The second word
Why listen.
Most of what passes for listening is really just waiting to talk. You can do it for years, with the people closest to you, and never once notice you are doing it. The other person speaks, the words land somewhere, you answer, the conversation moves along, and nothing in you has actually changed. That nothing changed is the proof that you did not listen, you only looked like you were listening.
Real listening is being willing to be changed by what the other person tells you, to let their account of it all the way in before you have settled on a position, and to seriously entertain that what they are saying might be true even in the places where it contradicts what you would much prefer to be true.
They told you. You heard. You did not listen.
There is a particular kind of listening failure that ends relationships quietly. The other person tells you what they need. You hear it in the narrow technical sense, the sound reaches you and the words register, but you never actually let it in, you file it away under their thing rather than under our situation. Months later they tell you again, and some years after that they are gone, and the whole time they had been telling you, and you had been hearing them, and never once listening.
Respect is what makes listening possible in the first place. Without it you are already sure, before they have even finished, that the other person has nothing important to tell you, so you do not really listen at all, you just wait to have your existing view confirmed. And without listening, respect never gets past being an idea you hold about someone, a posture rather than anything you actually do. The two of them lean on each other.
Listening is slower than we want it to be. It is the patience to let someone finish a thought when you already have your reply loaded and waiting, and the willingness to sit with a hard thing for a moment instead of immediately producing a clever response to it. None of that is glamorous, and it is very nearly the whole of the work.