Revering: Love Sanctified. I hold you as sacred.
What Does It Mean to Hold Another Human Being as Sacred?
Rachel is standing at the kitchen island, holding a letter from the bank, and she is angrier than she has been in years. For the third time, Sam forgot to call the contractor, and now the deposit is gone. Sam stands across from her, red-faced and defensive, saying all the wrong things.
And Rachel knows the sentence. She has known it for twelve years. When Sam was a boy, his father used to call him useless, and it is the one word on earth that can still flatten him. It is sitting right there on her tongue, loaded and accurate: you’re just as useless as he always said.
She doesn’t say it. She says, “I’m furious about this, and we need to fix it tonight.” Then she puts the letter down.
Nobody will ever know what Rachel didn’t say. That is exactly what makes it reverence.
To hold someone as sacred does not mean believing they are perfect, or divine, or above criticism. Sam was wrong, and Rachel told him so. Reverence is not idolatry, which needs its object to be flawless. It is not submission, which surrenders your own voice. It is not idealization or infatuation, which love a fantasy rather than a person. Reverence sees the real, flawed, sometimes infuriating human being in front of you and still refuses to treat them as anything less than a full person of immeasurable worth.
Cherishing, the step before this one, is personal: I treasure you. Reverence reaches past the personal to something deeper: I honor the humanity in you, and I will not violate it, even when I’m hurt.
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.
The Sacredness of Human Dignity
Whether you find the sacred in a cathedral, a forest, or nowhere in particular, most of us share one intuition: a human being is not a tool. The philosopher Immanuel Kant put it plainly more than two centuries ago. People must be treated as ends in themselves, never merely as means. The theologian would say every person bears the image of God. The secular humanist would say every person has inherent dignity. In a marriage, it comes to the same thing: your partner’s worth is not up for evaluation.
We live in a culture that measures people constantly, by salary, attractiveness, productivity, and follower count. Reverence quietly refuses to play. It honors the person beneath the roles: not the provider, not the manager, not the mother of three, but the human being who exists before and after all of those jobs.
This matters enormously to men who have come to feel valued mainly for what they produce. A man who has been laid off, or injured, or simply aged out of being the strongest person in the room often wonders, privately, whether he still counts. Reverence answers without hesitation: you counted before you earned a dime, and you will count when you can no longer lift a thing.
Failure does not make anyone less human. Neither does weakness, illness, or a bad decade. Dignity is not something a person earns by performing well. It is something they bring with them simply by being a person, and reverence is the commitment to never forget it.
Reverence as a Covenant Rather Than a Feeling
Feelings are weather. They roll in and out. On Tuesday you’d take a bullet for your spouse; on Wednesday you’d happily push them into a lake because they reorganized the garage without asking. That’s normal. That’s being human.
If reverence were a feeling, it would vanish every Wednesday. It doesn’t, because reverence is not a feeling. It’s a value, a decision about how you will treat another person regardless of the weather. Seeing, admiring, and cherishing all have strong emotional currents. Reverence is the riverbed underneath: it decides where the water is allowed to go.
This is why reverence says as much about the person offering it as about the person receiving it. Rachel didn’t hold back that sentence because she felt tender toward Sam in that moment. She didn’t. She held it back because of who she had decided to be in love. Reverence is integrity, applied to intimacy. It’s the answer to a question every partner eventually faces: when I have the power to wound you, what kind of person will I be?
One essential clarification. A sacred commitment to someone’s humanity is not an obligation to remain in danger. Reverence never requires anyone to tolerate abuse, cruelty, or repeated betrayal. You can honor someone’s humanity and still leave. In fact, protecting your own dignity is part of reverence too, because the covenant only works if both people are held as sacred, including you.
Protecting the Sacred Places in Another Person
Every person has rooms inside them that most people never enter. The memory of the day they were humiliated in seventh grade. The miscarriage nobody at work knows about. The panic attack in the airport bathroom. The quiet fear that they are, underneath everything, unlovable.
Intimacy is the process of being let into those rooms. And here is the uncomfortable truth: being let in hands you a key that could also be used to break things.
The philosopher Martin Buber described two ways of meeting another person. In what he called the I–It relation, we treat people as objects to use, manage, or defeat. In the I–Thou relation, we meet them as whole persons, fully present. An argument is where many couples slide from Thou to It without noticing. Suddenly the partner is an opponent, and everything you know about them becomes a weapon cabinet.
Reverence keeps the cabinet locked. It means the confession made at 2 a.m. never reappears at 2 p.m. in an argument. It means you don’t share their story with your friends, even disguised. It means honoring a boundary like “I don’t want to talk about my brother tonight” instead of prying it open because you think you know best.
Most of this happens where nobody can see it. No audience applauds Rachel’s restraint. No one knows that a husband defended his wife at a dinner party she didn’t attend. That’s the point. Reverence is how you treat someone when they will never find out.
Reverence in the Midst of Anger and Disappointment
Reverence is easy at an anniversary dinner. Its real home is the argument.
There is a line every couple must learn to see, the line between criticizing what someone did and attacking who they are. “You left the stove on and that scared me” is about behavior. “You’re a careless idiot who can’t be trusted with anything” is about worth. The first invites repair. The second invites war.
The researcher John Gottman spent decades watching couples argue, and his findings point to contempt, the sneer, the eye-roll, the mockery that says “I am above you,” as the single strongest predictor of divorce he studied. Contempt is the opposite of reverence. It can’t coexist with it. You cannot hold someone as sacred while treating them as beneath you.
That doesn’t mean reverent couples don’t get angry. They get very angry. They just fight like people who intend to still respect each other afterward. Accountability is part of it: Sam needed to hear that he’d let Rachel down. But accountability without humiliation is a completely different experience from accountability with it. One says, “You made a mistake, and I believe you can make it right.” The other says, “You are a mistake.”
