The main point of the book is that in a marriage or any other close relationship, to the man, feeling respected is usually more important even than feeling loved. Not to downplay love; that’s essential, but the idea runs against the grain of a lot of attitudes we’re exposed to, the glorification of love above all else, love is the key ingredient to make any relationship work, and so on and so forth.<\/p>\n
The woman who wrote the book, a Ms. Feldhahn, based her conclusions on surveys of roughly a thousand representative men, and the book is replete with survey results to probing questions. Many of the responses are eye-opening, but the one that crystalized the situation for me read as follows:<\/p>\n
If you were forced to choose one, which of these negative experiences would you choose?<\/p>\n
a. To feel alone and unloved in the world
\nb. To feel inadequate and disrespected by everyone<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Of the men polled, 74% answered that they would rather feel alone and unloved. I’d have to say I’d answer the same. Adequecy, respect, appreciation–these things impact our lives as men on so many levels than even we don’t realize.<\/p>\n
Last night a lot of people tried to make the point that love and respect are synonymous in a close relationship. They can be, and oftentimes I think they are. We often communicate love when we express respect, and vice versa. But one attribute can, and sometimes does, exist without the other. Imagine a work environment. There are certainly employees in any line of work who are well-liked by everyone, fun to be around, appreciated for their thoughtfulness, appearance and personality. But suppose that person isn’t terribly competent in the duties they’re to perform, not entirely trustworthy. In that case we can certainly say that we like the person, but we may not respect their ability to do their job or their contributions to the company. Conversely, we’ve all probably run across coworkers we couldn’t stand for whatever reason on a personal level, but who excelled at what they did. Met deadlines, worked efficiently and so on. So in the second scenario we could say that we respect that person’s abilities, though we may not like them as an individual. It’s not a perfect example, since in a work environment the ability to perform one’s job is the raison d’\u00eatre<\/i>, weighted disproportionately in contrast to an interpersonal relationship where being liked and loved carries more emphasis, but I think the point is made. You can certainly love someone without respecting them, and vice versa.<\/p>\n
And men need a much greater amount of respect communicated to them in their close relationships in order to thrive and feel complete. More than is commonly thought, I believe. So even though feeling loved and feeling respected, while independent, are essentially equal<\/i> propositions, by and large men have more of an emotional stake in the respect side of the equation. And it’s hard because we as men often don’t know that we’re not feeling respected–we just feel like something is wrong with the relationship…we’re insecure, beaten down, frustrated, often angry, but we don’t know why we’re feeling the way we are. So in a lot of ways it’s useful for men to be self-aware of the subconscious importance we place on feeling respected, to put a name on what we’re feeling, in other words (yes, sometimes we can’t figure these things out on our own–shocking, no?). In the world around us there’s so much emotional capital invested in glorifying the love in relationships, and rightly so in most ways, but that emphasis can often unfairly usurp needed attention from its equally important sister concept. That’s a big issue, because while there are countless examples of love in our culture and relationships around us, there are few “blueprints,” as it were, for communicating respect. It’s a challenge, and the means of expressing it may very well be specific and unique to the situation in question. But it’s worth working for, I think.<\/p>\n
And granted, ladies, many (most?) men don’t present themselves as worthy of respect a lot of areas of our lives, but in those areas we do<\/i> get right (I trust there are some), if you really want to communicate appreciation, respect is a good place to start. And it may just encourage and motivate us to get our act together in those other areas.<\/p>\n
I’m eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes. I forgot how good these are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Just got back from my third run since the finger injury, and the third in the past week. My cardiovascular system is back up to speed, recovery times are down, but as for the weather… It’s like breathing clam chowder out there. The resident humidity in the air means I have to sweat buckets just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}