With women who do not love us, as with the “missing”, the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent our continuing to wait for news. 

And similarly lovers, who look upon it from their enclosure in a contrary state of mind, who have not begun yet to make trial of it, are unable to believe in the healing power of renunciation.

And this resistance was costing me steadily less and less, because, however much one may love the poison that is destroying one, when one has compulsorily to do without it, and has had to do without it for some time past, one cannot help attaching a certain value to the peace of mind which one had ceased to know, to the absence of emotion and suffering.

— Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Chapter 6