During his Berlin years Schopenhauer occasionally mentioned his desire to marry and have a family. For a while he was unsuccessfully courting 17-year-old Flora Weiss, who was 22 years younger than he was. His unpublished writings from that time show that he was already very critical of monogamy but still not advocating polygyny—instead musing about a polyamorous relationship he called "tetragamy". He had an on and off relationship with a young dancer Caroline Richter (she also used the surname Medon after one of her ex-lovers). They met when he was 33 and she was 19 and working at the Berlin Opera. She had already had numerous lovers and a son out-of-wedlock, and later gave birth to another son, this time to an unnamed foreign diplomat. (She soon had another pregnancy but the child was stillborn). As Schopenhauer was preparing to escape Berlin in 1831, due to a cholera epidemic, he offered to take her with him on the condition that she left behind her young son. She refused and he went alone; in his will he left her a significant sum of money but insisted that it should not be in any way spent on her second son.