The third word
Why love.
If respect is the foundation and listening is the practice, love is what becomes possible when those two are real. Not before. The mistake I made for most of my life — and the mistake I see most often in others — was to start with love and skip the rest. You cannot do that. Love built on nothing is sentiment. A feeling about someone rather than a relationship with them.
A feeling will not survive contact with reality. Love that is only a feeling vanishes the moment loving costs you something. It is a private state inside you, available when convenient, gone when inconvenient. That is not what the wisdom traditions are pointing at when they speak of love as the highest practice. They are pointing at something the other person can rely on. Something they can feel without your having to declare it. Something that holds when the feeling is absent.
Real love is what you do.
The small signs the other person asked for and you would not give. The phone call you keep meaning to make. The time you set aside that you would rather have spent on yourself. The being-present when you would rather have checked out. None of these are romantic. All of them are love.
The wisdom traditions agree about this in a way that should give us pause. Christian, Buddhist, Sufi, Hindu, Indigenous, secular humanism at its best — they disagree about a great deal. They agree that love is the orientation we are meant to find our way to, and that finding it is most of the work of a life. If the source from which everything comes is itself loving, then to love in this sense is to participate 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.