Лучше means better. It can be used either as an adverb or as a short-form adjective.

If you want to include a “than” in the sentence, then the word you want is чем:

Interestingly enough, if the чем is followed by a noun or pronoun in the nominative case, you can make an equivalent construction by dropping the чем and using the genitive of the noun/pronoun:

Лучше is also often used with future tense verbs or imperative verbs to express the idea of “it would be better”:

Last but not least, here we have a standard mother-in-law joke that uses the word:

No discussion of marriage would be complete in the twenty-first century without addressing однополые браки same-sex marriages:

In the Russian context this immediately poses a conundrum because the most common marriage words are gender specific: the Russian word used to describe a man getting married can be morphologically paraphrased as “to wife himself upon,” and the word that describes a woman getting married can be morphologically paraphrased as “to go out husbanding after.” So a foreigner might be tempted to put together sentences like:

Nope, the Russians won't say it that way. Well, a comedian on stage might, but certainly no one would ever say it with a straight face. The муж- and жен- roots produce too much gender dissonance. Actually that's a problem in English, too. My buddy John won't refer to his long-term partner Adam as his “husband” because “What does that make me, the wife?” Considering how well you cook, John, yeah, I think it does make you the wife. Get over it.

So how will the Russians refer to this? Not surprisingly, they can use the verbs that have no gender-specific roots, e.g. вступать/вступить в брак and заключать/заключить брак. What perhaps is surprising is that if both partners are the subject of the sentence, the verb жениться/пожениться mostly works, too. In other words all these phrases sound grammatically fine:

Here are some examples from the Russian-language press:

Other phrases that are used in discussing the issue of same-sex marriage are:

The most neutral of all the the marriage phrases is вступать/вступить в брак which means to enter into marriage, to get married. By “neutral” I mean that the subject of the verb can be a man or a woman, and the context can be religious or non-religious:

(BTW, if you want to read an article that seriously makes that last claim, you can find it here.)

The phrase заключать/закючить брак “to contract a marriage, get married” means about the same thing as the вступать/вступить в брак, but I've noticed that it seems to be particularly used in contexts where the legal complications of marriage are involved or where the legal implications of marriage are involved:

Last but not least the verb состоять “to be a member of” is often used with the word брак in offical contexts to ask «Вы раньше состояли в браке?» “Have you ever been married?”

* This is an example of what happens when we try to translate a Russian sentence too literally: it comes out strange sounding and wooden. Long Russian sentences, especially those with participial phrases or verbal adverbs, sometimes need to be broken up into two or more sentences so that they sound natural in English. A better translation would be something like: “Boris Berezovski has married Annika Ankiverina, a native of Latvia. This is his third marriage; the previous two have not been dissolved.”

When a woman gets married, the verb commonly used is выходить/выйти, which is irregular in it's conjugation:

The verb in this meaning is always used with the adverb замуж, and the man she marries appears in the accusative case after the preposition за:

¹ Americans get extra points if they can identify these folks.

When a man gets married, the verb commonly used is жениться, which is an odd verb in that it can be interpreted as either imperfective or perfective in this meaning. The woman he marries is expressed in the prepositional case as the object of the preposition на: