My Years With Proust - Day 593

Then, by dint of accustoming myself not to use my will-power, whether it was a question of work or of anything else, I had become more cowardly.  But above all, this anguish was incomparably more intense for a number of reasons of which the most important was perhaps not that I had never tasted any sensual pleasure with Mme de Guermantes or with Gilberte, but that, not seeing them every day, and at every hour of the day, having no opportunity and consequently no need to see them, there had been lacking, in my love for them, the immense force of Habit.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, p. 436

Marcel continues to mourn Albertine's departure and the end of their relationship, although we have trouble viewing it as true suffering, not only because we can't separate ourselves from our sense of his own hypocrisy, but also because, let's be honest, it's not happening to us.  The only true suffering is our own.  Nevertheless, Marcel soldiers on trying to make sense of why the relationship ended, and also why he is feeling such pain.  It's hardly the first time he's witnessed the end of a relationship and felt that sting, but maybe it's just best to think that it's the first time he ever had his heart broken (whatever that means; difficult to define, although we've all been there).  Certainly part of the pain relates to the fact that he was intimate with Albertine, which was not the case with Mme de Guermantes or Gilberte, and, as we've discussed before, when you're inside someone you're inside them.  Instead, as Proust explains, the difference rested in the fact that, "not seeing them every day, and at every hour of the day, having no opportunity and consequently no need to see the, there had been lacking, in my love for them, the immense force of Habit."  When we are most crushed by the death of a relationship is not that we miss a person, but rather that we now miss a life marked by Routine and Habit, which was almost certainly mind-numbingly tedious, but also structural and life-affirming in its own way.  When I think back on the women I've known and loved and lost, I almost always think back on having coffee with them in the morning (each having its own particular form), which maybe means that I miss the life we constructed more than the person themselves.