"'What are you talking about? Of course he was in love with me. D'you think a girl doesn't know when a man's in love with her?'
'Oh I dare say he was in love with you after a fashion. He didn't know any girl so intimately as he knew you. You'd played around together since you were children. He expected himself to be in love with you. He had the normal sexual instinct. It seemed such a natural thing that you should marry. There woudn't have been any practical difference in your relations except that you lived under the same roof and went to bed together.'
Isabel, to some extent mollified, waited for me to go on and, knowing that women are always glad to listen when you discourse upon love, I went on.
'Moralists try to persuade us that the sexual instinct hasn't got so very much to do with love. They're apt to speak of it as if it were an epiphenomenon.'
'What in God's name is that?'
'Well there are psychologists who think that consciousness accompanies brain processes and is determined by them, but doesn't itself exert any influence on them. Something like the reflection of a tree in water; it couldn't exist without the tree, but it doesn't in any way affect the tree. I think it's all stuff and nonsense to say that there can be love without passion; when people say love can endure after passion is dead they're talking of something else, affection, kindliness, community of taste and interest, and habit. Especially habit. Two people can go on having sexual intercourse from habit in just the same way as they grow hungry at the hour they're accustomed to have their meals. Of course there can be desire without love. Desire isn't passion. Desire is the natural consequence of the sexual instinct and it isn't of any more importance than any other function of the human animal. That's why women are foolish to make a song and dance if their husbands have an occasional flutter when the time and the place are propitious.'
'Does that apply only to men?'
I smiled.
'If you insist I'll admit that what is sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose. The only thing to be said against it is that with a man a passing connexion of that sort has no emotional significance, while with a woman it has.'
'It depends on the woman.'
I wasn't going to let myself be interrupted.
'Unless love is passion, it's not love, but something else; and passion thrives not on satisfaction, but on impediment. What d'you suppose Keats meant when he told the lover on his Grecian urn not to grieve? "Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!" Why? Because she was unattainable, and however madly the lover pursued she still eluded him. For they were both imprisoned in the marble of what I suspect was a n indifferent work of art. Your love for Larry and his for you were as simple and natural as the love of Paolo and Francesca or Romeo and Juliet. Fortunately for you it didn't come to a bad end. You made a rich marriage and Larry roamed the world to find out what song the Sirens sang. Passion didn't enter into it.'
'How d'you know?'
'Passion doesn't count the cost. Pascal said that the heart has its reasons that reason takes no account of. If he meant what I think, he meant that when passion siezes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but conclusive to prove that the world is well lost for love. It convinces you that honour is well sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay. Passion is destructive. It destroyed Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O'Shea. And if it doesn't destroy it dies. It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one's life, that one's brought disgrace upon oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, that one's expended all one's tenderness, poured out all the riches of one's soul on a poor drab, a fool, a peg on which one hung one's dreams, who wasn't worth a stick of chewing gum.'
Before I finished this harangue i knew very well that Isabel wasn't paying any attention to me, but was occupied with her own reflections. But her next remark surprised me.
'Do you think Larry is a virgin?'
'My dear, he's thirty-two.'
'I'm certain he is.'
'How can you be?'
'That's the kind of thing a woman knows instinctively.'
'I knew a young man who had a very prosperous career for some years by convincing one beautiful creature after another that he's never had a woman. He said it worked like a charm.'
'I don't care what you say. I believe in my intuition.'
It was growing late, Gray and Isabel were dining with friends, and she had to dress. I had nothing to do, so I walked in the pleasant spring evening up the Boulevard Raspail. I have never believed very much in women's intuition; it fits in too neatly with what they want to believe to persuade me that it is trustworthy; and as I thought of the end of my long talk with Isabel I couldn't help but laugh.
...'"


- Somerset Maugham in The Razor's Edge



i remember quoting the following to someone in a similar context about what I could never settle for even if it was the most natural thing then:

"love is a pretty poor forecaster
passion leads to disaster
it's something else that makes me sure
our bond will last five decades more"

that was Vikram Seth and it had always stuck in my mind as being very sad. like giving up on all your dreams in a way. simply resigning. a huge compromise.
i wanted passion to sweep me away mercilessly...