Skip to main content

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.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

RELIGION AND NIGERIA.

Tourists to Nigeria’s popular cities -- Lagos, Abuja, and Port-Harcourt -- may query statistics that suggests Islam to be the peoples’ major faith. Arguably, there are twelve churches to every mosque in each local government area, in, say, Lagos. Majority of these churches are privately owned organisations, e.g. Winners Chapel: formerly world’s largest church capacity, with fifty thousand seats, until recently upstaged by the Apostolic Church of Nigeria’s one hundred thousand seats church auditorium, also in Lagos. Approximately 160 million people, individually affected by two or more of the following: Tribal racism; Post-trauma of a civil-war (Biafra); Societal under-development stemming from thirty-two-years of oppressive military rule; Poverty; and now Terrorism. Taking a social science approach, expected loss of human dignity and social cohesion in such society, especially having evolved through slavery and colonialism, prior, it’s understandable why the world’s larges...
2 comments
Read more

Buhari's needless fights.

Buhari’s needless fights.   President Buhari’s peace-meeting with leaders from the Niger-Delta last week isn’t first of his reversals. A worrying trend.  It’s known Nigeria’s chaos is by design, predictable, and reform will be a fight. Some of us had thought a war-tested, retired-army officer, Muhammadu Buhari, before embarking on needed reforms would hunch over specifics laid on his magnolia Aso-Villa desk, with lawyer vice-president opposite him, and key advisers, identify quick wins, preempt reaction of vested-interests, and weigh-up possible unintended consequences against objective, as an army-general would before ordering a military offensive. Instead, it's been gaffes and climb downs, and the president diminished with each episode. PMS price modulation Take for instance pegging premium motor spirit at N86.50 at start of this year. A time Buhari had claimed to stop oil subsidies, was unconvinced about Naira devaluation, and US dollar restricti...
1 comment
Read more

It's our collective image as Lagosians at stake

On an October evening in 2011, what many Lagosians had long suspected was confirmed. That besides their acting and musical careers, Yoruba entertainers smuggle narcotics out of Nigeria. It’s said that's majorly how they financed their lifestyles; singing or acting was a cover up. The artiste in the spotlight was multi-award winning Tunde Omidina, who plays vituperative character: Baba Suwe. He was detained at Murtitala Muhammad Airport (MMA) in Lagos enroute Paris. The news broke on Nigeria's Twittersphere to unsurprised comments — “we knew”. The Nigerian Drug Law and Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) paraded the actor in his white-brocade kaftan, looking disorientated. The agency claimed their scanner detected wrapped morsels in his bloated stomach. Mr. Omidina was led like a felon to a holding cell to do under observation the bowel movement we all do in private. Alas, narcotics he was supposed to have swallowed wasn’t there. Backtracking false claims is embarrassing and...
1 comment
Read more