I would not have slapped him but I do find it vaguely satisfying whenever Maitimo overthinks or overacts himself into a mess and then I can cut him free of it just with a modicum of the specific kinds of sense he is lacking.

He agreed with me that I could have reasoned out of a societal taboo if I'd grown up with one without help, said you did the same thing.

More or less, I suppose. I at any rate didn't take twenty Years of propositioning to decide I wasn't going to spend my life alone.

Did it take you awhile?

To start pursuing men once I realized that I wanted to, no. To conclude that I wasn't doing anything wrong, a fair bit longer. It was not a length of time measured in Years, though.

D'you remember what the reasoning process looked like?

Did Maitimo tell you the, ah, perspective we both started from? - okay, there are Valar, there is Eru, at the time the Valar really did seem to be unambiguously correct and good, they hadn't done anything that was in hindsight characterizable as a mistake, when they give us laws without sufficient reason, we should assume that those laws have reasons.

And perhaps the will of the gods is reason enough, perhaps they feel the griefs of Arda more intensely, perhaps they can intimately sense damage to our souls which we don't notice, perhaps whenever we are marred they suffer more than us, more than in fact our less complicated minds have the capacity to suffer.

So maybe it's wrong. There's certainly a lot of evidence it's wrong, and a very self-serving reason to reach the conclusion it's not, and my moral reasoning did not differ from the Valar's otherwise.

You see the conundrum?

Well, I suppose if I started from this perspective I might have actually asked a Vala instead of quietly assuming they were morons...

Except if you ask them they'll fix you.

In that respect I could not have started without my moral reasoning differing from the Valar's otherwise.

They don't do it involuntarily, but certainly they wouldn't entertain the question in confidence with no implications for your life, and they'd have tried to persuade you, and they're - not persuasive, exactly, but distracting to be in the presence of when disagreeing with them. I didn't have the nerve to go ask.

Being unwilling to keep a confidence is also a problem, I'm not sure this 'cannot characterize anything they did as a mistake in retrospect' thing is an accurate summary...

Oh, now I think they're disgustingly incompetent and also care about things that are distinct from right and wrong. But at the time they seemed like - aliens, who were bad at us but learning as quickly as they could, and who shared our values if not our needs or motives or styles of thinking. They wouldn't keep a confidence because they didn't know how.

I am now imagining an earnest young Elf version of myself attempting to explain incarnate needs and mindsets and ethics to Valar. It is disquieting.

Awww. Anyway, what happened was that I decided that perfect virtue was not a realistic aspiration and that this was an area with an ugly cost/benefit and I was going to be selfish. And then I had some relationships and noticed that I really did not seem to be devaluing or using anybody, and that in fact the least complicated answer was that the Valar'd been wrong.

Good.

I don't think I am at all the same person I'd be without the assumptions, so 'grew past it' is a bit generous, but I was sure enough of what I wanted to go and get it, so it worked.

What do you think you'd've been like if you were from my world or something?

Hmm. That also requires adjusting for being human - I think Maitimo and I wouldn't have the failure mode where he is too absorbed in something important and uses me more carelessly than is typical and I feel toyed with. I think we'd both have - less of a background assumption that sex is usually a power game which we're currently not treating as one, or a currency for relationship disagreements - 

- these are tendencies we keep in check and have a healthy relationship despite, don't mistake me. But being unendorsed doesn't make them go away, and they're certainly present.

He said once that he'd probably have no more interest in sex than any other social activity if there weren't power dynamics he associated with it.

Well, he has a fetish, doesn't he. I would certainly not feel that way, but - well, I don't seem to have your capacity for saying 'this is a power thing for Maitimo and the rest of our society but it's not one to me'. If it is to them, it is to me, and that's fine but in a different society I think our dynamic would be quite different.

I'm getting some serious mileage out of that capacity. I'm pretty much devoid of native fetishes but if I were going to have to be in something I interpreted as a power dynamic and pick a half of it, me and Maitimo wouldn't work out nearly so well. Fortunately we have enough difference in background that he can cut my hair for me and I can laugh at the look on his face.

He's cutting your hair for you? Awww.

I can't see the back of my head.

Right. I didn't think about how much maintenance that style'd require.

When Maitimo was in his stage of adorable sexual frustration over you I said to him once that I would not cut my hair and he made the funniest noise.