Hey all,

I am in the middle of reading "Love and Respect" by Emerson Eggeriches (yes, Mimi, finally got around to it...).

Anyway, just curious to the guys on here answers......

Would you rather have your wife's love or her respect????


Answer away......

not2fun

I've always heard "women want love and men want respect" - but, personally, I greatly value my wife's love. I work hard to earn her respect, but for me it is a means to an end - the end being her love.

I think it's compelling evidence that men find respect comes naturally and it is natural for a woman to love which is why Men are not commanded to respect and women are not commanded to love.

That is a great book.

I read a book describing an American football team that described itself. They said that they were hated by nearly everybody but at least they had their respect.

This is the standard that men want. Respect first, love later.

Whose job is it to speak to the neighbors when something important is happening. It is the husband, he should not have to be protected by the wife skirts.

Many times on this forum, respect is minimized. It is easier to change love from one man to another if there is no regard for the first man.

I back respect.

There are people out there whom I respect...however, I hate their freak'in guts!

I'd much rather have my wife's love than respect.

Frankly, I think I'd have the respect first. I believe that my FWW would not have invited OM into our bedroom if she respected me. She would have taken her sleazy A elsewhere.

I've seen many posts where the women claim they could not love a man they don't respect.

If that is true, it would be be impossible to have a wife's love without her respect. So I would choose love, which means I also have her respect.

That said, I'm not really sure I buy that. I think women fall in love with people they don't respect.

Hey Not,

Call me selfish, but both are equally important to me. LaLa's respect is what made me feel 10 feet tall and bullet proof and her love is what provided a safe place for me to land when I screwed up. I find it hard to believe you could have one without the other.

Want2Stay

I agree with you. You can respect someone you hate and love someone you don't respect. It happens all the time, both in romantic and nonromantic love. I'm sure if you took a poll, you'd find a large number of people who don't respect one or both of their parents. I also believe most troubled marriages are due to lack of respect by one spouse for another. This covers adultery, abuse, or just run-of-the-mill discord. Every single WS that comes here, man or woman, claims they love their BS, but they clearly didn't respect them. Abusers have no respect for their victims. And couples that are just unhappy, arguing or whatever can generally root the problem to lack of respect on one or both parties.

And MIM, it doesn't matter where your WW chose to have her affair, the fact that she did showed she had no respect.

I'll have to put my vote in for respect. Of course, respect is earned. I believe that if a woman respects her husband, she probably feels a great comfort and responds with love.

I also want to extol the virtue of Honor. It is greatly lacking in today's world.

Ahhhh, Grasshopper. Not have learned much you about the backward ways of the WS.

-- Yoda. (If Yoda were here)

I could never love a man I didn't respect. That is what caused me to fall out of love with my last husband. No respect=no love.

I think I heard Dr Harley make this point on his radio show once, but am not sure. I am searching for the clip.

Thats completely different from romantic love, though. He is speaking of romantic love. Of course we still love family members we don't respect. Its a completely different kind of love.

I, too, must feel respect in order to feel love. I cannot be romantically in love with someone I do not respect.

Respect FACILITATES love for me.

OK, let's take this a litte bit further. I think we see proof that respect is neccessary to feel love here all the time. How many times have we seen where the WS "affairs down" and then creates a fantasy that the AP is something that there obviously are not to anyone but the WS? I think it's neccessary for them to build up the AP in order to get the mushy love feelings. It's a means to an end because if they didn't find some reason to respect the AP, it would diminish the high of the A. That's not to say there can't be lust without respect though. It is a matter of recognizing the difference between the two.

Want2Stay

I disagree and I'll tell you why. There is no respect for the AP, and the WS has no self-respect during the affair either...In fact, this lack of self-respect is one of the reasons that a WS "affairs down" - or heck has an affair at all...They need someone that appears to "worship" them due to this lack of self-respect...

I do, however, agree that respect isn't necessary for lust...and guess what? Adultery IS nothing more than lust, 'cuz it sho nuff ain't love...

Mrs. W

I want them both. But if you make me choose, I will take respect every time.

My wife loving me but not respecting me as a man is a sickening thought. Pathetic.

I totally agree with both of these points, in fact I could have written this myself:


This is especially true when the WS is foggy and spouting off nonsense. When the fog wears off and they look back in horror at the AP it becomes VERY obvious. You just cannot respect someone who you know that you "affaired down" with.

It's all about the WS, NOT the AP. That is why it's possible to have an A with someone you do not respect...as Mrs. W says, it's all about the "worhip", which the WS needs since they are trampling over their own boundaries and losing self-respect by the minute.

I understand. I believe you.

But I'm not so sure this is true for the general population. Now, I think every woman in the general population will claim that they could not love a man they don't respect. But I'm not so sure that is truthful. I'm not saying anyone of the fine people who post here are untruthful about this, but I think others who are not members of this community may be being untruthful about it. Frankly, who's ever going to say they can love a person they don't respect.

I really don't know where this "untruthfulness" resides. I've seen woman who claim to be in love with someone that clearly they do not respect, or it is obvious the person is not respectable. So, it could just be women who claim to only be able to love a man they respect are just BS'ing people. It could also be that the woman really believes this, and the reason she "loves" an unrespectable man is that she has deluded herself into thinking he is respectable. Or maybe it's not delusional, maybe it just "is". Meaning when one "loves" a person, they respect them.

For example, I know very few men who say they could fall in love with a woman they do not think is physically attractive. Yet regardless of how attractive the woman actually is, without fail, if the man is "in love" with her, he will think she is attractive.

I often wonder with women, which of those 2 would they choose. Would they rather their husbands loved them or thought they were physically attractive.

Yes, that's the thing I roll over and over in my head... how my FWW could have ever had any kind of respect, love or affection for the POSOM. I just can't see what she saw in him. I sure as heck don't even want to be closely compared to him. We're not even in the same universe.