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In a previous post, I described Plato’s hidden third category: another person’s psyche is neither random chance nor within your control, it is a separate domain of autonomous choice that flows predictably from character. Understanding this distinction matters most when we’re trying to make sense of love gone wrong.
When Patterns Reveal Themselves
Consider a common scenario. Someone’s history slowly reveals itself: a past marked by addiction, by deception, by relationships destroyed through the same behaviors now emerging in your direction. You discover that the way they treat you mirrors how they treated others before: the lying, the sneaking, the betrayals they swore were behind them. The addiction they claimed to have conquered resurfaces in different substances, different compulsions, while they remain in denial about what anyone watching from outside could plainly see.
Here the third category becomes complex. Their disorder is not a single dramatic choice (like leaving) but a continuous pattern of small choices, each one the expression of a psyche organized around concealment and appetite. And your difficulty is not simply whether to stay or go, but whether you can accurately read the character before you when you are invested in seeing something else.
The Conspiracy of Denial and Hope
Here is where our own psyche must confront an uncomfortable truth. Their denial and our hope form a kind of conspiracy against reality. They minimize their patterns; we maximize their potential. They hide the evidence; we look away from what evidence remains visible.
By the time we see the nature of their psyche clearly, we have often already given more than we should have, stayed longer than wisdom would counsel, returned more times than we care to admit.
Was this a failure of our own self-governance? Perhaps partly. But it was also a failure of a particular kind—not a failure of intelligence, but a failure of hope. The same hope that makes love possible at all.
Grieving the Good Within the Bad
This is one of the cruelest features of loving a disordered soul: the good moments are real. The connection, when it surfaces, is genuine. And so you find yourself, even after ending things, grieving what was good—while having to remind yourself that the good was the minority, the exception, the bait on a hook whose nature you learned to recognize only after being caught too many times.
Wisdom is not pretending the islands didn’t exist. The good moments happened. But wisdom is recognizing that you cannot build a life on islands while ignoring the sea. The currents ran toward destruction, and no amount of cherishing the islands changes the nature of the water.
When to Act
Plato’s concept of auto politeia, constitutional self-governance, offers guidance here. The well-ordered soul does not simply react to events or blindly follow rules. It deliberates, taking into account the nature of the situation, including the nature of other souls involved.
Sometimes the well-governed soul chooses hope over probability—not from naivety, but from a reasoned judgment that certain goods are worth pursuing even when success is uncertain. But it also learns. It updates its reading of character as evidence accumulates. And when the evidence becomes undeniable, it acts—not in anger or bitterness, but in clear-eyed recognition that another’s disorder, however pitiable, is not yours to fix by enduring it.
The hardest thing about recognizing another’s psyche as a third category is that it offers no clean resolution. Pure chance demands only acceptance. Your own choices demand only responsibility. But another’s psyche, another’s choices, emerging from their own history and wounds and constitution, demands something more complex: compassion, realism, grief, and finally, action.
What You Cannot Pretend
What you cannot do is pretend their choices were weather. They were not. They were human, and therefore both more predictable and more tragic than any storm. They were the expression of a soul in disorder—and the disorder was visible, if you knew how to look, or if you were willing to look.
Perhaps your willingness to love someone whose soul was in disorder was not simply a failure of your own self-governance. Perhaps it was recognition of something true: that we are all, to varying degrees, souls in disorder, hoping someone will take the risk on us anyway.
The question is not whether to take such risks, a life without them would be impoverished. The question is how to take them with open eyes, and how to leave when you finally see clearly.
Living wisely requires more than acceptance or responsibility. It requires the difficult art of loving what can choose to leave, and the harder art of leaving what you loved when you finally see its nature clearly.
