The question is not really about them. It never was. You have been building the case for this person for months, maybe years, and the case keeps needing maintenance. Something happens. You explain it away. Something else happens. You find a reason. At some point you have to wonder: are these explanations true, or are they something you need to be true?
Three thinkers from the Consilium roster would approach this from different angles. They do not agree on where the problem is, or even on what the problem is. That disagreement is worth sitting with.
Fromm: the excuse is not love, it is something else
In The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm argued that love is not a feeling that happens to you but an active discipline of seeing and caring for another person as they actually are. Making excuses for someone you love, in his account, is not a demonstration of love. It is a refusal of it. The excuse replaces the real person with a version of them you can live with. You protect the image rather than deal with what is actually there.
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
He would push further. Real love requires that you see someone clearly, flaws and patterns included, and choose them anyway. Excuses blur what is there. When the pattern you are excusing is harmful, and when you have been excusing it for a long time, Fromm would say you are not protecting a relationship. You are protecting a construction. And the construction is not them. The person you are defending in your head is built from your own needs, not from who they actually are.
Murdoch: are you still looking, or have you stopped?
Iris Murdoch spent her career arguing that genuine attention, undistorted by our needs and fantasies, is the foundation of both ethics and love. To pay attention is to see what is actually there, not what we need to be there. The excuses you make for someone are, in her framing, a failure of that attention. But she would not let you collapse everything into that diagnosis.
Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
The question she would put to you is whether the excuses coexist with clear seeing or whether they have replaced it entirely. You can explain someone's behavior while still seeing it. That might be compassion, or patience, or the long view. The problem Murdoch describes is when the explanation becomes the mechanism by which you stop looking. If excusing this person means you no longer have to look at what they are doing, that is not love. It is avoidance dressed in the vocabulary of love.
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Austen: what does this reveal about you?
Jane Austen would turn the question around. Her novels are, in large part, extended studies of what people choose not to see about the people they have decided to love, and what that selective blindness reveals about them. She would not ask you to account for this person. She would ask you to account for yourself. In Austen, the excuse almost always protects something the person making it cannot admit.
The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love.
She would point out that every Austen character who makes sustained excuses for someone they love is also protecting a want they have not named. You explain away the behavior because confronting it would mean confronting what you want from this relationship and whether you are actually getting it. The excuse says as much about the one excusing as the one being excused. Austen would ask: what would you have to give up if you stopped making this excuse? Not necessarily them. But something you have been holding onto.
Where they disagree
Fromm would say the excuses are evidence you are in love with a fiction. The attachment is real. Whether the love is real depends on whether you are willing to see the person who is actually there.
Murdoch would say the excuses themselves are not the diagnosis. What matters is what they are doing to your capacity to see clearly. Some people excuse and still see. Others excuse precisely in order to avoid seeing. You need to know which one you are doing.
Austen would say both of them are asking about the wrong person. Stop asking what this person deserves or what their behavior means. Start asking what the excuse tells you about what you want, and why you cannot say it plainly.
None of them would tell you to leave. None of them would tell you to stay. All of them would tell you to stop pretending you do not know what you are doing.
The question you came here to avoid
The excuses have probably been running long enough that you cannot easily separate them from what you actually think. The justifications have become load-bearing. You cannot remove them without looking at what they were covering, and looking at what they were covering would mean deciding what to do about it.
So here is the question underneath the one you searched: if you stopped making excuses for this person for one month, what would you see? And if you already know the answer to that, what is the excuse for that?