Snuggle. "Those conversations are always a little weird. Where else do you get that mix of moral philosophy and bizarre metaphysics and personal sniping?"

"I hadn't realized it was missing from my life! Can you pull up something on how marriage works in Shiny tree Ardas, I couldn't figure out what the hell he meant by that but didn't want to press it..."

"I think Bar curates by topic much better than I do -"

She does. Is this what they were looking for?

Yep, definitely. 

He was absent for the shiny-tree-Elf-sex-is-marriage conversation - "oh, it makes significantly more sense that he asked if I was getting married..."

"Oh?"

"Well, it literally did not occur to me that their setup would work that way, because what the fuck that's incredibly dangerous and has consent issues all but baked in. So it might similarly not have occurred to him that ours doesn't, even once he found out ours doesn't limit by gender."

"I don't actually know about Singularity Elves. They could be different, with the natural chips, or not, it never came up."

"Now I'm curious - Bar, marriage customs in Singularity?"

Bar provides.

Read, read, "nope," relieved. "They've got blessings that they load if they decide to marry, same as us. Soul bonding must be a magic Elf thing- or maybe a Midnight's-world-only thing, I haven't asked the new alts..."

"I wonder if the Singularity blessings are gender-agnostic and only used heterosexually as a matter of custom."

"Some of ours are anatomically specific, maybe they bundle 'em. Marriage blessing downloads are public record even if you skip the one that makes you noticeably married, so you couldn't do a stealth one under the radar anyway..."

"Coming as I do from a culture where marriage is composed entirely of social recognition the idea of a secret marriage is weird to begin with."

"I think if I were in a homophobic society and not sufficiently fucked up by it to decide to be celibate forever - which is the most plausible candidate, really - I'd probably be very tempted by a secret marriage? It is by all accounts an absurdly nice blessing-set, and the affirmation of the relationship wouldn't be meaningless for the fact it had to be a secret...."

"What do the blessings do?"

"Instantaneous knowledge of major changes to the other person's wellbeing as well as good instincts for where they are - that's one you could technically make more widely available but it's very high-bandwidth - things described as new senses not usefully analogous to any extant ones and manifesting differently for different people but centered on your spouse or very occasionaly on something you both care about a lot and do together...higher-fidelity memory for happy moments with that person, emotion-sharing with voluntary control on both sides, for which the major application I've heard of is getting high off sex..."

"Does osanwë not do voluntary emotion sharing by default?"

"You can send emotions to someone, but it's conscious, like sending a thought, unless you just want to partition your thoughts and emotions and senses so they have access to the private ones, but yikes. The marriage blessing is, like, you set the intensity you want to be sharing at, by default in the background, and they set the intensity they want to be receiving at, and then you experience what they're feeling attenuated by whatever factor you two picked - the lower of the two, obviously..."

"Oh, huh."

"You would probably get more useful answers from an actually married person. But that's the idea."

Nod.

"Ever something you wanted?"

"What, getting married, or getting fancy telepathy married?"

"The latter you just said was not on the table!"