15/11/2025
When Marguerite Duras said that one must be very fond of men to love them, she wasn’t being cruel or cynical. She was being honest. She was pointing to the gap between affection and endurance, that strange space where love actually lives. Fondness, for her, wasn’t a shallow liking. It was the deep, almost humorous patience that allows love to survive the daily irritations of being human together.
Marguerite Duras understood that people, especially the men in her world, could be exasperating. She had lived through a century that gave men most of the power and women most of the waiting. Yet she refused to turn bitterness into her only lens. Instead, she looked at love with a kind of exhausted tenderness. To love, she seemed to say, you have to start from a place of forgiveness. You have to like the person enough to withstand their noise, their ego, their fragility.
Her own life was filled with contradictions that shaped this view. Born in French Indochina, she grew up between cultures and carried that sense of distance all her life. She joined the Resistance during the war, watched the world fall apart, and then wrote stories that examined what was left of people afterward. In her writing, men are often lost, unsure, sometimes cruel, sometimes helpless. Women are the ones who see clearly but suffer for it. It’s not that Marguerite Duras despised men. It’s that she saw them without illusion.
That’s what makes her line so piercing. She’s not mocking men; she’s acknowledging how hard it is to love anyone when you see them truthfully. Love, for Marguerite Duras, isn’t built on fantasy. It’s built on persistence. You have to keep choosing fondness, again and again, even when the person in front of you becomes unbearable. That’s the quiet heroism of intimacy.
In ‘The Lover’, her most famous work, this idea runs deep. The relationship at the heart of the story isn’t romantic in the traditional sense. It’s complicated, uneven, sometimes painful. Yet it’s real because it’s grounded in the contradictions of desire and power. The young girl and the older man don’t understand each other completely, but they see each other in a way that no one else does. That seeing, with all its discomfort, is what she calls love.
Her quote lingers because it strips love of its decoration. It reminds us that affection isn’t about perfection but about endurance and humor. It’s about being able to laugh, to sigh, to stay. Her world is one where love is both a burden and a grace, something you carry because you’ve chosen to, not because it’s easy.
And maybe that’s the truth she offers us: to love anyone deeply, you have to like them first, even when they drive you mad. Fondness is what keeps love from collapsing under the weight of reality. Marguerite Duras knew that love isn’t sustained by passion alone. It’s sustained by the small, stubborn decision to keep caring when it would be simpler not to.
