There is something deeply human about forgiveness. Someone we love hurts us. They apologise. We remember everything that is good about them. We remember the history, the laughter, the plans, and the person we believe them to be underneath whatever has happened. So we forgive.
Sometimes that forgiveness becomes part of what makes a relationship stronger. But sometimes something else happens. We forgive again. And again. A boundary becomes a conversation. The conversation becomes an exception. The exception becomes another exception. Eventually, something we once said we would never tolerate has quietly become part of everyday life.
And somewhere along the way, a difficult question emerges.
How much of yourself are you allowed to lose before staying stops being an act of love?
There is no simple answer. But psychology has some fascinating things to say about why intelligent, capable and otherwise confident people can remain fiercely committed to relationships that appear, at least to those watching, to be costing them their dignity, autonomy or sense of self.
We sometimes describe people in these relationships as weak. “Why do they put up with it?” “Why don’t they just leave?” “They need to have more self respect.” Those statements can sound obvious from the outside. From inside the relationship, things may look very different.
Psychological research doesn’t recognise a condition called “loving someone too much”. Instead, several well studied human processes can combine to make preserving a relationship extraordinarily important. One of them is attachment.
Attachment theory grew from the work of psychologist John Bowlby and was later extended into adult romantic relationships by researchers including Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver. Broadly speaking, attachment research suggests that our closest relationships activate powerful psychological systems concerned with connection, security and the availability of people who matter to us.
For someone higher in what researchers call attachment anxiety, signs of rejection, separation or uncertainty can feel particularly significant. That doesn’t mean someone with an anxious attachment style will tolerate poor treatment, and attachment styles shouldn’t become another convenient label we stick onto people. But the research does offer us an interesting possibility.
Sometimes the prospect of losing the relationship may feel more threatening than accepting something painful within it.
From the outside, we might ask, “Why would you tolerate that?” From inside, the more powerful question might be, “What happens to me if this person leaves?” Those are very different questions.
There is another fascinating area of research called relationship contingent self esteem. Researchers including Chip Knee have studied what happens when a person’s sense of worth becomes strongly connected to what is happening within their romantic relationship. When the relationship is going well, their sense of themselves may rise with it. When the relationship is threatened, their self worth can become threatened too.
That changes the emotional mathematics considerably. You aren’t simply trying to save a relationship. You may be trying to save something that has become connected to how you understand yourself. Questions such as “Who am I without them?”, “What does it say about me if they leave?” and “What does it mean if this relationship fails?” can become entangled with the decision about whether to stay.
And perhaps the particularly painful question is this: after everything I’ve invested, can I really walk away now?
That question takes us into another important piece of relationship research. Psychologist Caryl Rusbult developed what became known as the Investment Model of Commitment. Her work suggests that commitment isn’t determined simply by whether we are currently happy in a relationship. It is also influenced by how much we have invested and how we perceive the alternatives available to us.
Think about what investment can mean after a long relationship. Years together, a home, children, friendships, financial commitments, shared routines, memories and plans for the future can all become part of what is at stake. There may also be sacrifices you made specifically because you believed there would be a future together.
Leaving isn’t like returning an unsuitable jumper to a shop. You aren’t merely evaluating today’s relationship. You may feel as though you are walking away from ten years of yesterday and twenty years of imagined tomorrow.
None of that means someone should stay. It simply helps us understand why “just leave” can sound remarkably simple to the person saying it and almost impossibly complicated to the person hearing it.
And then there is forgiveness itself.
Forgiveness isn’t the villain here. Quite the opposite. Research on forgiveness has associated it with a range of positive psychological and relational outcomes. Close relationships inevitably involve mistakes, disappointment and hurt. If every relationship ended the first time someone behaved badly, humanity might have a slight relationship retention problem.
We need forgiveness. We need generosity. We need the ability to see a whole person rather than reducing them to their worst moment.
There is even evidence that trust can influence how we remember a partner’s wrongdoing. Research by Laura Luchies and colleagues found that people who trusted their partners could later remember previous transgressions as less severe than they had originally reported them.
Think about that for a moment. Our minds may sometimes help relationships survive by softening the edges of past hurt.
And perhaps that’s normally rather useful. Nobody needs a mental spreadsheet entitled Things You Have Done Wrong Since 2009, complete with colour coding and quarterly performance reviews. But there is an uncomfortable possibility here too. The very psychological processes that help healthy relationships survive ordinary human imperfection may also make it harder to recognise when forgiveness has become something else.
And this is where another piece of Luchies’ research becomes particularly interesting.
In research that became known as the “Doormat Effect,” Luchies and her colleagues examined what happened to the person doing the forgiving when their partner responded differently afterwards. Their findings suggest that forgiveness does not affect our self respect in isolation. What the other person does with that forgiveness matters.
When an offending partner behaved in ways that communicated that the forgiver was valued and respected, forgiveness could support or preserve the forgiver’s self respect. But when the offending partner failed to make meaningful amends and continued behaving poorly, forgiveness was associated with reductions in the forgiver’s self respect and clarity about their own sense of self.
That is an important distinction.
Perhaps the question isn’t simply, “Have I forgiven them?” It is, “What have they done with my forgiveness?”
If someone responds to forgiveness with accountability, genuine repair and changed behaviour, forgiveness can become part of rebuilding a relationship. But if someone receives forgiveness and learns that nothing really needs to change, something very different may be happening.
The person forgiving may believe they are demonstrating the depth of their love. The other person may simply be learning that the boundary has no consequence.
