My Years With Proust - Day 614

One wants to be understood because one wants to be loved, and one wants to be loved because one loves.  The understanding of others is a matter of indifference to us and their love importunate.  My joy at having possessed a little of Albertine's intelligence and of her heart arose not from their intrinsic worth, but from the fact that this possession was a stage further towards the complete possession of Albertine, a possession which had been my goal and my dream ever since the day when I had first set eyes on her.  When we speak of the "niceness" of a woman, we are doing no more perhaps than project outside ourselves the pleasure that we feel in seeing her, like children when they say: "My dear little bed, my dear little pillow, my dear little hawthorns." Which explains, incidentally, why men never say of a woman who is not unfaithful to them: "She is so nice," and say it so often of a woman by whom they are betrayed.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, p. 506

Proust tells us, "One wants to be understood because one wants to be loved, and one wants to be loved because one loves."  This doesn't bring us to a definitive conclusion on the question of my Marcel loves Albertine, but it gives us even more information on what loves means to him.  We fall in love, and we expect the woman to love us and to understand us.  Consequently we are focused like a laser on that one person and the "understanding of others is a matter of indifference to us and their love importunate."  Of course, there are few things less out of our direct control than making another person love us or even understand us, but they are both annoying necessities after we have fallen in love. Is it any wonder that we are so consistently miserable in love when we have chosen a quest for which we have so little control.