Admiring: Love Appreciated. I celebrate you.
The hunger to be admired by someone you love. Admiring: Love Appreciated
At a retirement party in a rented banquet hall, a man named Dan stands near the dessert table holding a plate of cake he has no intention of eating. For thirty-one years he has repaired elevators. The speeches are kind. His boss calls him reliable. A coworker calls him the guy you want on a Friday at 4:55. Everyone claps.
Then his wife takes the microphone, which was not on the program. She doesn’t talk about elevators. She talks about the winter their son stopped speaking to them, and how Dan drove four hours every other Saturday just to sit in a diner across from a boy who wouldn’t look at him, until one day the boy did. “I have watched this man be patient in ways I didn’t know people could be patient,” she says. “I’ve been proud of him every day for thirty-four years. I just don’t think I ever said it into a microphone.”
Dan puts down the cake. He has to.
There is a difference between being loved, being needed, being desired, and being admired, and most of us can feel it even if we’ve never named it. Love says you belong to me. Need says I depend on you. Desire says I want you. Admiration says something rarer: I look at who you are, and I’m impressed. It is the one form of love that is also a verdict.
That verdict carries special weight from a partner, because a partner is the most qualified judge in the room. Strangers see the highlights. Your partner has seen the bad mornings, the petty moods, the unflattering angles, and the bathroom. When someone who has seen all of that still looks at you with admiration, it lands with an authority no applause can match. And it is so easy to lose. Admiration rarely ends in a fight. It simply goes quiet. The things that once impressed us become the things we expect. The steady paycheck, the clean kitchen, the calm voice in a crisis, all of it slides from remarkable to routine. Eventually a person can begin to feel like a well-maintained appliance: valued, relied upon, and never once marveled at.
The Five Steps of Worship in Your Relationship
Here are The Five Steps of Worship in Your Relationship™, each of which gives birth to the next:
- Seeing. Love Witnessed. I see you.
- Admiring. Love appreciated. I celebrate you.
- Cherishing. Love Treasured. I adore you.
- Revering. Love Sanctified. I hold you as sacred.
- Worshipping. Love Chosen Again and Again. I choose you every day.
Compliments, Flattery, and Genuine Admiration
A compliment is a postcard. Admiration is a letter.
Compliments are lovely and nobody should stop giving them. “Great haircut.” “Dinner was delicious.” They brighten a moment and then they’re gone, which is fine, because that’s their job.
Flattery is something else entirely. Flattery is praise with an agenda, aimed at what someone wants to hear rather than at what is true. People usually sense it, even when they enjoy it, the way you can enjoy a sales pitch while keeping one hand on your wallet. Flattery is about the speaker. Admiration is about the person being admired.
What separates genuine admiration from both is evidence. It has clearly been gathered by someone who was paying attention. Compare “You’re such a good dad” with “When Maya froze at the recital, you didn’t rush the stage. You just caught her eye and nodded, like you had all the time in the world. I watched her shoulders come down. That was masterful.” The first is pleasant. The second is unforgettable, because it proves someone was watching closely enough to see the exact moment he did something right.
Specificity is what makes admiration believable. General praise can be said about anyone. Specific admiration can only be said about you. That is why it gets past the defenses people build against empty kindness and settles in where it can actually do some good.
The Extraordinary Qualities Worth Celebrating
Achievements are easy to admire because they come with trophies, titles, and photographs. Character comes with none of that, which is exactly why it deserves the louder applause.
Consider the woman who told her boss the truth about a costly mistake when nobody would have traced it back to her. The man who still calls his late best friend’s mother every Sunday. The partner who can make a funeral reception laugh without one ounce of disrespect, which is a rarer talent than most people realize. Integrity, loyalty, humor, tenderness, perseverance: none of these will ever appear on a résumé, and all of them are what make a person worth building a life with.
