The first word
Why respect.
For most of my life I tried to love before I respected, and I could not understand why it kept failing on me. Love that has not come up through respect collapses into something that looks like love from a distance and is not love up close. From the inside of it, it can feel like devotion, or care, or being protective. To the person actually on the receiving end of it, there is something missing that they often cannot put a name to, and they can feel it missing anyway.
Respect means seeing the other person as fully real, their own person with their own inner life, separate from whatever you want them to be. Not your partner as an extension of you, not your child as the particular version of a child you happen to need, not your friend as an audience for your own life, but their own person standing on their own. That is a great deal harder to actually do than it is to say.
The test of respect is what happens when respecting them costs you something.
It is when their needs and yours pull in different directions, when the inconvenient thing is exactly the thing they need you to honour, when you would have to actually be present and you would much rather check out, when they have asked you, more than once, for some small specific thing and you still have not done it. If respect only shows up on the days it costs you nothing, then it was never really respect, it was just convenience going by a nicer name.
I learned this from a marriage I lost, and from AA. I learned it the way most people learn the things that matter: too late to undo what I had done, in time only to do differently afterward. There are people I cannot make it right with anymore, and that is part of the lesson too.
You cannot skip past this step and come out the other side with love. You come out with something else that has borrowed love's name. The order of the three words is not a matter of style, it is the way the thing is actually built.