“When good is powerless, it is evil” (proverb) On a minibus, I became an involuntary witness to a woman’s conversation on the phone. The plot is trivial and occurs frequently, but this makes it no less tragic, terrifying in its cruelty and senselessness. The woman told someone on the other end of the line that she was going to the hospital to the polytrauma department (multiple trauma) to visit her niece, who had been beaten by her ex-husband. She had been divorced from him for some time, lived and worked in another city. I came to my hometown for a friend’s birthday. The ex invited him to his place when his current partner was not at home to talk about their common child, whom he had not seen for some time. We sat, talked, drank coffee. What happened next, she cannot say for sure. No, the girl remembered everything that happened, but she could not name the reason why the man went wild. He beat her brutally and methodically on the head, pulled her hair, gave her a black eye under each eye, threw her to the floor, kicked her in the stomach and...offered, as if nothing had happened, to finish her coffee before it got cold! Yes, yes, it all ended as unexpectedly as it began, to the amazement of the poor fellow. Only at the beginning she was joyful and unharmed, and at the end she was frightened and depressed, lying in blood on the floor. The telephone interlocutor asked questions that I could not hear. But, among other answers, one caught my attention: “She says he WASN'T LIKE THIS BEFORE. There were a couple of times when he hit me in the face, sometimes he hid the keys to the castle, threatened to take the children away, sometimes he didn’t let me go home and took the money. Anything can happen in a family! But whatever! No, he WAS NOT THAT WAY! These are all the tricks of his partner, SHE MADE HIM THIS WAY!” Then the conversation switched to discussing the shortcomings of his current life and ceased to be of interest to me. Girls, girls, women, wives, aunts, mothers, grandmothers and everyone else! Don't fool yourself! He was like that before. It's just that the degree of his cruelty was less. It appeared less often. Against the general background of life, it didn’t catch my eye. And now it has grown and has become life-threatening. When it threatened your personality, honor, human dignity, but was not visible, or hardly noticeable to others, you also tried not to notice it. They found excuses for him: tired, irritated, lack of money is to blame, and who is kind now?, and who is easy now? Well, he didn’t kill him! They blamed themselves: they could have been more kind, it was her own fault, she started it first, but the borscht really wasn’t salted enough. When my appearance, body and health suffered from beatings, I became determined to turn to the right place. It's hard to hide a black eye, and even more so when it comes to broken ribs. It was possible to hide the fact that the psyche, the soul was all covered in bruises and abrasions. Do you know what is the most interesting and saddest thing in this story? The fact is that it is possible to find out what kind of person a person is based on emotional and behavioral characteristics even before marriage, but rarely does anyone want to do this. During the courtship period, almost everyone tries to show their best, so to speak, smart side. And the moment comes when “goodness” is taken off, like a boring suit, and the person remains in “home”, in what is comfortable for him. I appeal to those who want to know more about their chosen one (chosen one) and not only from his stories, and own impression, which often does not correspond to reality. If you want, but don’t know how and where you can do this, I inform you - go to premarital counseling with a psychologist. They will not only talk to you, inform you about marital roles, clarify your expectations from marriage, and enlighten you, if necessary, on matters of intimate relationships, but also, with the help of various types of projective techniques, you will explore together the hidden corners of your unconscious. In many countries around the world there are mandatory meetings with a psychologist before submitting an application to the registry office. They simply won’t sign you up if you haven’t visited a psychologist. You would be right if you are indignant: “Not everyone later turns into cruel rapists! Why go to premarital counseling?” Premarital,+380934283606