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CAN YOU LOVE SOMEONE YOU DON'T RESPECT?


Bishop Noel Jones, brother of famous actress and model, Grace Jones, stunned a London crowd when during his sermon he suddenly asked, “Can you love someone you don’t respect? Can you respect someone you don’t love? Same question in reverse order. Well, before you answer, it may interest you to know he's been divorced for 20 years and heads a 17,000 member church, The City of Refuge, California – USA. He's also a grand-father and his children are happily married. 

At first, my reaction was, why try to teach on love when you've clearly failed at it? But it occurred to me, that by virtue of hindsight he may actually have good lessons on how to have a successful marriage. Perhaps people who say they are lucky with their marriage are just being sincere. 

Back to the question – if your answer to both is, no, then you’ll agree love and respect do correlate. And if respect must be earned and reciprocated, so must love. Thus, a healthy loving relationship is one where there's mutual respect and care. 

You may say you have a lot of people with whom you share mutual relationships, does this mean you’re in love with all of them? Certainly not “in love”, but definitely you do love them. The opposite of love is hate, it won't be possible to have any relationship without love; be it family, friends or work colleagues. Being “in love”, is when we single out someone from the lot and through a process of care and addiction we selfishly desire them for ourself only. Again, this level of desire must be mutual between the pair of you, if not you're only obsessed. 

Now to the major question – after the feeling of goose bumps and heart-pounding, why do we fall out of love? Well, from the above we can deduce that respecting someone we don’t love is another definition of fear, and loving someone we don’t respect is pity. Therefore, we fall out of love when we break the rule of mutual respect and care, which includes failing to meet each other's physical, emotional and social needs.

Love isn't difficult, we just have to continue doing that which is naturally deserving to someone we claim to care for and respect.




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