Respect and Knowledge: How Can You Respect Someone You Don’t Really Know?

It isn’t love alone.

Or compatibility.

Or even good intentions.

There are two factors I see again and again in almost every healthy relationship: respect and knowledge.

Respect is a word we repeat a lot.

But let’s pause on it for a moment: How can I respect someone I don’t really know?

And knowledge here doesn’t mean surface information, like their age and their job.

Knowledge means understanding their story, their values, their fears, and their red lines.

Why does this matter?

Because disrespect sometimes doesn’t come from bad intentions, but from not knowing.

You joke about a painful subject, press on something sensitive for the person in front of you, and then wonder why they got hurt.

When you truly know someone, respecting them becomes easier.

Not because you’ve become perfect, but because you see the person as a whole story, not a passing snapshot.

What Do We Mean by Knowledge?

Psychologist John Gottman, who spent decades studying couples, calls this knowledge Love Maps: the space in your mind where you keep everything that matters in the other person’s life. Their goals, their fears, their dreams, the biggest events in their history, and what’s weighing on them right now.

According to the Gottman Institute, couples who have detailed maps of each other are better prepared to face stress and conflict. This is a conclusion the institute draws from its research and clinical experience, not the result of one specific study.

And the idea isn’t limited to couples.

A father who knows his son is embarrassed to be corrected in front of his siblings will point things out to him in private.

A manager who knows her employee is going through a health issue will choose her words carefully when she asks about the lateness.

We can picture knowledge as layers:

• The surface: Age, job, city.
• The story: What they went through to become who they are.
• The values: What they consider important and non-negotiable.
• The fears: What worries them, even if they don’t say it.
• The red lines: The topics and behaviors that truly hurt them.

Most of our relationships stop at the first layer. And the wounds usually happen in the deeper ones.

What Does Research Say About Respect?

Even though everyone talks about respect, researchers Frei and Shaver (2002) noticed that it had rarely been defined or measured in studies of close relationships.

So they ran three studies with university students and asked people: what does respect mean to you? The answers that came up most were honesty, consideration for the other person, accepting them, and listening to them. And when people were asked to rate the most important qualities, at the top came honesty, not causing harm, and loyalty.

Then the researchers compared respect with love and liking as predictors of relationship satisfaction. The result was striking: respect was the strongest predictor of satisfaction, and it kept predicting it even after accounting for love.

The participants were students, each answered only for themselves and not their partner, and the data were collected at a single point in time, so we can’t conclude that respect “causes” satisfaction. But it fits what we see in our own lives: love alone isn’t enough.

When the Hurt Comes from Not Knowing

Picture these situations:

• At the office, Saif jokes about “people who had to repeat their last year of high school,” not knowing that the colleague sitting across from him repeated that year after his father died.
• At a family gathering, Sara’s aunt asks for the tenth time: “So when are we going to dance at your wedding?” not knowing that Sara’s engagement ended a few weeks ago.
• And under a photo on Instagram, someone comments jokingly: “Why have you gotten so thin?” not knowing the woman in the photo has just come through a long illness.

None of them meant to offend.

But it landed as an offense.

And that’s what makes knowledge part of respect, not a luxury on top of it.

The Dangerous Illusion: “I Know Them Well”

You might say: I know the people close to me well. And that’s exactly where the trap is.

In an experiment published in 2011, 24 married couples sat back to back, and each tried to understand ambiguous everyday phrases spoken by the other; their accuracy was then compared with how well they understood strangers. The result: spouses were no more accurate than strangers, but they were more confident that they had understood.

The researchers (Savitsky, Keysar, Epley and colleagues) called this the closeness-communication bias. As one of them, Nicholas Epley, put it, being close to someone creates the illusion of understanding more than it creates actual understanding.

The lesson here isn’t to doubt all our relationships, but to remember that knowledge is not a fixed balance. People change, and what you knew about your friend five years ago may not be true today. That’s why asking is still more honest than assuming.

When Knowledge Turns Into Leverage

Let’s be clear: respect without knowledge can sometimes stay a formality, like a guest you honor with food but never once ask how they’re doing.

And knowledge without respect can turn into leverage.

Someone who knows you well also knows where it hurts. And in a moment of anger, they may use what you told them in a moment of trust: a family secret, an old fear, or a failure you admitted.

Gottman describes something close to this as contempt: biting sarcasm, belittling the other person, acting superior to them, even rolling your eyes. According to his research, contempt is the number one predictor of divorce among couples. And the remedy he suggests isn’t complicated: a daily culture of appreciation, gratitude and small kindnesses.

The relationships that last are the ones where both come together:

I understand you so I don’t hurt you by accident, and I respect you so I don’t use that understanding against you.

How Do You Build Both Together?

1. Ask about the story, not the facts. Example: Instead of “What do you do?” ask: “How did you end up in this work?”
2. Keep updating your map. Example: “What’s on your mind these days?” is a simple question that can reveal more than years of assumptions.
3. Respect the red line even before you understand it. Example: If a friend asks you not to joke about a certain topic, stop first, and ask later whether they’d like to explain.
4. If you hurt someone without meaning to, ask instead of defending yourself. Example: “It seems what I said hurt you. What did you hear in it?” instead of “I was only joking.”
5. Make an agreement with yourself. Example: What I learn about you in a moment of trust doesn’t get brought up in a moment of conflict.

A Simpler Mental Model

• Knowledge keeps you from hurting people by accident.
• Respect keeps you from hurting them on purpose.
• Knowledge without respect is a weapon.
• Respect without knowledge is mere courtesy.
• Both together make a relationship that lasts.

No one wants to be merely accepted.

We want to be understood, and respected at the same time.

And the way there starts from the other side: with you trying to understand.

Think today of someone close to you, and ask them one question you’ve never asked before.

Then ask yourself: In my relationships… do I want to be understood, or just accepted at any cost?

Further Reading

• The Sound Relationship House: Build Love Maps — The Gottman Institute, 2012: An explanation of the “love map” idea, with practical questions to help you get to know your partner’s inner world.
• Respect in Close Relationships: Prototype Definition, Self-Report Assessment, and Initial Correlates — Frei & Shaver, Personal Relationships, 2002: The three studies that defined respect in close relationships and found it predicts satisfaction better than love does.
• Couples Sometimes Communicate No Better Than Strangers, Study Finds — University of Chicago News, 2011: A summary of the “closeness-communication bias” experiment, and why we think we understand the people close to us better than we actually do.
• The Four Horsemen: Contempt — The Gottman Institute, 2025: What contempt looks like in relationships, how it shows up, and what Gottman suggests to counter it.