“I love you, but…”—Maintaining Relationships When You Disagree
Loving someone whose beliefs and values are different from our own—especially when we find those beliefs to be profoundly harmful—is really, really hard.
I want to share a sigh and a cup of tea with you, and I want to talk about keeping the relationships we want to keep. Not the ones that hurt you or ask you to compromise your values, but the ones that treat you with respect and good faith. The ones where both of you recognize that you each have a real seat at the table, even if both parties believe that the other has made some poor choices, or been misled by propaganda, or is too stubborn to see the “obvious.”
You may have someone in mind like this. And they probably feel the same way about you.
It’s likely that you both feel misunderstood, irritated that they just don’t get it, and weary from constantly deciding what’s safe to say or how much to push back. It can be lonely, tiring, sad, and wildly frustrating. So get your tea, and let’s talk about it.
Normalize the In-Between Relationships
We tend to think in binaries: all in or all out. But most relationships live in the in-between. Not every strained relationship has to end, and not every relationship has to stay exactly as it was.
You’re probably familiar with the term “inner circle.” These are the people we trust the most: the ones who “get” us best, who we share our fears and hopes and contradictions with. We don’t have a good word for the next circle out: the people we care about but don’t let all the way in. Then imagine another circle, and another—a series of concentric circles extending out to acquaintances and distant family.
All relationships naturally move between these circles over time. Maybe someone who you kept in your inner circle doesn’t feel as safe as they used to. It’s okay to choose to move someone to an outer circle. You can make a relationship a little smaller without erasing it. You can love someone while trusting them a little less.
Maybe this looks like:
talking less often
sharing less personal information
skipping certain topics entirely
choosing side-by-side activities (movie, games, hobbies) instead of direct or vulnerable conversations
Nudging someone away from the inner circle may sound harsh at first, but it’s an act of genuine love, I think. It’s natural to think, “But they’re family…But we’ve been friends forever…But we’ve been through so much together.” Calibrating your level of closeness with a person so that you CAN maintain a real relationship without resentment, dread, or estrangement—this is hard.
But it is loving.
At least they're in a beautiful place, right?
Photo by Gabin Cobret via Pexels.com
"How can they believe that?"
It’s tempting to think of our beliefs as decisions, as if we all sit down with a stack of evidence, weigh it carefully, and choose our positions. But our brains aren’t that tidy.
Neuroscientist and scholar António Damásio wrote, “We are not thinking machines that feel; we are feeling machines that think.” Most of us arrive at our beliefs not by thought but through a complicated mix of experience, education, identity, fear, hope, social belonging, and a thousand other factors that have been shaping us since before we ever heard the term 'logical fallacy.'
Humans generally rely on what feels true and good. Research shows that disconfirming evidence and rational counterarguments often don’t do much but backfire and make us double down on what we already think. It’s true for the people we love but disagree with, and it's true for you and me.
None of this means that our beliefs don’t matter, or that all beliefs are equal. But it does mean that almost everyone is trying to act from a place of good faith and integrity—at least, everyone you’d want to keep around. Recognizing the humanity in how the other person arrived at their beliefs can take the edge off and make the disagreements a little more bearable. Because, like you, they probably didn't fully choose.
Opening Up to Closeness
Without going too deep into my personal history, you should know that I have decades of experience with this stuff: drastic changes of belief, going against the family grain, and wrestling with how to love and be loved when everybody in the room thinks the other is wrong on a cosmic level.
But the thing that gave me the most hope, the most warmth and peace, in the middle of all of that—
Laying on a grassy hill and looking for shapes in the clouds with my mother and father. A thirty-eight-year-old and two seventy-somethings, respectively.
It was an unplanned moment, stolen between noisy, kid-focused activities at a family reunion. I snuck away to get a break, and my parents found me and joined me. We just looked at clouds. And I still think about it years later.
In my last email, I shared why awe, as an emotion, is a self-care strategy particularly suited to hopeless and doomy times. Among its many virtues, awe nudges us toward generosity, cooperation, and community-mindedness. Awe doesn’t erase disagreement or replace boundaries. But why not try taking a walk in the woods together, watching a meteor shower, visiting big water, attending a concert? See what happens when you take a moment, together, to feel small and insignificant in a big, complicated world.
You get to decide what kind of contact you can lovingly sustain. You are allowed to keep your heart open selectively. You get to protect your relationships and your values.
This is part five in a five part series, "How Not to Drown in Doom Right Now."
See all five parts here.
© 2025–2026 Summer Hopkins Myers | Already Good
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