Men hunger for respect like women hunger for love. But what exactly is respect? I’ve been married 40 years and I’m still trying to figure it out.

I asked my husband, Dan, and both of my sons to explain respect to me.  I kid you not, they all had the same instantaneous answer, “Just do what I tell you.”  They all chuckled a little as they said it.  I don’t know if that is because they were embarrassed by the candor of it or they were partly joking about it.  Either way, I wasn’t crazy about their response.

God gave us a great behavioral definition of love in 1 Corinthians 13.  It explains how love acts and does not act.  It’s fairly easy to check our behavior against that list to see how we are doing.

But nowhere in the Bible is there a great behavioral definition of respect. It simply states that wives are to respect their own husbands.  So what does respect look like? How does it behave?  What does it do?  What doesn’t it do?

One thing I am sure of is that men sometimes view respect differently than women.  More than once Dan has felt disrespected by something I said or did when I actually had no disrespect in my heart at all.  Talk about frustrating!

Learning how to respect our husband is definitely a life-time learning process. It involves taking the time to see life from our husband’s point of view.  What matters to our husband needs to matter to us.  When your husband feels disrespected and you have no idea why, grab the opportunity to learn more about your man.

After all, I’m pretty sure eye-rolling, sighs and stomping out of a room aren’t respectful!  LOL

If you’ve never read it, I recommend the book Love and Respect by Dr. Emerson Eggerichs.