Family studies

Linh asked Trường:

• Why did you quit your job when you had such a good one? Is there some secret work?
  Trường replied:
• Not a secret, but there is work. I've come home to ask my parents to keep feeding me so I can do my own research project.
• Haven't your parents had enough? They raised you through a master's degree and you still ask them for meals?
• Luckily my parents are fairly well off and they love me, so they indulge whatever I ask. They only ask me to hurry up, get married and give them grandchildren, many grandchildren. It is precisely because of that request that I had to quit my job and throw myself into research.
  Linh asked in surprise:
• I don't understand what you're saying. Marrying, quitting, research, what do you mean?
• It means this. Getting married means starting a family. Then I become a husband and the one I marry is a wife. If my wife has a child, I become a father and my wife becomes a mother. The babies born become children...
• Have you had your nerves checked lately?
• There's nothing wrong with me, I haven't finished. We want our family, made up of husband, wife and children, to be happy. When we love someone, we all feel that if we marry that person we will have a happy family. But when I went around asking about 100 families, the answer was that none of them were happy. They said that once you start a family you face countless unexpected situations, and you were never prepared with the psychological knowledge to face them. The result is that they handle them wrongly and make the family even less happy.
  I thought that if I started a family I would surely fall into similar circumstances too, not knowing how to resolve them, and the family would not be happy. I want to study all those situations, find solutions for each case and record them in a handbook, so that later, after I start a family, whatever situation comes up I will have a smooth way of dealing with it.
  Linh nodded:
• That sounds good, actually. How far have you got?
• The more I research, the more fascinated I am. This issue connects to that issue, which leads to another, endlessly. Family happiness is a vast category, covering very many fields. If I wrote it all out, it would be as thick as a university textbook. Many topics, many angles, many fields, and every one of them important. If I devoted myself to researching and writing it all down, it would take more than ten years, and by then I would be over 40, past the age for marrying.
  The first chapter is choosing a wife or husband, to ensure a marriage has an 80 per cent chance of success. This part alone is already extremely complicated. It turns out that until now hardly anyone has known how to choose a wife or husband. They marry because they fall for someone, or because they simply like someone, or because they foolishly slipped up and the doctor says they must marry... in many cases they marry for utterly unreasonable reasons, with no logic or wisdom at all. As a result, those marriages do not succeed.
  Linh asked:
• People only marry out of love, and now you say they should marry out of logic? That doesn't seem likely to convince everyone.
• I don't oppose the view of marrying for love, but I offer a new proposal: marry in order to create a happy family. That is much better. Love is a matter of the past and present, while the goal of creating a happy family is a matter of the future. So are we going to the future or going back to the past? Clearly we are going to the future, so we must think of the goal of creating a happy family. The goal of creating a happy family is more important.
• What you say makes sense, but when people are in love, who thinks about the future? If they can't marry, they threaten to kill themselves.
• That's exactly why a course of marriage and family counselling is needed, also called family studies, or "famiology", hehe.
  My goal is to set up this subject of family studies to advise people before they wish to start a family. Only after graduating from this course should anyone start a family. I believe that after completing this course, more than 90 per cent of students will rethink the person they planned to marry, because it will no longer be logical.
  Then there are chapters on Family health, Family finances, Resolving disagreements, Responsibility towards both sets of parents, Creating the child you want, Raising healthy children, Teaching children to become good people, The times when one's heart strays towards someone outside, Psychological change over time, Overcoming defects of moral character in one's spouse, Cultivating oneself to help create a happy family... There are a frightening number of them.
  Linh smiled mischievously:
• I was thinking of marrying you, but after hearing you talk I'll have to reconsider, hehe...
  Trường put on a serious face:
• I'm not joking. Choosing a spouse is very hard. Nobody is perfect without faults. Everyone has some bad trait or some shortcoming. I myself have many shortcomings. Then we must work out whether the shortcomings of both sides added together could break the marriage. If they would not break the marriage, can they be gradually overcome, can we cultivate ourselves to correct them?
  I made a table listing the result of adding two people's shortcomings together, giving the percentage of marriage success. After looking at that table, everyone has to stop short and not dare to rush into marriage, because the result is not good at all.
  Families often run into trouble over disagreements about everyday matters. I have to give a great many specific cases and give ways to resolve them. For example, the husband likes to hang a picture of a girl by the sea and the wife only wants to take that picture to the kitchen and burn it for fuel. Or at Tết the husband wants to spend several days at his parents' home and the wife wants to spend several days at hers; even that can cause divorce.
  In truth, when starting a family, almost everyone is uneducated in the science of the family. A family has so many problems, and we know nothing about them. It is like setting sail without any knowledge of navigation, like picking up a book without knowing how to read, like wheeling a motorbike onto the road without knowing how to ride. The world has no formal family studies course, and that is the reason so many marriages fail. My ambition is to compose a Family Studies course to teach those who are about to start a family, those who have a family, those who have once had a family... Who knows, one day there may be a law that anyone who has not graduated in Family Studies cannot register a marriage.
  Linh said:
• Now I'm starting to see that what you do is serious. But surely you aren't going to teach this subject without starting a family yourself?
• I tried picking a few decent candidates, adding up their characteristics with mine and found the results not very good, so I still have no intention of starting a family.
• Have you tried it with me?
• Yes, and your big weakness is that you think I need to see a doctor for mental illness. You wounded my pride badly, and a man's pride is hard to restore.
• I was joking, I'm sorry... 👨‍🏫

This subject will save the world in a very concrete way.