My Years With Proust - Day 493

So long as my jealousy had not been reincarnated in new people, I had enjoyed after the passing of my anguish an interval of calm.  But the slightest pretext serves to revive a chronic disease, just as the slightest opportunity may enable the vice of the person who is the cause of our jealousy to be practiced anew (after a lull of chastity) with different people.  I had managed to separate Albertine from her accomplices, and, by so doing, to exorcise my hallucinations; if it was possible to make her forget people, to cut short her attachments, her taste for sensual pleasure was chronic too, and was perhaps only waiting for an opportunity to be given its head.  Now Paris provided just as many opportunities as Balbec.  In any town whatsoever, she had no need to see, for the evil existed not in Albertine alone, but in others to whom any opportunity for pleasure is good.  A glance from one, understood at once by the other, brings the two famished souls in contact.  And it is easy for an astute woman to appear not to have seen, then five minute later to join, the person who has read her glance and is waiting for her in a side streets, and to make an assignation in a trice.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, p. 14

When discussing Albertine sapphic desires Proust notes, "A glance from one, understood at once by the other, brings the two famished souls in contact."  I've proposed, doubtless repeatedly, my own theory that unhappy people, especially unhappily married people, emit a pheromone that other unhappily married people are instantly drawn to.  I knew of a couple once, whose names, to protect the innocent and not so innocent, I will not reveal, who were both unhappily married (but, as the country music song tells us, not to each other) who within about a half hour of being introduced were immersed in mutual mauling behind a pool pump room.  Essentially, they were "two famished souls" who instantly recognized a similar condition, and, as Marcus Aurelius reminds us, like is always drawn to like.  When I was getting divorced years ago my attorney told me that one of the sad things she said almost everybody learns at a certain point during the process is how little it would have taken to keep the marriage together (not always the case, obviously, but more often than makes sense).  How much does it take to keep your partner from becoming a "famished soul?": a little carnality, a little attention (even feigned), a little affection.  I think it takes a lot more effort to destroy a relationship than to maintain it.  Sure, that extra effort might be an affair on the side, but there's also the extra effort of callously ignoring what your partner needs.  Returning to Marcel, how much time and effort is he devoting to find reasons to be miserable?