Have you ever noticed how strongly culture shapes our perception? Cities hold one set of values, the countryside another, and between neighbouring nationalities the differences are more striking still. Here it is fashionable, and psychologically healthy, to separate from your parents and build everything yourself, whereas among more southern peoples that is all but unthinkable. Or take attitudes to family. The further south you go, the earlier it is held that there is no life without it, for a man and for a woman alike. Whereas in Europe it is perfectly normal to marry after thirty and to have children after forty...
Background: The stories are published from the feedback we received and with our clients’ consent. The names have been deliberately changed. At the end you will find a counsellor’s commentary analysing the relationship.
Skip to the counsellor’s commentaryNikolai felt these differences especially keenly, even though he had been born and raised in St Petersburg. His Tatar roots made themselves felt: he sincerely longed for a family, for a home of his own, for comfort, for things to be the way he was used to. In the city he felt lost, unwanted, unsettled somehow. It seemed that nobody now had any need either for a family or for care. The girls rushed about their own business, beautiful, made up, back-combed and sparkling. The lads drank beer, sang songs, revelled in the fleeting moment, content with the light froth on the milk and with no intention whatsoever of building anything serious. He felt almost like the odd one out at this feast of life, where everyone but him had gone mad and where he, with his principles, his skills and his urge to care and to protect, was truly of use to nobody. A gloomy workaholic, sparing with his emotions, working thoroughly and conscientiously, if for a pittance, at an electronics assembly firm; steady and not one to stray... Not fashionable, given how crooked fashion had become. He grew tired of arguing and protesting, and stopped turning it into a joke.
He met Dasha at some party he had ended up at completely by chance, tagging along with friends. He met her and understood: here she was, the ideal. A striking blonde with huge pale blue eyes, a finely sculpted figure and a high but lovely voice. Stylish, sensual, a real princess stepped out of the pages of the book of fairy tales his mother used to read him as a child. The longer he watched her, the clearer it became to him that she was the one, that she was the one he had to win and to care for, and that there could be no half-measures here.
Dasha dreamed of a good match. Of love too, of course, who does not dream of that, but every girl has to know her own worth! You never know: she might go on maternity leave, or make her way in the world... The husband has to be able to clothe her, to shoe her, to buy her jewellery... And to be someone whose home she would not be ashamed to bring her friends to. And in general, let the other paupers try borrowing until payday; she needed a comfortable life! So she paid little attention to a good-looking but altogether unremarkable young man with a slight eastern slant to his eyes, a charming smile, an idiosyncratic sense of humour and a sweet directness. Well, another one had fallen in love; it happens. What? Works in a factory? Not ambitious? What does someone like that need a family for, how would he provide for her? Let him run around after her if he wants to. Dasha would not even mind...
And run around Nikolai did. A week, a month, a second month; with truly mulish persistence and a thoroughness Dasha was not used to. He was always there, supportive, protective, wonderfully funny, and he carried out her whims without a murmur, and to the question “what is it you actually want?” he invariably answered that he wanted to marry her. This was clearly not what Dasha had pictured for herself. Nikolai stood out favourably against the other young men, but... a Tatar, a pauper, with no status and no ambitions.
“And where exactly are you going to find yourself a twenty-five-year-old millionaire?” her mother fumed. “Whereas this one is steady, reliable, good with his hands...”
“Mum, that’s not how I want it,” Dasha argued lazily.
“You don’t know yourself what you want! A fairy-tale prince? You’ve nearly got a psychology degree! How many girls wait for princes like that into old age and end up cuddling stray cats!”
“Well, he’s somehow just not ambitious...”
“And what are you there for? Are you studying for nothing?” her mother snorted. “Listen to a wise woman: try it while you’re young, push him along, and then we’ll see!”
And Dasha made up her mind. She agreed to try marrying Nikolai, but on a number of conditions. First, he would take her surname, since she neither wanted nor was able to pronounce his own. Second, he had to earn well, which would mean leaving the electronics assembly firm. And a number of smaller demands besides. To her surprise and her mother’s delight, Nikolai agreed to every one of them without a murmur. And then Dasha put her education and her skills to use. Having got hold of the full professional version of the famous Holland career test for Nikolai, she announced with considerable astonishment that a brilliant banker might well be dying inside him. Nikolai pulled himself together, took on a couple of odd jobs and managed to pay for a course at a fairly prestigious banking college. And in less than a year he was noticed.
Even before he finished his studies Nikolai began working for one of the city’s large banks, at the same time refusing to provide services to a couple of near-mafia groups. The groups did not take refusals well, so they insistently advised Dasha to persuade her husband. Dasha tried, and discovered just how stubborn and wilful her husband could be when he was certain that he was right. The leaders of the groups turned out to be no less stubborn, so at some point they came for the couple in imposing black jeeps, surrounded by “bodyguards” armed to the teeth. There was nowhere to run, and once again Dasha barely recognised her husband. The whole affair seemed only to amuse him. He agreed to talk to the bosses, and after a short conversation whose content she never did learn, he put his arm round Dasha’s shoulders as if nothing had happened, with the air of a victor and a master, and walked out. Nobody shot, nobody swore, nobody stopped him, and Dasha understood for the first time how well founded her sense of safety beside him was.
