"Another traveller could. You can be less careful, just not thoughless."

"That sounds really frustrating."

"Being of the royal house of the Noldor complicates a lot of things. In general though I would say it makes dating men easier."

"It does?"

"Have to be way more careful, are under a lot more scrutiny, but once you figure out how to navigate those - we can all travel the countryside practically at will, we can give people absurdly nice things with no scrutiny, and everyone knows who we are. And for some people it's specifically appealing. Thus sneaking into throne room and so forth."

"Friend of mine back home once dated the governor's apprentice but I'm not sure this captures the described phenomenon very exactly, especially since they didn't sneak around."

"Your governors don't sound precisely like our King anyway. It might carry less emotional weight."

"Likely."

"Anyway if I were nobody maybe my parents would decide they didn't care and invite my boyfriend to dinner or maybe they'd have me sent to Lórien for straightening out. I am not nobody and so both of those are out of reach."

"...sending one to be straightened out is a parental authority?"

"Not - legally. But it is very hard and fraught to disobey your family, particularly when everyone you've ever spoken to agrees with them -"

"That sounds horrible."

"I struggle with whether stopping the Valar from fixing young people is a pressing moral problem. It's not as if they're less happy afterwards, and the Valar don't do it without consent. I have been accused of only caring because it limits my dating pool."

"I think the underlying priorities such that the Valar - can we not call it 'fixing' that's horrible - tamper with people are the pressing moral problem."

"Agree there. The Valar change very slowly, though."

"Why's that?"

"Millions of years old. They're very set in their ways."

"Why are they set in these ways?"

"It's in Eru's design for the universe."

"By that logic I shouldn't count."

"You honestly might not. Your people can't have children anyway, so everyone'd be very confused and very lost. But - it's only the actual content of the prohibition that's divine law. No sex with men, that's from Eru and the Valar. All the assumptions that apparently Maitimo explained to you, those come from cultural and historical contingencies."

"Yeah. I haven't even had any sex with men. Or with anybody, but it's the men I haven't had sex with who are relevant here."

"...I am a mature adult human, I'm allowed to vote and have sex and get a passport and own a house and whatnot. I was like a couple months away from formally finishing my apprenticeship, at home. As for the rest of what you just said you're going to have to be less oblique."

"We consider someone of age at fifty but I'd hesitate to pick up a man who was fifty. Also - " what else had been in Maitimo's litany - "you're here as a guest of the crown, one usually doesn't proposition people who might feel they're depending on you for a place to sleep. I don't know your customs and sometimes cultural differences can result in people miscommunicating intent in a way that gets someone hurt."