In any relationship, there is the one who quotes, and the one who consents to be quoted

After my last post about the nature of love, or more specifically the nature of being "in love", I remembered a quote that goes something like this:

In any relationship, there is the one who loves, and the one who consents to be loved.

As with all misanthropic pessimism, it's not quite true, but it contains just enough truth to be poisonously effective. I think the quote sticks with me because it casts those who love as suckers, so I can excuse my own lack of love as "enlightenment".

Ah, the things we tell ourselves in the pursuit of self-justification.

I'd recalled it as being a quote from Rosseau, but of course that name was just one that I more or less completely pulled out of my ass. So I tried googling it. The internet, in its infinite wisdom, suggested that the quote was from Thackeray, Jerome K. Jerome or Somerset Maugham. None of the sources were particularly scholarly, so without any further evidence, I'm going to attribute it to Maugham. It is, after all, exactly the sort of thing that bitter old queen would have said.