The first word
Why respect.
For most of my life I tried to love before I respected, and I did not understand why it kept failing. Love that has not passed through respect collapses into something that looks like love and is not. From the inside it can feel like devotion, or care, or protectiveness. From the outside, to the person on the receiving end of it, there is a missing thing they may not be able to name. They can feel it anyway.
Respect means seeing the other person as fully real. Their own person, with their own interior, their own life, separate from what you want them to be. Not your partner-as-an-extension-of-yourself. Not your child-as-the-version-you-need. Not your friend-as-an-audience-for-your-life. Their own person. That is harder than it sounds.
The test of respect is what happens when respecting them costs you something.
When their needs and yours diverge. When the inconvenient thing to honour is the thing they need honoured. When you would have to be present and you would rather check out. When you would have to do the small specific thing they have asked you for, more than once, and you have not done. If respect only shows up when it costs nothing, it is not respect. It is convenience wearing a kinder 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 this step and arrive at love. You arrive at something else that wears love's name. The order is not stylistic. It is structural.