The relationship with your own body, which I wrote about last time, profoundly affects the way we receive and offer intimacy. But there is another foundation of healthy intimate life that we always assume is present and rarely check: respect. Not abstract respect, declared in solemn moments, but the concrete, daily kind, visible in the way you treat the other person in small moments and large ones.

And desire, equally concrete and alive, does not survive in its absence.

There is a confusion I see frequently and that does a great deal of damage in silence: confusing love with respect. People assume that if they love, they automatically respect. That is not true. You can love someone deeply and treat them with indifference towards their needs, invalidate their emotions, ignore their limits, use the knowledge they offered you in moments of vulnerability as an argument in conflicts. All of these are forms of disrespect. And they coexist, more often than we would like to acknowledge, with sincere love.

Love is a feeling. Respect is a behaviour. And behaviours can be cultivated or neglected, regardless of the feelings in the background.

How does lack of respect manifest in the life of a couple, in its less visible forms? I am not referring to aggression or deliberate humiliation, which are obvious. I am referring to something more subtle and more frequent.

It is in the tone used when you are frustrated, one that would be unacceptable towards a work colleague but seems normal towards the partner you have been with for years. It is in repeated interruptions, in eyes rolled, in irony that cuts without appearing aggressive. It is in decisions made without consultation on matters that concern them too. It is in the neglect of small promises, the ones that do not seem important but that say something clearly: you are not a priority right now.

Each of these, taken in isolation, is minor. Accumulated, they form a climate in which the other person feels seen as less. And people who feel seen as less do not open up. They close. Gradually, systematically.

The connection between respect and desire is one we constantly underestimate. Erotic desire does not live in a vacuum. It grows or diminishes according to the emotional climate of the relationship. A partner towards whom you carry resentment, towards whom you feel you are not treated with genuine consideration, towards whom you have built a protective distance, is no longer a partner towards whom you can feel authentic desire. You can have sex out of inertia, out of obligation, or out of routine. But desire, in its alive and chosen sense, disappears.

Esther Perel says something I consider essential: you cannot truly desire someone towards whom you feel you are more tolerated than chosen. Respect, meaning treating the other person as someone who genuinely matters, is a condition for desire, not a consequence of it.

There is also the dimension of respect for the other person's limits in sexual life, which deserves to be addressed directly. Respect for a no, regardless of context and regardless of the relationship's history, is non-negotiable. Not because it is an external rule, but because a no that is ignored or treated as an obstacle to overcome destroys the safety that intimacy requires. And once safety is compromised, there is no longer genuine intimacy. There is physical contact, but without the most important ingredient.

Couples in which both partners feel their limits are consistently respected have a freer, more creative, and more satisfying sexual life. Not in spite of respect for limits, but precisely because it creates the safety from which erotic freedom can grow.

One aspect I consider profoundly important and rarely discussed: respect for yourself within the relationship. Not accepting being treated with less than you deserve, defending your limits without excessive apology, not minimising your own needs in order to make room exclusively for theirs. This is not selfishness. It is a condition for the relationship to be between two whole people, not between one who sacrifices and one who receives.

And paradoxically, a person who respects themselves is easier for the other to respect. People respond to the tone with which you treat yourself.

What is one concrete way in which you feel you are not receiving the respect you deserve in your relationship, and what has stopped you from addressing it directly?