Their affairs improved at a phenomenal rate. Dasha exulted, feeling like a prospector who had fished a fist-sized nugget out of the mud. Before long they had a new flat and a fairly impressive foreign car, she always had money for new clothes and her friends looked at her with undisguised envy. Her husband spread his wings, gained confidence, ambition, respect. He demanded unquestioning execution of his orders from his subordinates, took decisive and unconventional steps and earned his bank superprofits. Nobody now would have believed that this same Nikolai had once been an assembly-line worker with no sense of his own worth, gloomy and unsettled. And the main thing was that Nikolai never once looked sideways. As at the beginning of their relationship, only Dasha existed for him. She did not lag behind, applying her psychology training to raising their daughter and to operating successfully on the property market — there she had no equal.
No, their relationship was not cloudless. Dasha would not have been Dasha if she had not nagged her husband every single day over anything at all: he had done this wrong, she had wanted that done differently, she was sick of his rules (which she did not much observe anyway), and why did he work so much when he ought to be at her side, and where would he be without her anyway.
Whether it was the eastern mentality at work or Nikolai’s own principles, every time he would endure her attacks stoically for a long while, until at some point he “exploded”. Though it was hard to call it an explosion: there was none of Dasha’s emotion and chaos in it. On the contrary, these were precisely thought-out and utterly logical counter-attacks, which wound Dasha up all the more. And only when Nikolai suddenly said, quite calmly and without raising his voice, “It will be this way and no other!”, perhaps patting the table lightly with his palm, did Dasha suddenly understand that that was enough for today, fall silent and obediently agree.
Later she used to tell her friends that of course not everything in their family life had always been perfect, but that on the important subjects and questions she and her husband always looked in the same direction. Nikolai is unlikely to have told anyone anything, but it was enough for him that he remembered how Dasha had helped him find himself and find a purpose, which he now served with the greatest pleasure.
Counsellor’s commentary
Nikolai is the manic personality type. The foundation of this personality type is seeing oneself as the sole bearer of the truth, for there is only one truth and he is the one who voices it. At the same time it is the notion that the idea stands above the person, and service to that idea. In order to find this truth of their own, manic people will go into a subject fairly deeply and study a great deal, but their conclusions and results will still be largely “black and white”.
At the beginning of the story Nikolai is lost and tries to make himself less conspicuous, to adapt to a world that runs strongly against his principles. He tries to behave like somebody else, and this non-acceptance of himself plainly makes his life worse. His personality type belongs to the so-called social types, in whom the theme of being unwanted comes out particularly strongly and throws them off balance. Fortunately for him, Dasha appears on the horizon, and what she actually needs is precisely the active version of Nikolai, that is, the way he really is, rather than what he had become through the mismatch between his outer and his inner self.
Dasha’s personality type is hysteroid. Her main traits are a search for over-provision and a constant bid for attention. She plays and sparkles her way through life, racing along the waves of emotion, even if in Dasha’s case studying psychology helped her harmonise to a certain degree.
A hysteroid woman attracts a manic man with her beauty and her emotions, and he attracts her with his status: he will create a protected existence, and besides, up to a certain point the hysteroid woman will be able to steer him. It is that ability to steer that wins Dasha over at the start, so the status turns out to be a pleasant bonus later on.
A manic man is rarely the initiator of a relationship. It can happen if he suddenly becomes aware of his loneliness and of the fact that it is time to start a family. In Nikolai’s case a large part was played by his mentality and his beliefs, reinforced by his truly manic persistence in reaching a goal.
To him Dasha is unpredictable. She can easily breach the rules. Breaching rules brings colour into his life. Dasha, for her part, understands that she has to measure up, that there is a line she must not cross. On this ground they harmonise each other: he has the rule, she has the breaches. By breaching rules she brings colour, and he to some degree brings her up.
This is a partnership relationship of the male type, in which both are forced to negotiate over who is in charge today. And here the manipulations and the bids for attention characteristic of Dasha’s personality type come out in full, and they “dovetail” with the neurotic need of manic people not to let themselves have anything good. For quite a long time she will be able to take it out on Nikolai successfully, playing the one in charge, but sooner or later it will be her turn to compromise, and here a great deal depends on Dasha’s sense of when it is time to stop.
We rarely propose unions of this kind in the Dating Club, where counsellors do the matching, precisely because of how hard they are to harmonise. The story shows how much depended on chance, on luck and on the partners’ ability to come to terms with each other. Even so, Dasha and Nikolai have been together for more than thirty years.
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