is more attractive? It is like the case of the Barbie doll: once a new version is on the market, the old one is exchanged for it.
You mean, we separate prematurely?
We enter into a relationship because we expect satisfaction from it. If we feel that another person will give us more satisfaction, we end the current relationship and begin a new one. The beginning of a relationship requires an agreement between two people; ending it only takes one person. This means that both partners live in constant fear of being abandoned, of being discarded like a jacket that has fallen out of fashion.
Well, that is part of the nature of any agreement.
Sure. But in earlier times it was almost impossible to break off a relationship, even if it was not satisfying. Divorce was difficult, and alternatives to marriage practically non-existent. You suffered, yet you stayed together.
And why would the freedom to separate be worse than the compulsion to stay together and be unhappy?
You gain something but also lose something. You have more freedom, but you suffer from the fact that your partner also has more freedom. This leads to a life in which relationships and partnerships are formed on the model of hire purchase. Someone who can leave ties behind does not need to make an effort to preserve them. Human beings are only considered valuable as long as they provide satisfaction. This is based on the belief that lasting ties get in the way of the quest for happiness.
And that, as you say in Liquid Love, your book on friendship and relationships, is erroneous.
It is the problem of ‘liquid love’. In turbulent times, you need friends and partners who do not let you down, who are there for you when you need them. The desire for stability is important in life. The 16-billion-dollar valuation for Facebook is based on that need not to be alone. But, at the same time, we dread the commitment of becoming involved with someone and getting tied down. The fear is that of missing out on something. You want a safe harbour, but at the same time you want to have a free hand.
For sixty-one years you were married to Janina Lewinson, who died in 2009. In her memoir, A Dream of Belonging, she writes that, after your first encounter, you never left her side. Each time, you exclaimed ‘what a happy coincidence’ it was that you had to go where she wanted to go! And when she told you that she was pregnant, you danced in the street and kissed her – while wearing your Polish Army captain’s uniform, which caused something of a stir. Even after decades of marriage, Janina writes, you still sent her love letters. What constitutes true love?
When I saw Janina, I knew at once that I did not need to look further. It was love at first sight. Within nine days I had proposed to her. True love is that elusive but overwhelming joy of the ‘I and thou’, being there for one another, becoming one, the joy of making a difference in something that is important not only to you. To be needed, or even perhaps irreplaceable, is an exhilarating feeling. It is difficult to achieve. And it is unattainable if you remain in the solitude of the egotist who is only interested in himself.
Love demands sacrifice, then.
If the nature of love consists in the inclination always to stand by the object of your love, to support it, to encourage and praise it, then a lover must be prepared to put self-interest in second place, behind the loved one – must be prepared to consider his or her own happiness as a side-issue, a side-effect of the happiness of the other. To use the Greek poet Lucian’s words, the beloved is the one to whom one ‘pledges one’s fate’. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, within a loving relationship, altruism and egotism are not irreconcilable opposites. They unite, amalgamate and finally can no longer be distinguished or separated from each other.
The American writer Colette Dowling dubbed women’s fear of independence the ‘Cinderella complex’. She calls the yearning for security, warmth and being-cared-for a ‘dangerous emotion’ and urges her fellow women not to deprive themselves of their freedom. Where do you disagree with this admonition?
Dowling warned against the impulse to care for others and thus to lose the possibility of jumping, at will, on the latest bandwagon. It is typical of the private utopias of the cowboys and cowgirls of the consumer age that they demand an enormous degree of freedom for themselves. They think the world revolves around them, and the performances they aim for are solo acts. They can never get enough of that.
The Switzerland in which I grew up was not a democracy. Until 1971, women – that is, half of the population – did not have the vote. The principle of equal pay for equal work is still not established, and women are under-represented in boardrooms. Are there not any number of good reasons for women to get rid of their dependencies?
Equal rights in these areas are important. But there are two movements within feminism that must be distinguished. One of them wants to make women indistinguishable from men. Women are meant to serve in the army and go to war, and they ask: why are we not allowed to shoot other people dead when men are permitted to do so? The other movement wants to make the world more feminine. The military, politics, everything that has been created, was created by men for men. A lot of what is wrong today is the result of that fact. Equal rights – of course. But should women simply pursue the values that have been created by men?
Is this not a decision that, in a democracy, must be left to women themselves?
Well, in any case, I do not expect that the world would be very much better if women functioned the same way that men did and do.
In the early years of your marriage you were a house-husband avant la lettre. You did the cooking and looked after two little children while your wife worked in an office. That was rather unusual in the Poland of those days, wasn’t it?
It wasn’t all that unusual, even though Poland was a conservative country. In that respect, the communists were revolutionary, because they considered men and women to be equal as workers. The novelty about communist Poland was that a large number of women worked in factories or offices. You needed two incomes at the time in order to provide for a family.
That led to a change in the position of women and thus to a change in relations between the sexes.
It was an interesting phenomenon. The women tried to understand themselves as economic agents. In the old Poland, the husband had been the sole provider, responsible for the whole family. In fact, however, women made an enormous contribution to the economy. Women took care of a lot of the work, but it did not count and was not translated into economic value. Just to give an example, when the first laundrette opened in Poland, making it possible to have someone else wash one’s dirty laundry, this saved people an enormous amount of time. I remember that my mother spent two days a week doing the washing, drying and ironing for the whole family. But women were reluctant to make use of the new service. Journalists wanted to know why. They told the women that having someone else do their laundry was much cheaper than them doing it themselves. ‘How come?’, the women exclaimed, presenting the journalists with a calculation showing that the overall cost of washing powder, soap and fuel for the stoves used for heating up the water was lower than that of having everything washed at the laundrette. But they had not included their labour in the calculation. The idea that their labour also had its price did not occur to them.
That was no different in the West.
It took several years before society got used to the fact that the household work done by women also had a price tag attached. But by the time people had become aware of this, there were soon only very few families with traditional housewives.
