Loving your spouse as much as you love yourself and honoring your spouse more than yourself will produce peace. Let's explore why.

Love is an emotion from within. Love can strongly motivate you to behave towards one whom you love, and to do so with warmth, care, kindness, compassion and drive. Love can powerfully prompt feats of beneficence, generosity and consideration. And, it should. But, there is a problem.

Love, being an emotion, is subjective and is limited to the extent that you have emotional "fuel." It may be powerful fuel, but it only goes as far as your emotional "fuel supply" goes.

If the needs, feelings, perceptions or reality of

* your spouse,
* the marriage or
* the pressures and tribulations of "real life"
ever exceed the measure of your "fuel," the "fuel supply" will not be adequate to deliver, owing to the limitations of subjectivity and of your emotional energies. The "fuel" of subjective emotion can, on one or more occasions, run out. What about when the needs of your partner or the demands or responsibilities of your marriage exceed your subjectivity or your emotional limitations?

The Torah tells us that you are to behave according to objective standards, demand-levels, needs and responsibilities which are beyond yourself. If there is occasion to get outside of yourself and beyond your limitations or subjectivity, you must respond and rise to each such occasion.

This is accomplished by attributing "weight" through objective kavod, beyond the limitations of your subjective "fuel supply."

This explains why, to have peace, it is not enough to fuel your beneficence towards one another with love alone. In marriage, two people live with each other constantly and intimately. Love is a subjective and limited emotion, which is constantly tested and eroded by the pressures and tribulations of life.

Together with kavod, their relationship can withstand the vicissitudes of life, and maintain shalom. This is because kavod is the insurance that causes one to relate objectively outside of oneself to the other person, beyond the limitations of your emotional powers or subjectivity. Your partner is a reality outside of yourself, different than yourself and with needs, feelings, dignity, sensitivities, quirks, shortcomings and an individual identity.

Unless each partner is truly capable of dealing with and responding to the other person as the other truly is - and NOT merely in accordance with what you wish, what you feel, what you expect, what you need, what you imagine; NOT what would be self-serving or convenient; NOT with a taking, using or entitlement orientation - but based on what the other genuinely is, feels and needs - you won't be able to peacefully live with the other person for too long.