Don't judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes. And keep in mind that we're looking at all this from almost a century later and that society has moved on quite a bit. Things that my grandparents would have considered perfectly a-ok would look ridiculous to you and me. Context is everything.
In plenty of places in the world this would be an 'amicable arrangement' even today.
Mote, beam, eye etc.
Without knowing what went on before this it is very hard to judge the list. Maybe they reached a stage of armistice and decided to live like this for the sake of their kids. Whatever it was, it spells out tragedy rather than malice.
Even in a modern context, I do not think this list makes Einstein sexist (or a jerk).
If my girlfriend did not work, I would ask her to take care of all the chores and meals (which would probably be, at most, 20 hours a week of work). Accordingly, I do not see items A[1-3] on the list as unreasonable, given his wife was not employed at this period in their life. I also happen to be very particular about my desk area, given I spend most of my sorry life in front of it. :)
Einstein wanted to stay together for the sake of his children, but had clearly fallen out of love with his wife. If you had a lot of work to do, you probably would not want to be bothered with socializing with a person you no longer loved. He gave her the best options he could - even after she left him, he paid her half his salary and gave her his Nobel Prize money (which was enough to buy three houses, among other things), even though this was not legally required.
Mostly, this just seems like a list by a man who wants to be left alone so he can work, not a bad person.
I find your comment to be belittling. The amount of chores one does is inversely proportional to the amount of money brought home?
"If my girlfriend did not work" is a shorthand for something else. I think it's shorthand for "sit around being lazy all day", which is an emotional decision and not the overt economical one. If your girlfriend is going to school full-time, then that's not work. Would you expect her to put in up to 20 hours of chores and meals on top of her studies? I don't think so.
Ahh, but perhaps you also meant to include potentially income-generating work (like studies) along with income-generating work?
Which then means that if your girlfriend gets disability pay then she doesn't have to do as many chores, right? Since even if she watches the TV all day she's still bringing in some money, as a consequence of work she's already done. (This can be extended to living off of a trust fund, or off royalty income.)
If you had children then would she also need to spend 100% of her time raising the children, on top of the chores? At what point do you start helping? Can you assign a monetary value on that?
Or, if you were making $1 million per year, then would you still request that she do all of the chores and meals? Because then it feels petty, when you could easily hire others to do it instead, and she can pursue her life's dream of developing free online education courses.
In the modern context, the delegation of chores is based on a combination of factors, including available time, interest in doing so, and tolerance of what happens when it isn't done. If you don't like it and can't deal with it, then you break up. In the modern context, breaking up or even getting a divorce is a simple task with little social stigma. Hence you have very little power over your girlfriend. If you "ask her to take care of all the chores and meals" then she can say "no", and leave.
100 years ago there was a much higher power imbalance. The woman couldn't easily say "no" and leave, even if the demands of the man were unreasonable, because it was much harder for her to have a normal life post-separation than for him.
In any case, simply saying "if my girlfriend did not work" is belittling because it assumes that work is the only thing that's important in a relationship, and it's secondarily gender biased because men tend to have higher incomes than women.
This is the kind of reasoning that drives me insane. When most men say "if my girlfriend didn't work, she should do more chores" that is exactly what they mean. That's it. As for studies, nobody was talking about that, so it is irrelevant. This isn't even a man vs woman thing, the same logic could be replied in reverse if I were staying home with the kids and my wife was bringing home the bacon.
And I'm saying that the view should be "if my girlfriend doesn't help maintain the relationship, then I'm leaving, and if I'm too demanding in what I need from the relationship then she leaves." This only works if there's no stigma associated with breaking up, which is the modern view. (Not only that, but I support nationalized health care in part so that each person in a relationship can leave without being dependent on the other person's insurance or other medical coverage.)
Therefore, I do not think it's proper to reduce the issue to a trade-off between working vs. doing more chores, because that provide no insight into the underlying complications of a relationship.
I gave some clear counter-examples for why that simple viewpoint may not be reasonable: non-work based income (e.g., disability pay or trust fund), going to school, or simply that the other person is making enough money that they can easily hire people to do the work. My wife, btw, gets disability from the Army and is going to school full-time, so I can easily relate here.
I can give more examples. Suppose the wife has a take-home pay of $45K and the husband wants to be a concert pianist, but there are no jobs open in the area. So the husband practices 6+ hours a day (in the expectation of a job for the future). Is that non-paying practice "working"? What if that husband also does occasional piano lessons at $15/hour, bringing in $150/week? Are chores now exempt because there is some paying work?
