What Even is Respect?

A Walk Through The Experience & Meaning of It

I was talking to my Mom the other day about what it takes to be with someone long term. She and my dad had been married for 20+ years and I can tell that they still care for each other and enjoy each other’s company. It is quite rare to see things like that in the modern day so I was curious.

Among other things, she said “Love, Respect, and Trust”. I had heard this trio before somewhere so it stood out to me. I asked my Mom if she had gotten the idea from somewhere but she had said no and that it was just “common sense” in her view. Well I guess as usual, common sense is not all that common because this did not feel obvious.

Now for me, I understood Love as a state, at least; the feeling of care, the desire for connection and intimacy. And to sustain those feelings, you needed to be able to Trust the person you are with. Connection while feeling constantly under threat that you might get hurt was a disaster waiting to happen, and I knew this from experience.

However, Trust is hard. Trust is hard because we are all very fragile people, and our souls are easily bruised. Sometimes, I have trusted the wrong people many times and have gotten myself hurt. But I have also distrusted the right people just as many times and ended up hurting them. So Trust ends up being quite a subtle thing that asks for a lot of forgiveness while also promising none. It is something that asks for a lot of faith and offers no guaranteed return, at least objectively.

In other words, Trust and Love alone is not stable enough to make a connection last for 20+ years.

Exploring Respect

And thus we come to Respect because it seems to be the most critical part of this intimacy machine. Yet, I have never really understood what it meant.

I think I usually saw Respect as an egoistic thing. Something acquired or lost in the sea of interactions with the world. I could tell when I had it and when I didn’t from other people, but it seemed as though it came and went all the time. And even for myself, if I respect myself, then I trusted myself, and also love myself. The flow was exactly that order as well in a feedback loop:

Respect => Trust => Love => Respect…

But the Respect for myself was unstable all the time, although it was self correcting in an emergency. I couldn’t really understand it within myself so I just focused on noticing when I felt respected in my interactions with others despite not knowing what it was.

It is strange where you find that you feel Respect. People who are afraid of you can respect you more than people who love you, and often times, this is so. You can feel more respected by someone who you just met over someone you’ve known all your life.

You can lose respect very quickly in a way that just doesn’t happen with Love. You can lose trust as fast but strangely people fight to keep their trust in others in a way they don’t with respect.

All of these things make Respect feel very untethered, very loose fitting, and very very ‘objective’. Where Love is a feeling and Trust is a choice, respect is a measurement. It seems not to linger long when circumstances change in certain ways. It is very conditional in a way that Love and Trust feel more removed from.

What Respect is Measuring?

Is respect always earned or something that is deserved? I think the answer to that question says a lot about how a person structures the world. It is the difference between seeing people as beings that start out with respect that they lose, or as beings who start out with no respect that they must gain. It is one of those binary aspects of reality that seem arbitrary in the minds of people but have cascading effects on the way they engage with the world.

Respect seems to have the effect of causing people to maintain their space. Respect is like Boundary-fuel. The times where people didn’t respect me were the times when they didn’t take my no, seriously. It’s not that I didn’t have boundaries, but rather that those boundaries did not mean anything to them.

This was not just for boundaries but for any request or display of needs. When people look down on your existence, they feel the right to decide where your wants and needs should be in their priority list.

Thus Respect seems to be a measurement of the weight of your being. The gravity of your words, desires, and needs. It directly correlates with your ability to influence the world.

What Does it Mean to Have Respect?

In regards to a relationship between two people, respect is the thing that makes their dynamic states of being matter at all. To have respect for someone is to subject yourself to their priorities.

Respecting an animal is being aware of its priorities. Factoring its priorities into your framework of how to engage with the world. However, it isn’t just this. There is this added sense of awareness that in spite of an accurate model, the animal can still surprise you. It is both.

My urge is to say, thus, that to have Respect is to have a model of the respectee that is accurate. However, it is a little more complicated than this. Strangely someone can completely understand you and all your behaviors in practice but still leave you feeling disregarded. Why if they are right about you would you feel that way? If you are a piece of shit, and you say to yourself ‘I am a piece of shit’ why does that not feel respectful of yourself?

