Liebesleben

“What induces a self-confident, intelligent woman like Jara to risk her marriage, her family, her job for a man who offers her no prospect of happiness, who treats her badly and with whom there is no future? Is it masochism? Or a strange kind of martyrdom? LOVE LIFE is always a slap in the face for all those who benefit from the fruits of emancipation, whether men or women. But Jara is not a victim. She is neither weak nor blinded by love. She uses Arie to the same extent that she lets him use her, performing a kind of experiment on herself. She hands herself over to him, almost virginal, like a clean blotter sucking up the ink, hungry for experience.

She senses in Arie a kind of predator, a man who will challenge and hurt her, who sees life differently to her, differently to the polite form of indifference that characterizes her life with Joni, her husband. Arie’s apparent independence, his fearlessness, his provocations – all that makes him so seductive that Jara willingly submits, in search of the compelling sense of experiencing life to the absolute full.

I think many women find themselves in constant conflict with the unchanged coordinates of love, in which role attributions continue. There are archaic longings for submission and male dominance that we scarcely like to admit to ourselves because we would like to have overcome them, of course, and because they oppose our self-image of independence and self-determination.” 

Maria Schrader