DMax Zeller’s partner puts his clothes out for him every morning. T-shirt, underpants and socks, colour-coordinated. “If I put on a light T-shirt, dark socks and colorful underpants, she says: ‘You can’t go out like that,'” says the engineer. Arguing against it is useless. “She knows better. My opinion is irrelevant. She thinks that without her I wouldn’t be able to live, that I would starve and the apartment would be dirty.” Zeller finds himself being oppressed all the time. In addition, his partner does not listen to his concerns. His job is very demanding, he has vision problems and circulatory problems, “but she always says: pull yourself together”. In the meantime, Zeller has withdrawn from his partner. But he doesn’t want to break up just yet. He’s 35, it would be his sixth breakup, and he doesn’t want to be alone.
Henrike Bergmann, who, like Max Zeller, actually has a different name, recently pulled the ripcord. After more than ten years, she broke up with her partner because it finally became clear to her that he did not have the same idea of a relationship as she did. She had met him on an online dating site after two long failed relationships and thought he was finally the one. Just like her, he was very successful professionally, was very responsive to her and had a lot of understanding for her situation as a single parent. And he kept surprising her: a picnic out of the blue, a spontaneous short trip over the weekend when her daughter was with her father.