Let's say that the wife has a take-home pay of $88K, which is easily enough to support a couple, only the wife wants a larger house while the husband wants to volunteer full-time at the local animal shelter. The wife could demand that since she brings home the family income then he should do more chores around the house. In that way they wouldn't have to pay the house cleaner to come in, pay for laundry services, nor buy as much take-out, and so save up in order to buy a bigger house (which the husband would then need to clean). That she can demand such is clear.
But it's also clear that the underlying issue here isn't "doing chores" vs. "bringing home the bacon." So saying that "If my girlfriend did not work, I would ask her to take care of all the chores and meals" is a uselessly simple statement. And I don't even think it's true for you or for the original poster.
Suppose you become seriously ill and can't work for a year. Your wife gets a job, while you're unable to do all but the most basic of chores at home. Would your inability to do the rest of the chores be sufficient justification for your wife to divorce you? I didn't think so. Though in truth, it is stressful and quite a few marriages don't survive this sort of incident, I don't think the main reason is that one person couldn't do all of the chores while the other works.
You seem to be inserting a lot of hypotheticals here.
I don't remember the GGP saying anything about "chores will be distributed inversely proportional to % of household income provided".
Since we have no reason to believe that the poster was rich enough to hire somebody to do all the chores and that neither him nor his spouse had a disability that would prevent them from performing chores we can assume that he simply meant "if she would otherwise be idle I would expect her to help with chores".
Of course I am. I don't like the "Even in a modern context". That statement papers over all the details that show why the statement is useless as a means to understand the modern context. My hypotheticals are examples of how that view cannot be applied to many modern contexts.
You complain about hypotheticals. This whole tangent started with the hypothetical "if she would otherwise be idle" so it isn't like I started it. But you'll see that I also gave a non-hypothetical. My wife doesn't work. I do. She goes to school full-time and gets disability money from the army. Should she do all of the household chores because I'm the one who is earning the money? Maybe. If she wants to. But it's not predicated on that I'm the one making the money and she isn't.
The disagreement between me and others here seems to be because there are two issues at play: one is the personal view of the commenter, regarding what that commenter expects from a relationship, and the other the extension of that view to others.
The former I find somewhat crude and distasteful but acceptable because breaking up or getting a divorce has much less of a stigma than 100 years ago. It's the expansion of that view as a generally acceptable cultural goal or justification that I'm complaining about.
I mentioned "chores will be distributed inversely proportional to % of household income provided" as an example how the commenter's view is not a useful guideline. The view is absolute: if the girlfriend doesn't work then she should spend not more than 20 hours a week doing chores. My question - meant to highlight the useless of that guideline - is: if the girlfriend works for 1 hour a month, does that mean she doesn't need to do any chores? Almost certainly not. But the guideline says nothing about how to handle that case, which means it's a rather overly specific guideline.
(Now excuse me. I need to put the next load of wash on the line. It's my turn to do laundry. :) )
I really don't understand your point. Different households are always going to have different arrangements regards things like chores.
I don't think the original comment said anything along the lines of "here is an equation that everyone needs to apply in order to decide who does the dishes".
Just that if you have a situation where one person has significantly more free time than the other it wouldn't seem unreasonable to expect them to do more chores. Of course in real life there can always extra variables that complicate things. These things usually manifest themselves as domestic arguments, so are best discussed up front.
He never mentions money when talking about their pre-seperation life. The post you're replying to is clearly a discussion of time, not money, and you've somehow twisted it into "The amount of chores one does is inversely proportional to the amount of money brought home?". Stop trolling.
s/girlfriend/mother/g and is it still unreasonable? Your widowed mother lives with you, and doesn't have job or enough income to live on her own - do you kick her out if she doesn't make you meals three times a day?
I get the feeling you're reading between the lines and that the original comment was made to be reversible (if his girlfriend worked full-time and he stayed at home, he would expect himself to have 20h of housework as well).
I don't think it is belittling - I would gladly do the same as well. In fact, during the period of time my girlfriend was going to school, I did all of the chores because her degree was very stressful (high cost, high rate of failure) -- despite working fulltime myself.
Respectfully (!), your conclusion relies on a fallacy (perhaps more than one type). This type of fallacy is called an "argument from silence", in which you make an assumption based on a lack of information provided:
Agree with you. Otherwise, it was totally puzzling to me a simplistic, judgmental view calling him a jerk as a top comment.
Don't know how many people have been married a long time here (i.e. > 10 years). Looking at the responses, it seems to me not that many.
Thankfully, my marriage is several orders better than his was. But still I can perhaps see where the conditions are coming from.
Just to take an example - C(3) - you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.
