The News
By Ralia Maijama’a Abdullahi
Here’s the thing. While love is important in getting marriage started, it certainly is not what keeps marriage intact. Love is fickle, needy and selfish. Love is unrealistic and often self-deceiving. Love has impossible aspirations and love is always hungry. Yes, love feels wonderful and fantastic, especially when it is reciprocated; love makes you feel happy and alive in ways only people who are truly in love will understand; but love is not enough. It may surprise you to know that it is often the culprit in domestic abuse.
Why? Because love is jealous. Love has led many people to kill their spouses out of jealousy, it has led many to become bitter enemies. One day you’re pointing at a couple as a shining example of love and the next day you’re astonished to find them tearing at each other’s throat. Again, why? They love each other but they do not respect each other.
Mutual respect is what keeps violence and abuse at bay. You will never insult a person you respect, and you most definitely will not be violent towards a person you respect. But what does respect mean? Let us get one thing straight – respect and obedience are not the same thing. You can force obedience, but you can’t force respect. In fact, if your spouse is too obedient or gives in too easily to your demands, you should question whether he or she truly respects you. It may well be one of two things – either your spouse is afraid of you or your spouse has so little respect for you that they feel you are not even worth arguing with. Neither case means respect.
Keep in mind that the person who argues a point with you respects you enough to want you to see things from their perspective; if they didn’t respect you they would simply dismiss you as stupid or incompetent and not worth the effort it would take to convince you.
To respect a person is to acknowledge their humanness and their right to be different from you; it is to concede their right to an opinion and to still be willing to live with, and accommodate their difference from you. To respect someone is to desire to understand them as a human being, to want to know what makes them tick, what moves them, what drives or motivates them, what environment makes them flourish, what brings out the worst and the best in them, what their fears, hopes and aspirations are, how they think and how they see the world.
To respect your spouse is to turn your spouse into a priceless book, the pages of which you turn with delicate care and reverence; or a vintage car which you drive with care and pride and which you wipe clean with tenderness always ensuring all its parts are well oiled and in top form. We value books in this way and we value cars in this way; do we value our spouse in this way?