The quietest goodness often deserves the most attention, because no one else is going to give it any. The stranger whose car he helped push out of a snowbank. The coworker she has been quietly mentoring for a year without credit. Admiration that notices these acts is admiration with good taste.
Growth deserves celebration too, perhaps most of all. A man who used to go silent for three days after an argument and now comes back in three hours has done something genuinely difficult. A woman who has finally learned to say no without apologizing four times has done something brave. Change is hard, slow, and almost invisible from the inside. A partner who says, “I see how much work you’ve done, and I’m in awe of it,” gives that effort a witness. And real admiration celebrates who someone actually is, not who we might prefer them to be. The introvert who will never love parties. The partner whose laugh is a little too loud. The person who reads the instruction manual cover to cover before assembling a bookshelf. Admiration is not a renovation plan. It is a delighted appreciation of the original.
Why Admiration Matters So Deeply to Men
Most men know precisely what they’re appreciated for. They are thanked for showing up, paying up, lifting the heavy thing, killing the spider, driving through the snow, and staying calm in the emergency room. All of it is real, and all of it matters. But notice what every item on that list has in common. It is something he does. Very few men can name the last time someone admired something he is. That gap has a cost, and it is a lonely one. A man can be surrounded by people who rely on him and still feel like a very dependable utility, essential and unremarkable at the same time. Ask a man what he is good at and he’ll tell you within seconds. Ask him what is good about him and watch him stall.
So picture what happens when someone crosses that line. A woman tells her husband, “The way you sat with your father in the hospital, holding his hand and saying almost nothing, is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen a man do.” She is not admiring his strength, though it took strength. She’s admiring his tenderness. She’s admiring the emotional courage it took to stay in that room. For many men, it’s the first time anyone has suggested that those qualities are not weaknesses to manage but treasures worth celebrating.
This kind of admiration doesn’t shrink masculinity into a role. It enlarges it. It tells a man he is magnificent not only when he is fixing, earning, or protecting, but also when he is gentle, when he is uncertain, when he cries at the end of the movie and pretends something is in his eye. He doesn’t have to choose between being strong and being tender. He gets to be admired for both.
Admiration, Respect, and Romantic Attraction
Ask long-married people when they last felt a rush of desire for their partner, and the answers are rarely about lingerie. “Watching him handle that contractor who tried to cheat us.” “Seeing her give the toast at her sister’s wedding, completely unrehearsed.” Competence and character, witnessed in action, are among the most reliable aphrodisiacs ever discovered, and they cost nothing.
There is a reason for this. Attraction that rests only on novelty fades as novelty fades. Attraction braided together with respect has a second engine. Every time you watch your partner be brave, wise, funny, or kind, the attraction gets fresh fuel. The relationship researcher John Gottman makes what he calls the fondness and admiration system one of the foundations of a lasting marriage, and describes it as the antidote to contempt, which his research identifies as the single strongest predictor of divorce. It is very hard to desire someone you have stopped respecting, and remarkably easy to desire someone you keep being impressed by.
Admiration is also what keeps familiarity from hardening into boredom. Familiarity says, “I know everything about you.” Admiration replies, “Then how do you keep surprising me?” Couples who stay attracted for decades are rarely the ones with the most excitement. They’re the ones who never stopped noticing what was remarkable about the person across the breakfast table.
How Admiration Can Help Someone Flourish
People tend to grow toward the light they’re given. In 1999, psychologists Stephen Drigotas, Caryl Rusbult, and their colleagues gave this a lovely name: the Michelangelo phenomenon. The sculptor described his work as releasing a figure already sleeping inside the stone. In their studies, people whose partners saw them, and treated them, as the person they themselves hoped to become reported moving closer to that ideal. Notice whose ideal it is: theirs, not their partner’s.
You can watch it happen in ordinary life. A woman who has been told, sincerely and more than once, that she has a gift for calming frightened people starts volunteering for the hard conversations at work. A man whose wife admires his patience with their teenager discovers he has more patience than he thought. Admiration doesn’t invent these qualities. It invites them to come out more often.
