"Life is strewn with these miracles for which people who love can always hope . . . However, with every occurrence in life and its contrasting situations that relates to love, it is best to make no attempt to understand, since in so far as these are as inexorable as they are unlooked-for, they appear to be governed by magic rather than by rational laws. . . These obstacles against which lovers have to contend and which their imagination, over-excited by suffering, seeks in vain to analyze, are to be found, as often as not, in some peculiar characteristic of the woman whom they cannot win back - in her stupidity, in the influence acquired over her and the fears suggested to her by people whom the lovers does not know, in the kind of pleasures which at that moment she demands of life, pleasures which neither her lover nor her lover's wealth can procure for her. In any event, the lover is not in the best position to discover the nature of these obstacles which the woman's guile conceals from him and his own judgment, distorted by love, prevents him from estimating exactly. They may be compared with those tumours which the doctor succeeds in reducing, but without having traced them to their source. Like them these obstacles remain mysterious but are temporary. Only they last, as a rule, longer than love itself. And as the latter is not a disinterested passion, the lover who no longer loves does not seek to know why the woman, neither rich nor virtuous, with whom he was in love refused obstinately for years to let him continue to keep her."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 539-540
And this is why we all go crazy when we're in love: we try to treat it as a rational phenomenon which we can sort out using the scientific method. Love is probably best left to the artists to explain. It is emotional and irrational and instinctual. When I think back on my happiest moments with women they were, at least on the surface, the most illogical; a seemingly mad assignation between mismatched opposites. There's a reason why Machiavelli said that for a successful prince it was better to be feared than love, because fear is perfectly logical and love is perfectly illogical. You can't depend upon it. If you want a rational pairing then you probably should have your mother arrange a marriage for you (she does probably know you best). You won't be as, at least occasionally, deliriously happy, but you stand a better chance of maintaining your sanity. But here's the thing, the most essential, and clearly the best, aspect of love is its irrationality. It transcends the limitations of the rational world. One of the characters in Winesburg, Ohio describes love as the divine accident of life, which I've always liked. Not to be too blasphemous, but love, like God, transcend the linear and the mundane (which I guess makes it appropriate that many religions, in one way or another, propose that God is love). How many love affairs die because of the decision to make them adhere to the misguided stipulations of the common place world? When love is strangled by the demands of filling out green card forms or financing more house than you need - as well as innumerable other examples - all of which are misguided notions that will allegedly clear the way for love to blossom, you are chloroforming the love affair, not only because you are taking valuable time away from it, but because you are altering it to fit a world where it doesn't belong. Recently great friend of mine, when reflecting on the nature of a mature relationship, and lamenting the passing of the more irrational, and I would argue pure, state of the relationship, proposed, "remember when it was about you bending her over the dishwasher and betting her that you could her an orgasm in five minutes?" That is either the most inelegant or most elegant definition of love I've ever heard.
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