What Einstein’s Love Letters to His Wife Can Teach Us About Love
His granddaughter Evelyn published 54 letters in the book ‘The Love Letters’ in 1992
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Nobody can define love because everybody experiences it in their own unique way.
Can we learn something from the love-life of Einstein, one of the greatest physicists of all times? These letters are from a happier period in Einstein’s life with Mileva Maric but there was a darker side as well. The original letters are available as a part of Einstein’s papers by Princeton University Press.
His love affair started when were students at the Zurich Polytechnic Institute in 1896. He was 17 and Mileva was 21 at the time.
Then, in the evening and at night, I will kiss you and squeeze you again to my heart’s desire. ~ Einstein’s letter
Albert Einstein married Mileva in 1903, even though his parents objected. She was his companion, colleague, and confidante in the most creative years of his life.
“How was I able to live alone before, my little everything? Without you I lack self-confidence, passion for work, and enjoyment of life — in short, without you, my life is no life.” ~Einstein
After the marriage, he published three of his most important papers on photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and the special theory of relativity in 1905.
Unlike the picture of Einstein the lone, isolated thinker of Princeton, he appears here both as the burgeoning enfant terrible of science and as an amorous young man beset, along with his fiance, by financial and personal struggles — among them the illegitimate birth of their daughter, whose existence is known only by these letters.
Describing his conflicts with professors and other scientists, his arguments with his mother over Maric, and his difficulty obtaining an academic position after graduation, the letters enable us to reconstruct the youthful Einstein with an unprecedented immediacy.
