When Love is Hurting You

Maybe the only way to really respect love is to respect its limits and respect that it doesn't give you the power to change other people. That's why you can love someone and still choose to say good-bye to them. It's not really a question of whether you love them, it's whether they belong in your life.
~Tara Westover, author of the memoir Educated

Westover, if you haven't heard, is the bestselling author of a jaw-dropping memoir that details her highly dysfunctional childhood with fundamentalist parents (who are also, clearly, not well mentally) and an abusive brother. She's someone who has given love a lot of thought. And she has decided that, although she still loves her family, including her abusive brother, they are not in her life.
Her views aren't particularly radical. You wouldn't be on this site if you couldn't point to someone in your life whom you love but who hurt you. 
But Westover's pragmatic approach – that she can love her family while drawing strong clear boundaries around what she will and will not tolerate in her life –  is tough to enact. We tend to connect love with presence. If we love someone, we choose to be with them. Even if being with them is hurting us. 
Which is why this quote resonated with me.
A whole lot of us grapple with whether or not to stay in a marriage affected by infidelity or leave. Few of us fall immediately out of love when we learn of our partner's cheating. Some of us are completely shocked when our response is unbridled physical desire for our husband. 
Sometimes we need to let the proverbial dust settle. To process our pain. To receive the shattering. 
And then...
Then we can take stock and ask ourselves some really tough questions: 
•Is he doing the hard work of understanding why he risked everything that mattered for someone who didn't? 
•Is he showing you that he deserves a second chance?
•Is being with him healing you or harming you?
Cause that's the big one, right? As Anne Landers used to put it: Is your life better with him in it or not? Perhaps not at this exact moment, when he forgot to put the toilet seat down YET AGAIN. But mostly. Is it mostly better?
Cause if it's not, and if it hasn't been for a long time, if the hurting far outweighs the healing, then Westover's words are for you. 
You can love someone and still know that they don't deserve a place at your table.