Respect before love: Why a loving marriage must begin with a woman’s respect

When Christian speaker and writer Audrey Broggi first met her husband, her gut instinct was not that he was the one but that she had a deep respect and admiration for his walk with the Lord.

“I respected him before I loved him. And so then, when you see in Ephesians, when Paul gives that whole list about what husbands are supposed to do for their wives, and then very succinctly right at the end he says, ‘And you wives see to it that you respect your husbands,’” Broggi tells Allie Beth Stuckey of “Relatable.”

“How do you foster the respect that we’re commanded to have when it doesn’t come naturally like a feeling for some women?” Stuckey asks.

“I’ll speak to you when you’re single, because that’s an area that you really do need to commit to the Lord. You need to know God not only calls me to submit to this man, but he calls me to respect him,” Broggi explains. “If it’s a struggle for a young woman, when she’s single and she’s dating someone to have respect for him, it’s not going to go away when she gets married.”

“Sanctification is a process, so we all grow in those areas. But at the same time, if you really don’t respect them right now, you need to find out why, and then take that to the Lord,” she continues, adding, “You either cry now, or you cry later.”

However, when you are married, Broggi’s advice is different.

“Now, for a married woman, it’s a command of the Lord to respect your husband,” Broggi says. “Sometimes, if women are struggling with that, I always encourage women to list out some things that you do respect about him.”

“It’s not like you don’t respect anything about him, something drew you to him, something you admired about him. Make a list of those things and then camp on those,” she continues. “Then, you tell him the things you respect about him. You actually talk to him, say, ‘I really love it when you do this.’”

“There’s so many things that we crave and we want from our husbands. They want respect from us,” she adds.

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