My Year With Proust - Day 89

"Almost everyone was surprised at the marriage, and that in itself is surprising.  No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.  And so there are very few who can regard as natural the enormous proportions that a person comes to assume in our eyes who is not the same as the person that they see."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 505

Proust assures us that everyone was shocked that Swann ended up marrying Odette, and maybe most of all Swann himself.  I think I've talked before about my theory that, thanks to cognitive dissonance, people often end up marrying the person who broke up their marriage because it somehow alleviates the inherent psychic tension.  Yes, I broke up my marriage, but I did it because I found the great love of my life, and not simply because I was bored or met someone who likes sex as much as I do.  If you end up marrying that person then, at least psychically, and completely unconsciously, it's all a wash.  Swann's case is slightly different because he never broke up his marriage or hers, but by marrying her it does help explain away his increasingly irrational behavior; again, not in a rational conscious world, but down deep in the unconscious depths.

The "supplementary person" is more problematical, not in the ability to understand the concept but rather in our ability to live with that person.  I always warn my students against falling into the trap of following up their college graduation with a wedding, which too many of them do as they begin to imagine themselves as a functioning adult.  Too big a part of that imagined adult self is the perception of themselves as a married, adult creature, the supplementary person that Proust discussed.  In a classic Seinfeld episode George goes on a rant on the dangers of "relationship George" coming into contact with "relationship George", and, while it is funny, like a lot of Seinfeld, there is a grain of truth in there somewhere.  The supplementary person we imagine/construct does appear to be the real person, although in reality it is as transitory or fictitious as a doppelganger.