And if that cycle happens repeatedly, perhaps the cost isn’t only what the other person continues to do. The research raises a more uncomfortable possibility: the repeated absence of repair may gradually affect how the forgiving person sees themselves.
That puts a different light on the phrase “I’ll forgive them because I love them.”
Forgiveness can be an extraordinary expression of love. But forgiveness without accountability isn’t necessarily reconciliation. Forgiveness without change isn’t necessarily repair. And forgiveness certainly doesn’t require us to volunteer for the same hurt indefinitely.
Psychological researchers have another wonderfully unromantic phrase that becomes surprisingly relevant here: unmitigated communion. It broadly describes an excessive focus on other people’s needs combined with insufficient attention to one’s own.
The distinction matters. Caring deeply for someone isn’t the problem. Sacrifice isn’t necessarily the problem. Putting another person’s needs ahead of your own sometimes isn’t the problem either. Healthy relationships require all of those things at different moments.
The important element is self neglect.
There is a significant difference between saying, “I’m choosing to put you first today because you need me,” and living as though, “Your needs have become so important that mine no longer seem entitled to exist.” From outside, those two things may initially look almost identical. Over time, they can lead somewhere very different.
Perhaps one of the most revealing questions we can ask ourselves about a relationship isn’t simply, “Am I happy?”
What have I gradually learned to accept that I once believed was unacceptable?
Boundaries rarely disappear with a ceremonial announcement. There usually isn’t a Tuesday morning when someone wakes up and declares, “Excellent. From today onwards I shall abandon three of my core values.”
It happens incrementally. Something happens and there is an explanation. We understand and we forgive. Then it happens again, and perhaps this time there is an even better explanation. Eventually, we can find ourselves defending behaviour we would once have advised a friend never to tolerate.
And that brings us to the people watching.
Imagine seeing someone you care about gradually disappear inside a relationship. You can see something they apparently cannot. Surely you should tell them? Perhaps. But how we tell them matters enormously.
If we say, “You need to leave,” “They’re terrible for you,” or “Why are you letting them treat you like this?”, we may believe we are being protective. The person hearing those words may experience something very different. They may hear judgement, embarrassment or criticism. They may simply hear an attack on someone they still love.
They may then defend their partner. If every conversation becomes another attempt to persuade them to leave, eventually they may stop having those conversations with us altogether. Ironically, in trying desperately to pull someone towards us, we can sometimes make their world smaller.
This becomes particularly important when a relationship involves domestic abuse or coercive control. Organisations specialising in domestic abuse generally encourage friends and relatives to listen, believe, avoid blame and support the person’s autonomy rather than simply ordering them to leave. Leaving an abusive relationship can itself involve danger, which is why specialist support and safety planning can be so important.
But I wonder whether there is a broader principle here that applies beyond abusive relationships too.
Perhaps our job isn’t always to provide the answer. Perhaps sometimes our job is to help someone hear their own answer.
Instead of saying, “You have to leave,” we might ask, “You’ve told me several times that this behaviour hurts you. What keeps making it acceptable again?” We might gently remind them, “Six months ago you described this as a boundary. Do you feel your boundary has genuinely changed?” Or we might ask them to imagine that nothing changes at all: “If your relationship was exactly like this five years from now, how would you feel about that?”
There is no verdict in those questions and no instruction. They simply hold up a mirror and give the other person the opportunity to look into it.
There is another uncomfortable side to this too. The person inside the relationship may be saying, “I behave this way because I love them.” Meanwhile, their friend outside may be saying, “I need to make you leave because I love you.”
Both people could potentially be using love to justify overriding somebody else’s autonomy.
That deserves our attention.
Supporting someone doesn’t necessarily mean making their decision for them. Sometimes the most valuable support might simply be remaining close enough that they have somewhere psychologically safe to think out loud. Somewhere they don’t have to defend their partner or defend themselves. Somewhere they aren’t embarrassed because they changed their mind for the seventh time. Somewhere they can simply tell the truth.
And perhaps this is also where we should be careful with the phrase “self respect”. When we watch someone repeatedly forgive behaviour we wouldn’t tolerate ourselves, it’s tempting to say, “They’ve lost all self respect.”
But perhaps that’s too easy.
Maybe they haven’t consciously chosen between love and self respect at all. Perhaps every individual decision seemed reasonable at the time. One more chance, one more explanation, one more promise, one more attempt to save something containing years of their life.
Self abandonment doesn’t necessarily arrive as one enormous decision. Sometimes it happens through a hundred tiny compromises, each individually understandable.
And perhaps recovering yourself happens in much the same way. One boundary remembered. One honest conversation. One moment of noticing. One decision in which you quietly recognise that your experience matters too.
So maybe the question isn’t whether it’s possible to love somebody too much. Perhaps love itself isn’t the quantity we need to measure. Maybe we need to look instead at what that love is asking of us.
What does this love require me to become? What am I repeatedly being asked to accept? Can I remain fully myself inside this relationship?
And perhaps most importantly:
If keeping someone I love requires repeatedly abandoning myself, what exactly am I saving?
You can forgive someone without giving them unlimited permission to hurt you. You can understand why someone behaves as they do without agreeing to live with the consequences. You can love someone deeply and still have boundaries.
And leaving doesn’t necessarily mean the love wasn’t real.
Sometimes it simply means you finally remembered that you are real too.
If something here has made you stop for a moment, you don’t need to arrive at an answer today. Myles is here. No judgement and no instruction to stay or leave. Just somewhere to talk, explore what’s happening and perhaps hear your own voice a little more clearly.
