Einstein's list of conditions for staying together with his wife

Don't forget the balkans have been destroyed multiple times by nationalistic wars, most recently in the Former Yugoslavia, so nationalistic sentiments may be more prominent.

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.

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.

And I wasn't judging you either ;)

> I'm trying to understand him.

You may have to simply live with not being able to. Both because of a lack of cultural connection and because you weren't there when it happened.