The third word
Why love.
If respect is the foundation and listening is the practice, then love is what becomes possible once those two are real, and not one moment before. The mistake I made for most of my life, and the mistake I see most often in other people, was to start at love and skip everything underneath it. You cannot do that. Love with nothing built under it is only sentiment, a nice feeling you have about a person rather than an actual relationship with them.
A feeling on its own will not survive contact with reality. Love that is only a feeling disappears the moment loving someone actually costs you something, because it was only ever a private state inside you, there when it was convenient and gone when it was not. That is not what the wisdom traditions mean when they call love the highest practice. They mean something the other person can actually count on, something they can feel without you having to announce it, something that stays put even on the days the feeling itself has gone quiet.
Real love is what you do.
It is the small specific things the other person asked you for and you would not give them, the phone call you keep meaning to make and keep not making, the time you set aside when you would honestly rather have spent it on yourself, being present on the days when checking out would have been so much easier. None of that is romantic, and all of it is love.
The wisdom traditions agree about this in a way that ought to give us pause. The Christian, the Buddhist, the Sufi, the Hindu, the Indigenous, secular humanism at its best, they disagree about an enormous amount, and they agree that love is the thing we are meant to find our way toward, and that finding it is most of the work of a life. If the source everything comes out of is itself loving, then to love in this sense is to take part in what is most real.
I have sometimes called this mantra a way of life that is just about impossible to live. I still feel that. I am not someone who has mastered respect, listening, or love. I am someone who has needed all three, badly, and who keeps trying again.