But there is an important line here. Admiration is not a training technique. Praise handed out only when someone behaves the way you want is conditional approval, and people can smell it. Real admiration is given because something is true, not because it might produce a result. The moment it becomes a lever, it stops being admiration.
That is also why it has to stay honest. Telling someone they’re brilliant at something they’re not doesn’t help them flourish. It teaches them not to trust your praise. Admiration only has power because it is true, and the person receiving it knows you’d never say it otherwise.
Making Admiration a Daily Practice
Admiration does no good locked inside your head. Plenty of people admire their partners enormously and say so roughly once per presidential administration.
Say it specifically. Not “You’re great,” but “The way you apologized to your brother tonight, without one excuse attached, was really something.”
Celebrate the private victories. Public wins come with their own applause. The victories that most need a witness are the ones nobody else will ever hear about: the hard phone call made, the craving resisted, the deadline met while quietly exhausted.
Speak well of your partner when they aren’t in the room. Admiration said behind someone’s back is the most credible kind, and it has a way of finding its way home. A man who hears secondhand that his wife bragged about him at book club will carry that around for a month.
Notice the slow growth. Some of the most admirable changes happen too gradually to see day to day. Every so often, step back and name the distance someone has traveled: “Do you remember how you handled things like this two years ago? Look at you now.” And let it run in both directions. A relationship where one person is always the admirer and the other is always admired becomes a stage with an audience of one. The healthiest couples are each other’s fans, taking turns in the front row.
From Admiration to Cherishing
Something shifts when you’ve admired someone long enough. At first you admire the qualities: the patience, the wit, the integrity. Then, almost without noticing, your affection slides from the qualities to the person who carries them. You stop thinking, “What a kind thing to do,” and start thinking, “What a kind person, and I get to keep them.”
That is the threshold of the third step on the staircase that rises from Seeing to Worshipping: Cherishing, love treasured. Its vow is three small words: I adore you. Admiration celebrates what is remarkable about someone. Cherishing treasures the whole person, including the parts that will never earn applause, like the grumpy mornings, the terrible puns, and the way they load the dishwasher like a raccoon in a hurry. Admiration says, “Look at what you can do.” Cherishing says, “Look at who you are, all of it, and how much I want to protect it.” One leads naturally to the other, because it is very hard to keep celebrating someone without eventually wanting to hold them close.
Which brings us back to the letter. Remember: a compliment is a postcard, and admiration is a letter. Most of us owe one to the person we share our life with. Not a greeting card on an anniversary, but a real accounting of the specific, unglamorous, magnificent things we have watched them do. The hard phone call. The apology with no excuse attached. The thousand ordinary Tuesdays handled with grace that nobody else will ever know about. Few of us will ever sit down and write it. But all of us can say it, one sentence at a time, across a kitchen table, for the rest of our lives.
Here is the privilege hidden inside all of this. Most people spend their lives hoping someone will notice what is good in them. To share a home with someone whose character still impresses you, after the honeymoon, after the mortgage, after the year everything went wrong, is to live beside a person who keeps showing you what goodness looks like up close. To love someone you are also deeply proud of is one of life’s extraordinary privileges. If you are one of them, don’t keep it a secret. Read them the letter out loud.
I celebrate you.
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
Companion Song:
— “Heaven” — Bryan Adams (1984)
Author Bio
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D. is a best-selling author and provocateur whose work explores love, relationships, sexuality, spirituality, and the magnificent complexity of being human. For more than three decades, she has explored what helps people connect more deeply, love more courageously, and create extraordinary relationships. Her writing blends psychology, spirituality, humor, and eroticism, with a particular passion for restoring the dignity and value of men and exploring the possibilities of Hot and Holy Love. At the heart of her work is a simple conviction: all human beings deserve and are capable of extraordinary love — and a beautiful life.