The misunderstanding is in what it means to be “accurate” in one’s model. The most accurate model of anyone is one that sees them and simultaneously does not see them. An accurate model is one that expects its own inaccuracy. Why? Because everything real is in a process of change.

When you call yourself trash, and you genuinely believe you behaved as such, your model fails to capture that you can still change. It would be more accurate to call your behaviors trash than to call yourself that. Similarly, putting someone on a pedestal and saying they are perfect is not ever giving them respect even if they were perfect. This is because they are a process, not a state.

So respecting someone is really that: Bringing their priorities into an increasingly more accurate framework.

This implies that Respect itself is a Process. The process of processing one’s way of being. And hence Respect measures if one is being examined as Process or as State.

The Implications of This View

This explains why respect feels and behaves the way it does. As I change, the level of respect someone has for me changes because they increasingly become inaccurate in their model of me. Someone who has known me for a long time might have a model of me while someone who just met me will have a model that continues to be open and capturing my ever changing present moment. Someone afraid and forced to interact with the thing they fear will keep an open eye for any new information that could calm their fear. When you are in a battle, respecting your opponent is really to keep your model of them fluid and responsive to their changes. Even respecting the dead, is to ‘keep them alive’ as a process to be referred to, rather than simply the state: ‘dead’.

When my words, needs, or desires are ineffectual or unimportant and lack gravity in someone’s world, really, they do not have a model of me at all. They see no cause-effect relationship (Model) between my actions and their life.

When I “earn” someone’s respect, it really means that I have switched their model of me from being a State, to being a Process, through some action that made them want to ‘keep tabs on me’.

I guess some people walk around with Static models of people as place holders that crystalize and capture the complexity of people autonomously. However, the more a person diverts from those models, the more one feels inclined to open up a constant examination of their being. They transform their gaze into a Process rather than a Static state.

When I am made “undeserving” of respect to someone, it means that I have fallen into a predictable model or stereotype in the mind of the examiner. They have shut down effort to examine me as a process and leave me modeled as the stereotype placeholder.

In this essay I wrote awhile ago, I mentioned briefly that the consideration of me as a human being was dictated by what I interpreted as being ‘Interesting’. However, I am realizing in hindsight that part of being human was having this Respect because I am a changing and evolving person. What I was really assessing was my personal way of acquiring that respect and freeing myself from the model of Manhood given to me.

Respect is the vehicle by which we escape being a stereotype in someone’s eyes. To respect is to welcome the uncertainty of a person. The more you are able to fix your gaze on their potentiality and their reality at the same time, the more you are to be respecting them, accurately modeling their existence.

So last thing, what did this mean?

Respect => Trust => Love => Respect…

I guess in my world or in my life, when I was free from how people stereotyped me, they often learned to trust me (or rather, trust the Process hahaha… anyway). And with that trust, they wanted to connect or felt some sense of Love, which inspired a desire to see me as Process.

And the opposite was also true. When they didn’t see me as a dynamic process, they began to predict or expect things that would hurt them, and subsequently they would lose the desire to connect, which would stereotype me further.

Fear seems to be something that instantly stereotypes someone, crystalizing them into the bad experiences associated with them. The impulse to free someone that is feared from that stereotype when that person is unavoidable, is really the desire to adapt the crystalized model to protect themselves. It makes it look as though being feared is being respected.

However, in reality, being feared is the opposite, being put in a box. If the person was avoidable, it would be a box they would never leave.

So what is the true source of respect?

The desire to know. The desire to see something unfold.

I don’t know what causes that desire, but I know you can’t desire to know something you think you already know.

So the secret sauce of Respect and of a long lasting relationship is cultivating the desire to know your partner.

And to respect yourself is a desire to know yourself.

Respect = the desire to know. To under-stand (“stand in the midst of”) one’s complexity

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