The idea of writing these recollections occurred to me when it became clear that it is impossible to convince anybody about my true ego, least of all the woman, with whom I have been living together in marriage for more than thirty three years. People have their own judgment of the surrounding world including their relatives, friends and enemies, partners, sometimes themselves, and the hardest attempt is to try to alter their judgment into something that is more real and nearer to the true nature of surrounding human beings.
To make it more understandable how hard the latest years have been to me, in one of the chapters I give an detailed picture about happenings as they took place really differing from the false image of them as the person in question thinks to see them clearly and takes them for granted. It is left to the common sense of the Reader to decide, if it is convincing or isn’t.
My desire to get close to other people’s minds, to feel what others want or think and how they reach true or false guesses might have come from my parents or grandparents through genes, but my real interest in psychology has been helped to life by a book given as a farewell gift by a very good colleague of mine to show me that my behaviour was not always as right as I believed it had been. This book is The Social Animal by Mr Aronson. First I thought it was to mock me, as she was often of an opinion different from that of mine, we argued much at the same time, as we appreciated each other. When I read it and even more when I took it again into my hands to look up certain things in it, I understood that it was to help me to understand my surroundings better. It became evident then – that has not been so earlier at all – that people were living in a world different from the real one they had been placed in and they were prone to create false images of otherwise real things and relationships to solve mutual problems of their own. That book has opened my eyes more than a thousand ones before. It made me possible to foresee troubles and avoid them. It made me easier to survive hard times as I avoided useless attempts to convince somebody about my ideas as it could be seen clearly that he whose interest is not to be altered would never accept my arguments. Shortly, I became wiser having read and understood that book.
My wife would never accept the fact of my being more honest than she believes it, because it would destroy her images of other people who were or are placed at the top in her mind and whom she considers perfect, but who – and she cannot deny it – made great mistakes. For this reason it is not my duty to do attempts in vain in order to convince her, but to leave her as she desires and to have a lot of patience, so as not to return on her all the rude charges she throws on me.
I feel the relationship between us can never be as good as it has been during the first ten years of our marriage, as it makes her frustrated to look for some proof that could support her doubts and never to find it. But I hope there will always be other problems to be solved in her life that can object her going completely insane.