I can see that for whatever reasons any fights between a husband (who works from home) and wife start when the husband is nicely all set to begin the day's work. It may be over a trivia discussion (perhaps because the husband has some work related frustration) or it could be the result of something building up. Now as a husband who is working from home, does not even have the choice to go to work elsewhere, in such a situation. And the argument/discussion/fight won't end until one person leaves the place. And countless hours can get lost, for a trivia thing.
Since I seem to be the target of this comment I'll respond.
Einstein was human. The purpose of using the phrases "womanizer" and "demanding jerk" was emotional -- we think of our heroes in pure terms. To associate them with negative judgmental phrases (such that we might easily use with anybody else in the world we meet) causes us distress.
And from what I understand, Einstein chased women all his life, even during his second marriage. How he and his second wife got along with this is anybody's guess.
But to focus on Einstein or his faults (or my easy judgement of him) is to miss the point. We read this list and we feel disjointed -- cognitive dissonance. How can such a great man speak like this to one who loves him? The reaction shouldn't be to start naval-gazing at our on judgment of others. The reaction should be to realize that we have only a very simple and cartoonish view of the world. People who did a lot of good in the world had some really big flaws. People who did a lot of evil in the world had redeeming qualities. If we really want to understand these folks, we need to see them in their own terms, not how mass media portrays them.
Perhaps some folks want to canonize some and demonize others. I much prefer to live in a world full of folks just like me -- human. The more I start glossing over faults? The more I'm missing out on all the good parts of history.
Look. Einstein was a womanizer. Galileo was a bit of a jerk. Newton was unhealthily obsesses with numbers. Martin Luther King Jr also chased women. Hell Nash was officially certifiable. If the only thing you get out of all my statements is that I'm judgmental, you're missing the point. Worse yet your'e missing all the good stuff, the parts of history people don't talk about. I'm not saying these men are bad; I'm saying they're just like the rest of us.
The problem isn't a judgment per se, it is judging based on evidence ripped completely out of time and place. Context is missing here and without that context you really can't say at all whether this was either a jerk making demands or someone exhibiting the patience of a saint. Even with a biography as a guide you still can't make a call like that.
The private affairs between two people are best left alone unless you get an active invitation from both participants to state what you think, and even then you're going to have to work really hard to figure out what an objective viewpoint would be. Judging is easy, deciding when explicitly not to judge is a lot harder.
I think we are talking past each other. If I knew Einstein, if he were alive today, then certainly what you say is true. Additionally, if I were trying to impeach him or his works, such as the attacks that Thomas Jefferson gets when we talk about slavery, then you would also have a point.
But I'm not trying to slander the man, I'm trying to understand him.
When I was a kid I used to be interested in General Patton of WWII. After a long spell of hero worship, I came to know more and more about the man. Finally I had an epiphany: he was really an asshole. Men who were under his command would have shot him. Many times. The people he reported to could barely manage him. He was an arrogant, self-centered, SOB.
But that didn't make Patton bad. That made Patton interesting. Yes, he was a son of a bitch, but damnit, he was our son of a bitch. :)
Understanding other human beings is the primary goal of biography. Of course one can never live entirely in another's shoes, but humans were then much as they are now, and we can gain much from trying to understand them more fully. A hundred years within the same culture and language is not so vast a chasm.
It would be a mistake to use this one letter to judge this one man through the lens of our times, which is what I think you're objecting to. Certainly that's not good history. But viewed within the context of the other things we know about him, it is much more revealing, and an interesting counterpoint to the hero/villain-narrative we reflexively grant famous people.
You can try to make it ridiculous but I actually was not aiming at anything 'deep' or philosophical, merely indicating that there is a problem with the method used to gain the required level of understanding.
I think you can actually understand others, but you're going to have to interact (like we do right here) with those people that you wish to understand.
Trying to understand people that have been dead for quite a while from (very terse) writings made in a stressful situation almost a century old is a very difficult undertaking. The lack of access to the subject, the distortion of social mores over time and more things like that make this from a practical point of view very hard.
At best this will give you fractional insights into aspects of their character it will never allow you to say 'x is a jerk' or anything to that effect. There would have to be significant qualification of that statement.
No, we can never really know any historical figure or event. The most we can do is try to learn what we can and hope that it has an emotional impact on us. If you really want a historical person to have the most influence possible in your life, you should strive to learn both the good and bad things about them -- not in terms of dates and facts, but in terms of how they thought about things.
Reading about historical figures should be an emotional experience. You should try to empathize and feel the things they felt. This is, of necessity going to cause you some discomfort as well.