And reverent couples repair. Someone eventually says, “I’m sorry, I was unfair,” and means it. Someone takes responsibility instead of defending a position to the death. When the line has been crossed, someone names it: “That was contempt, and I don’t want to talk to you that way.” Repair is reverence returning home after a bad night.
The Sacredness of Male Vulnerability
Many men learned very early that some feelings were not allowed out of the house. Tears were for babies. Fear was for cowards. Grief was something you handled in the truck with the radio up. So they built a sturdy, reliable exterior and learned to live behind it, sometimes for decades.
Then, one night, a man lets it slip. Maybe he tells his wife that he has been scared about money for a year and hasn’t slept properly in months. Maybe he cries at his mother’s grave, the real, shoulder-shaking kind of crying he hasn’t done since he was nine. Maybe he simply says, “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”
What happens next may shape the rest of his emotional life.
If he is met with discomfort, a joke, or a subtle cooling of respect, he learns that the old rule was right: never again. But if he is met with reverence, something profound becomes possible. He discovers that showing his deepest humanity does not shrink him in her eyes. If anything, he grows.
This is the dignity of male vulnerability. A man’s tears do not cancel his strength; they reveal the heart his strength was protecting all along. His uncertainty does not erase his competence; it proves he is honest. His tenderness is not a lapse in masculinity but one of its finest expressions.
Restoring men’s dignity requires exactly this: a place where a man can be fully human and still be honored. Not pitied. Not managed. Honored. When a woman, or a partner of any kind, receives a man’s vulnerability as something sacred, she is giving him what the world rarely offers, which is permission to be whole.
Reverence as a Daily Expression of Character
Reverence is not reserved for dramatic moments. Most of it lives in ordinary speech and ordinary choices. It sounds like how you introduce your partner at a party, with pride rather than a wry roll of the eyes. It sounds like the way you describe them to your mother, your coworkers, and your friends when they’re not around to defend themselves. It sounds like refusing to join the “my husband is so useless” or “my wife is such a nag” genre of conversation, even when everyone else at the table is enjoying it.
It looks like respecting their autonomy: their right to their own friendships, their own opinions, their own odd hobbies, their own decisions about their body and their time. It looks like taking their feelings seriously even when you think they’re overreacting, and taking their opinions seriously even when you think they’re wrong.
It means mockery is off the table. Playful teasing between two people who both enjoy it is a delight. Mockery aimed to diminish, especially in front of others, is a small act of desecration.
Above all, reverence shows up when love is hard. Anyone can be gracious on vacation. Reverence is being gracious on the third day of the stomach flu, in the second month of unemployment, in the middle of a fight about money. Character isn’t revealed by how you treat someone when they are delightful. It’s revealed by how you treat them when they aren’t.
The Difference Between Reverence and Idolatry
Idolatry and reverence can look alike from a distance. Both involve intense devotion. Both put the beloved on a high place. But they are opposites, and the difference determines whether love survives contact with reality.
Idolatry worships an image. It needs the other person to be wonderful all the time, because the image is all it has. The first time the idol snores, lies about the credit card bill, or turns out to be ordinary, idolatry shatters, and it often turns into contempt, because the worshipper feels cheated. Many marriages that began with breathless adoration ended in bitterness for exactly this reason.
Reverence worships nothing. It honors a real person: flawed, mortal, sometimes maddening, and irreplaceable. Because it never needed perfection, it isn’t threatened by imperfection. That is also why reverence is not the same as approving of everything someone does. Sacred worth is unconditional. Approval of behavior is not. You can hold someone as sacred and still say, “What you did was wrong.” You can revere someone and still insist on honesty, demand accountability, and keep firm boundaries. Real reverence is far more honest than idolatry, because it doesn’t need to pretend. It can look straight at a partner’s worst moment and still say, “You are worth more than this, and I believe you know it.”
When Reverence Becomes Worship
Something happens when reverence is practiced faithfully for years alongside the steps that came before it. Seeing keeps you paying attention. Admiring keeps you celebrating. Cherishing keeps you tender. Reverence keeps you honorable. Practiced together, again and again, these four stop being things a couple does and become the character of the relationship itself, the air two people breathe.
That is the threshold of the fifth and final step: Worshipping, love chosen again and again. Worship is not a new feeling layered on top of the others. It is what all four become when they are chosen, renewed, and returned to across a lifetime. Reverence makes the vow. Worship keeps it, every morning.
In a care home somewhere tonight, an eighty-three-year-old man is shaving his wife’s legs, slowly and carefully, the way she used to do it herself before her hands stopped working. She no longer remembers his name. She doesn’t know he comes every day. She will never thank him, and she will never know that the reason she looks so neat when her daughter visits on Sundays is that he was here first, with a comb and a tube of the lipstick she always wore.
No one is watching. She cannot give him anything back. By every measure the world uses, she has nothing left to offer. And still he treats her as the most important person in the building, because to him she is. That is reverence at its most luminous: the refusal to let a human being become less than human in your hands. It is one of the most dignified things a person can do, and it is available to every one of us, every day, with the imperfect, irreplaceable person we love.
And notice what that old man is really doing. He is not reverencing her once. He is choosing her again, this morning and tomorrow morning and every morning after, long after anyone would blame him for stopping. Seeing, admiring, cherishing, and revering have fused in him into a single, daily act of devotion. That is where this staircase has been leading all along, to its fifth and final step:
Worshipping, love chosen again and again.
I hold you as sacred.
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
Companion Song:
— “Baby I’m-a Want You,” Bread, 1971
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.
