A woman named Dunya has sought marital advice from me for the past few months. Her marriage has gone from one full of excitement to one full of monotony and routines. As time has gone on, Dunya has described herself as drifting away from her husband.

Dunya described her first encounters with her husband, Razumikhin, as highly emotional. She met him while she dealt with her brother’s mental breakdown and a terrible engagement simultaneously. Razumikhin was there to support her and her family both emotionally and financially. Dunya told me that this was when she began to grow close to Razumikhin. After she left her former fiancé, Razumikhin proposed that they open a printing business together. There, they fell in love and married. This happiness lasted for several years before Dunya started coming to see me.

After I looked at how this relationship started, I could already identify several problems. Dunya met her current husband during a very emotional time in her life, and it was these emotions that brought them together. They did not take the time to get to know each other; instead they mistook the connection they felt through this emotional time as love. As she dealt with her problems with her fiancé and her brother, she felt supported by Razumikhin and decided that was enough to base a relationship off of.

Dunya started to see me after she felt the spark was lost between her and Razumikhin. After they opened their printing business they had less and less to talk about. Their discussions quickly turned to topics such as the weather, current affairs, and financial issues. These are not very interesting topics to discuss, and Dunya explained that she started to avoid conversations with her husband. As she did this, Razumikhin started to pester her with questions on why she felt so distant. This just served to annoy Dunya, despite the fact her husband was just trying to help.

The problem here was that Dunya and Razumikhin have not found any similar interests which they can discuss. Instead they are stuck in a mundane printing job and discuss bland topics such as the weather. This dull lifestyle does not match up with the exciting, emotionally charged times in which they met. They no longer have that excitement bringing them together, and without that they have no passion for each other. My recommendation for Dunya is to find out what interests her husband has and if she shares any of them. If she can find some common interest between them it will help bring them closer together and make their lives more interesting than one long conversation on how cloudy it is outside. Another suggestion I have for Dunya is to suggest a vacation somewhere. If she can introduce some of the excitement that she and her husband felt at the beginning of their marriage they might be able to recapture feelings of intimacy.

The last suggestion I had for Dunya involved her personality. She complained about how Razumikhin pestered her with questions about how he could help bring them closer because she is a very independent woman. She wanted to be able to fix her problems on her own. At the same time, Razumikhin has just known the role of the knight in shining armor. He has stepped in to provide for Dunya from the moment he met her and has grown accustomed to that. Dunya must communicate with her husband and let him know that she does not want to be the damsel in distress all the time. If she explains that to her husband and lets him know that she will come to him if she needs help, she can regain some of that independence and self sufficiency that she craves.

Dunya’s marriage is the classic example of a romance based off of circumstances rather than feelings. If she is going to save her marriage she must follow my advice to communicate with her husband, and find something they have in common. This could reignite a flame in their relationship, but I am not fully optimistic. They may have nothing in common and merely sought a connection during emotional times, and now that reality has set in, it might be best to move on.