My Years With Proust - Day 382

It is moreover the property of love to make us at once more distrustful and more credulous, to make us suspect the loved one, more readily than we should suspect anyone else, and be convinced more easily by her denials.  We must be in love before we can care that all women are not virtuous, which is to say before we can be aware of the fact, and we must be in love too before we can hope, that is to say assure ourselves, that some are.  It is human to seek out what hurts us and then at once to seek to get rid of it.  Statements that are capable of so relieving us seem all too readily true: we are not inclined to cavil at a sedative that works. Besides, however multiform that person we love may be, she can in any case present to us two essential personalities according to whether she appears to us as ours, or as turning her desires elsewhere.  The first of these personalities possesses the peculiar power which prevents us from believing the reality of the second, the secret remedy to heal the sufferings that this latter has caused us.  The beloved object is successively the malady and the remedy that suspends and aggravates it.  Doubtless I had long been conditioned, by the powerful impression made on my imagination and my faculty for emotion by the example of Swann, to believe in the truth to what I feared rather than of what I should have wished.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 862-863

Note to self: use the word cavil more in polite company, but only if I want to annoy people.

Proust tells us, "It is human to seek out what hurts us and then at once to seek to get rid of it."  And why do we do this?  I believe that it is true, but I suspect that it would take a far greater mind than my own (which is not a particularly exclusive club) to sort that out, and if someone did it would bring about an end to almost all literature.  Maybe it's the desire to do the impossible, in this case to make the unhappy woman happy.  I'm sure over the years I've paraphrased Milan Kundera's brilliant observation that the surest way to get a woman into bed is through her sadness.  However, I wonder if it actually works the other way around as well; the surest way for her to get us into bed is through her sadness.