Note: To read before the wedding. Yury Gurkov

      People just should not be allowed to go in the registry office (even to submit an application) in case they had never read such books. If I was there, I would give them a special, carefully prepared, test with questions right on the doorstep. How much do they know about each other? How many weaknesses have they noticed? What do they expect from each other? And if a young couple of two loving hearts scores few points – marching orders! They cannot go into. They cannot make such mistakes. Of course, it sounds categorically, but the reason for this – are endless successive failures and setbacks in choosing a husband.

      Negative results of passing such a test would help young people at least to take a detached view. Whom have they chosen as a future husband or wife? Maybe it is not right decision at all or it is still very, very early to get married!

      One of the goals of the book is to give young people the opportunity to take a fresh look at the future spouse, to see him, to understand his "inner filling" as fully as possible at this point in life. After all, there may be new habits and worse manifestations. Few people get better as the years go by because self-improvement is a real hard work to do. So that "it would not be tormenting painfully" for the unhappily lived years, so that your risks with this person were clear – what can he do that is not acceptable to you, in what ways are you not the same as he or she and what will you have to endure year after year. Knowing your risks, knowing what you have to put up with, – it would be much easier to take this path. Then you would not be strongly surprised, have a temper tantrum, pose the question point – black, complain to your friends or parents, and seek consolidation in wine, saying to yourself: "I wish I knew what he is like." Forewarned is forearmed for family life!

      An even greater aim of our narration is to talk to adults who know life, who have experienced themselves in the marriage or in more marriages. The message is addressed to them – children need to be taught in the matter of choosing a second half. Adults have to talk with them, explain many issues, discuss their beliefs and hopes, and shape their views together, wisely directing from situation to situation. The analysis of current situations in the child's personal life or situations in the family is a great material for learning. For example, friendship with boys. Please try to discuss how the daughter sees her friend, how she evaluates his actions, whether she sees the reasons for such actions, especially bad or half-hearted. Even if your adult, personal experience in a relationship or marriage is negative or has brought disappointments, tell your child why and how did you make mistakes, why did you make wrong decisions, and what happened. The negative experience of parents will be the part which the child will try to avoid in his own life, especially if you talk about it and have a confidential communication with the child. Although in the interview, which we will soon move on to, there is an example of a daughter repeating the mistakes of a mother with an early pregnancy.

      Can we imagine that parents would not teach a child to treat older people with respect? Just imagine for a second: a child, not knowing what to do, do not understand the situation when he or she sees an elderly person in a transport or other place, he/she just sits quietly, does not stand up for an old woman, for example. After all, the understanding that it is necessary to stand up, appears precisely because of a set of measures and actions in childhood. Parents always talk about this and make sure that the child does not violate these established norms in relation to older people. They set an example by their own actions, politeness to them in conversations, etc. The child absorbs this and acts in adult life in the same way independently. As a result, there is education – and also there is a result at its core.

      Now let's switch over to education, which is not yet available or sometimes it is practically absent. And if parents do not teach their children, then there is no result. How to find out what the person who is next to you is like, especially when you are in a relationship with him/ her? Parents often cannot teach, because no one has prepared them. Nobody told them they need to analyze every detail. What kind of things do you have to know in the pre-wedding relationship with the future spouse? Parents often have only their own negative experience. And do you know how many cases of several marriages and divorces are there? This shows the thorny path and the lack of the same set of measures that you need to teach your child. These divorces reveal clearly unacceptable character traits, habits, and shortcomings of the parent's own upbringing in order to maintain a happy family construction.

      Young people need to understand this «science» before the wedding. They still have a chance to avoid mistakes, to part with their possible dangerous future, where divorces kill the naivety and euphoria of falling in love. And it will be also useful for the older generation to enroll and finish this life university for the sake of the happiness of their children and grandchildren.

      In a good continuation of these questions, the child's upbringing should be boiled down to systematic conversations, analysis of actions, their reasons, criteria for family happiness, and the ability to evaluate a person in a relationship in a balanced way, compiling information of what is not even always visible or deliberately hidden. Such education, as well as its other directions, will be more successful if parents take care of each other every day. If parents are able to drop some voltage across their communication, sacrifice themselves for the sake of the second half in everything and in all the little things. It is noted that if you do not analyze with the child these beautiful manifestations of love in the form of parents' care for each other, or vice versa, negative manifestations, such moments may remain unnoticed until the child grows up and begins to understand the reasons for things. But it can take years, decades, in which your child will get his or her bumps and abrasions.

      Funny stories are also suitable, especially if they remain in the memory as a stopper or a skew in the relationship. One of these cases occurred in Ukraine, when the mother of an 18-year-old girl tried to control every step of her daughter and exclude the continuation, in which only the skirt is mentioned from the girl's clothing (there is a proverb in Russia – to bring a child in the skirt/hem – which means to have a child before the wedding, it is always used in the negative meaning). The girl was going on a first date and could not help but tell her mother about it. And guess what! Her mother made the "only right" decision – she went on a date with her daughter! She wanted to look at the gentleman and to ask him to return her daughter home by the appointed time. The guy had no choice; he clearly remembered the eyes of the future potential mother-in-law, her possible reaction which would be like thunderstorm and lightning, if he was suddenly late for the appointed hour to bring the girl home. The hypothetical mother-in-law took another step on the next date, when the boy came for the girl to her home. She forced the guy to write an acknowledgement that he agrees to return her daughter by the time and not a minute later. The guy again lost the chance of choice, because he wrote and got a chance to date a girl, even under the hood of his mother-in-law. Their relationship soon ended when the guy casually told his mother that he had to write receipts for dates, and his mother was able to explain to him what lies ahead if the hypothetical mother-in-law becomes just a mother-in-law. It is funny and amusing, but when such