My Years With Proust - Day 712

I ought to have reflected, however, that prior to each of these women whom I had loved there had existed in me a sentiment of the mystery by which she was surrounded and that therefore, rather than ask Gilberte to introduce me to young girls, I should have done better to go to places where there were girls with whom I had not the slightest connexion, those places where between oneself and them one feels an insurmountable barrier, where at a distance of three feet, on the beach, for instance, as they pass one of their way to bathe, one feels separated from them by the impossible.  It was in this fashion that a sentiment of mystery had attached itself for me first to Gilberte, then to the Duchesse de Guermantes, then to Albertine and to so many others.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 1038

In the end is lust nothing more than mystery, and a boring sex life to be expected because the mystery has been solved.  You know how she will react every stage of the way, which is also your fault because you're tiredly and unimaginatively walking a well-known path.  Now, does love follow the same paradigm?  Proust writes: :I ought to have reflected, however, that prior to each of these women whom I had loved there had existed in me a sentiment of the mystery by which she was surrounded . . ."  Is love nothing more than acceptance, based on happiness or fear, that the mystery has been solved.  My ex used to propose that she wanted a job where she would do the same thing every day (because, I think, because she didn't like stress) whereas I viewed that type of job as pretty hellish (which also explains why I change my courses up every semester, adding a lot of madness to my pre-planning chaos).  This probably helps us understand why I was such a terrible husband.