Love and respect

This is a message that came to me in worship yesterday. It didn't quite meet the must-speak-or-will-get-a-migraine test, so I didn't stand, but it has still stayed with me...

Last fall, Lois McMaster Bujold came to Seattle, promoting her new book. I went to see her at the University Bookstore with my F/friend Marni, and we had a lovely evening.

After reading the new book, I of course had to go back and re-read the other three in the series. Among many other things, it's a series about this opposite-gender couple who meets and falls in love, both far from home.

In the first book, Dag, who has plenty of respect but not much love in his family, does not understand why Fawn, this woman he wants to marry and whose family clearly loves her very much, does not find all the love her family gives her to be sufficient. Until he visits them with her. And then he sees how they love her but do not respect her, and so try to make her smaller -- in a way, similarly to how his own mother and siblings try to make him smaller for respecting his work, but not loving the person he is.

And so Dag comes to understand that just as respect without love is not enough, so love without respect is not enough.