As a high school student, you’ve probably heard your fair share of speeches on respect. It started when we were little tykes, fumbling with our first words, struggling to pronounce the ‘l’ and ‘s’ in “Please” and the ‘th’ sound in “Thank you.” Then as we got older the school counselors started talking about the dangers of bullying, and so on.

But something I’ve realized lately is that they never really addressed respecting the opposite sex. Not very thoroughly, anyway, and now here we are: big, bad, hormonal high schoolers, eagerly exploring the world of romance. I guess everybody just figured respecting the person you’re dating is common sense, but from what I’ve been observing lately, we seem to have forgotten how to do that.

Here’s the thing: dating is great- it’s a lot of fun and it feels amazing when you find a girl or guy that you click with- but it’s dangerous in a way. When you enter a relationship, you gain power over each other on a deeper level. The way you treat the other person, and your faithfulness-or lack thereof- to them is suddenly a much bigger contributor not only to how they think of you but to how they think of themselves.

A couple of years ago, my youth group had a discussion about purity. The girls and the guys were divided into two separate groups to discuss the basics of relationships and abstinence and all that. My group later found out from our leader that as the topic of respecting the opposite sex came up in the guy’s group, a popular response was, “They don’t respect themselves, so why should we even bother?”

At first this insulted me, but then I started to see the other side. In a way, the guys were right. When you walk around in short, low-cut and tight clothes and give yourself away like it’s no big deal, you may think you look confident, but honestly, acting like that is a brightly-flashing neon arrow pointing to the fact that you can’t even respect yourself- or the guys you date- enough to dress appropriately or say ‘no’ every now and then.

If you want people to treat you with the respect you deserve, you’ve got to start respecting yourself. That means deciding on boundaries for yourself and sticking to them, and asking yourself questions like “Is this too short, too low, or too tight?” and “Am I doing this because I think it’ll make people like me more or because I want to?” It’s also important to think about how you act around guys who aren’t your boyfriend- respect goes two ways. You wouldn’t like it if your boyfriend was flirting with other girls, so why would it be okay for you to do the same thing to him?

And guys, it doesn’t matter what her track record is, she’s special, and she still deserves just as much respect as you do. Please, if you’ve captured her heart, be careful with it. It may be all fun and games to you but to her, it’s real, and 10 years from now when you look back on your high school career, it’s probably not going to be about how far you go or how many girls you dated. More likely it’s going to be about the actual relationships you had.