Not only is it possible to say "X is a jerk", but it is necessary. Otherwise people from the past are just little cardboard cutouts in a sea of data. Fan of Plato? Then you should not only know his works, you should have a personal feeling of how you view the way he thinks about things. Yes, this is imaginary, but it's also necessary. History is not just a list of famous guys doing things on certain dates. It's something you, personally, should use your imagination to dive into and enjoy.
History is fun. People are complex. We use our imagination and comprehension and passion to drive us towards better understanding of historical figures and their actions. This is the good part.
I'll bow out. Seems like you are making some other kind of point about really knowing what's in the heart of others and judging those we may never culturally understand. That really has nothing to do with anything. I say grab onto somebody in history you admire and dive deep into their personal and emotional life. Make your own judgments, ask yourself how you would have acted in similar circumstances. Learn and respect both the good and the bad. Have passion.
interacting with people in person doesn't remove the context problem
the context in which you interact with someone changes how you know that person
the same person (everyone, you included) will seem like a different person based on whether they are interacting with a collegue, a supervisor, an underling, an employee at McDonalds, a waiter at a fancy restaurant, an old friend, a stranger, a child, a parent etc. etc.
alot of the people you view favorably, you probably do so because the context of your relationship is mutual respect, those people probably have relationships that aren't in those context, and the people in them probably have quite different views of those people.
if "knowing" a person is actually possible, it might be easier to do so from the prospective of 100 years of distance and a biography than from the extreme closeup of personal interaction
>The problem isn't a judgment per se, it is judging based on evidence ripped completely out of time and place. Context is missing here and without that context you really can't say at all whether this was either a jerk making demands or someone exhibiting the patience of a saint.
You make it sound like some mysterious quantum dynamics problem.
There is _already_ plenty of context for making a judgement call in this case. It's not like they lived in another galaxy, in a society with extremely different cultural norms.
We know the norms of the era they lived, we have other people as examples from that time, and we even know (or have known) people that were alive back then. It's not like we're missing some mysterious information that changes all this into something else.
We're not talking about Andromeda. This is planet earth, a western society, a highly educated man, less than a century ago.
Heck, those of us who know History, we can make judgement calls even for millennia before.
The situation isn't [described as] "How can such a great man speak like this to one who loves him?" - it's the situation where the love-marriage has ended, and they are staying together for the kids and for practical reasons only.
Look around at all the exceptional people of our time. Jobs. Ellison. Every gifted, and I mean truly gifted, person I know or know about had a bizarre upbringing or background, and the vast majority of them are complete jerks. To rise above what is normal, it really helps if you are not given normal upbringing and stimuli early in life. And, when that is the case, you will likely step outside the bounds of what normal society views as acceptable behavior. Jobs is the best example from our time. By his own authorized biography, he was a complete asshole, but he did amazing things.
Apple did amazing things, it's somewhat unfair to give all the credit to Steve Jobs. NeXT didn't exactly do very well. There was something magical about the combination of people, from designers, to technologists to the supply chain optimization that made all the fancy ideas reality. It wasn't just Jobs, he steered the ship, he was its figurehead, but he, and his team did amazing things.
I agree re not judging. I made the mistake a very long time ago to assume that I understood someone else's relationship and gave them advice on what I thought was an obvious matter. After a decade my friend is now happily married to that same person with amazing kids and a wonderful life. It's become clear to me that there are two sides to a relationship and no one except the participants will ever understand it.
So I think the important thing to understand when reading this is that we have zero context - and perhaps worse because all we know are Einstein's works.
Without knowing what went on before this it is very hard to judge the list.
On the other hand, the list is perfect to figure out what had happened before: their home was a mess, meals were spotty, there were frequent discussions that prevented him from work and she belittled him in front of their children.
That's not to say that the situation was her fault.
It isn't perfect. It's a list of complaints, and it could be entirely false. The home could have been spotless, but Einstein, besotted with dreams of how much better life would be with his cousin (and future second wife), complained anyway.
I had a relationship once where (and this is my perhaps incorrect, post hoc attempt at understanding what happened) my girlfriend didn't want to be the one who broke up, so she made more and more demands on me until finally I had enough. The demands in the list could be indicative of that sort of behavior, and not a true description of the situation.
Don't judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes. And keep in mind that we're looking at all this from almost a century later and that society has moved on quite a bit. Things that my grandparents would have considered perfectly a-ok would look ridiculous to you and me. Context is everything.
In plenty of places in the world this would be an 'amicable arrangement' even today.
Mote, beam, eye etc.
Without knowing what went on before this it is very hard to judge the list. Maybe they reached a stage of armistice and decided to live like this for the sake of their kids. Whatever it was, it spells out tragedy rather than malice.