Love or respect?

I have read books, a bunch of articles and observed currently circulating messages in social media platforms on the topic of love and respect between couples. What they are harping about is, a husband needs respect more than love and a wife needs love more than respect. So, the husband should give love to his wife so that she will in return give him respect. These concepts helped to clarify what the instinctual demands of wife and husband are in the first place so that once it is fulfilled, they forget about the other one. Hence, this concept still has a major risk factor which keeps women under control of husbands or pushes them more towards male dominant society. Because, usually, the person who gets more respect will have control over who gets more love as receiving love sometimes leads to a certain kind of comfortable weakness.

Love: Love is a personal requirement. How much love is needed depends on person to person and the intensity of its demand changes with the situation. It is not true that women need love more than respect or men need respect more than love. Both need love and respect equally. If a man says, I need respect more than love, just don’t show it when in need, he cries like a baby for love. Love is universal as well as subjective and situational. You can't separate it between men and women.

Respect on the other hand is actually not needed between wife and husband. In fact, it may be needed to show in front of society, their other family members including their children. When wife and husband are alone, being respectful to each other only maintains a layer of distance between them and takes away from enjoying their intimacy. I can't enjoy my day-to-day life if my wife is respectful to me every day. After more than a decade of togetherness, I don’t actually enjoy respect from her and hence I don’t need it from her. Whenever the respect needed to apply in front of society or others, it should be applied equally. Respect is not situational. Respect should not be changed from person to person. It is not a personal thing. It is a social thing. By saying women need less respect than love, they are again being pushed to the dark ages. If women say they need more love, it's fine. If they agree that they need love more than respect, it's not correct. If my wife yells at me, I may think she is not respecting me. But when I yell at my wife, she may think I am not loving her. It's only the instinctive perception of the brain. We are actually disrespecting each other.

What husband and wife need is to “stop being disrespectful to each other.” There is a huge difference between being respectful to each other and being disrespectful to each other. I never asked my wife to respect me. In fact, I do not know what it is and even my wife does not know how to show that. But we told each other many times to stop being disrespectful in different ways. It is difficult to see what respect is, but it is quite easy to feel what disrespectfulness is. I can give a list of disrespectful things but all of them are escalated in three different stages. Those are 1. Promising that you do something (or you stop doing something) and not keeping that promise even after repeated demands. 2. Yelling at each other. 3. In fact, when you promise that you will stop being disrespectful but still maintain it will be the greatest of all disrespectfulness. If you still argue that women need less respect than their want of love, it is the peak of showing disrespectfulness towards them. The conclusions are 1. Behave respectful to each other when you are in front of others 2. Stop being disrespectful when you are together. 3. Show love to each other when needed.