it is not necessarily enough to create that special spark.
It all depends on what we mean by 'love'. For many people, love shows itself as behavior that is kind, caring, and supportive. But, what about Tough Love? Maybe that too has a place even in romance.
Appreciation is obviously not the same thing as excitement. We appreciate kindness, but it is not exciting. If a potential partner is looking for some excitement in a romantic relationship, they are more likely to be attracted to someone who challenges them than someone who is only kind to them. The best thing is to offer both.
Being able to give people a positive challenge can be very good for a relationship, or potential relationship. A positive challenge means not letting people away with behavior that is not respectful of you or others.
How to offer a positive challenge? One tip is to avoid blaming them, or attacking them. That will just put them on the defensive. The idea is to help them, not to hurt them.
For example, a date keeps being late on you. Some people would eventually get angry and say 'You _______ (insult) you are always late!', others would say nothing (and fume silently), or respond in a 'huffy' way.
It is much better to just be honest without attacking them, but to do so in a light playful way. Something like, "Hey, is arriving late all the time your way of playing hard to get or something?".
Sometimes saying a small thing like that will be enough to shift things dramatically. If you can be half-funny, while keeping them wondering how serious you really are, all the better.
When we can call people on their games (or what we suspect might be a game), without harming them, it puts them and us on the same side and builds trust and intimacy. Showing that we require respect, and doing this in a playful way, can add a lot of spice to relationships.
When we put up with things, we erode our self-respect and the respect that the other person has for us. Perhaps respect is part of the 'soil' that love needs to grow and to allow it to flower, for relationships seem to fall apart when respect has gone.
How many people have heard themselves say, 'How can he/she leave me after all did for them'. What often hides behind the 'what I did for them' is really 'what I put up with'. If we hadn't put up with it, and challenged the other person instead, things would probably have turned out very differently.
Why do we put up with stuff? Don't we deserve better?
When we hold an attitude of 'expecting respect', we often don't even have to say anything. People start to sense that we are not the type to put up with being messed around and they tend to behave themselves better anyway.
A further benefit of all this is that it helps us be more respectful of our own feelings. It gets us into the habit of behaving in ways that show that our feelings matter. This is a powerful message to our unconscious mind and tends to make us feel less 'needy'.
When we are take care of our own feelings and acting on them in constructive ways this takes care of one of our fundamental needs - to have our feelings taken seriously. People get 'needy' when their feelings are not being respected and acted upon - by themselves!
Ensuring that people around us treat us with due respect takes practice. It also takes courage, so there is no harm in starting out doing it in small ways. Of course, creating respect is particularly attractive when done on behalf of love - it is also a lot of fun.
