"Men not marrying is a product of Asmodeanism but men not being faithful in marriage is....a human universal as far as I can tell."

It cannot possibly be harder to be faithful to your spouse than to spend a decade as a celibate paladin, but admittedly most people are not celibate paladins.

Antonio doesn't understand why being faithful in marriage is desirable. It's probably a Good thing, so he's listening very attentively.

Llei keeps feeling like he's not supposed to admit to only sleeping with his wife, and then remembering that he is not, in fact, only sleeping with his wife anymore. 

"The family committee's first suggested set of vows does not have men promise fidelity, though I know Sir Goes was concerned about that."

"I don't think you want a promise more than half of people won't keep, you're keeping them out of Axis that way. Obviously you can still hold it up as aspirational, and try to discourage it other ways as with the bastardry penalties."

There is something unaesthetic about expecting less of men specifically because as a class they are less able to meet the standard. It's infantilizing. But she has a point.

"There was more discussion of what female fidelity should be understood to consist of, really, especially if the vows are to constitute a legal minimum. ...there are definitely some number of married women in Cheliax today whose contracts explicitly negotiated getting to sleep with other men, and I am not immediately sure how to respond to that."

"That's - interesting? - what situation would give rise to those contracts, are the husbands in these examples known to be sterile, or...?"

"The women are much more powerful or influential, I assume?"

"In general, yes, the man is the subordinate partner. More rarely, neither party cares, and the marriage is for reasons not especially related to producing children."

"I don't think we should be invalidating existing marriage contracts - or I think we might wish to invalidate a great many existing contracts for unconscionable terms and many of those will be marriage contracts, but if we do that I think it'd be with a very sparing concept of unconscionable terms, the bar for that should be much higher than just mundane 'well that's a terrible idea'."

"I suspect that quite a lot of specific marriage contracts should be invalidated. I have not burned my first one, but I was tempted. But I would be hesitant to make the legal minimum for a valid marriage any more restrictive than absolutely necessary, if we intend to use it to encourage as many people as possible to marry for the sake of raising children."

"Not having children at all is also fine, but there's not a lot of domestic celibate orders I could reasonably recommend to anyone at this time."

"Is that the only alternative? I suppose it makes explicit your intentions but that doesn't seem necessary, even if you want to be committed to celibacy."

"I would not be surprised if it turns out that there are other life courses that can work but I have not seen them tried in practice and at scale."

"I think we can be more optimistic than that. Andoran's norms are terrible for the abandoned children, but do seem salutary for the adults if those outcomes can be split apart. Particularly the women. And I definitely want a society in which it is encouraged to remain celibate for years, and self-supporting for some of them, waiting for a man qualified to be a decent husband to be found, because I think it will often need to be done to avoid terrible marriages. That's my present heir's life course, and if I'd been born twenty years later like her likely would have been my own."

"Oh, I think it would be fine if the membership in whatever group were temporary and the vows with it. A lot of ours expired on the conquest of Cheliax - not mine, but I think most of them."

Well, it's a very awkward context in which to ask, but on the other hand it's not like she's going to have an opportunity later. How to ask without implying she isn't obeying Iomedae in every single stupid respect.

"Can someone refer me to an explanation of, uh, why the Church opposes extramarital sex? Word has spread rather widely that it does, and people with any sense are complying, but generally without any understanding of the actual justification."

"'Opposition to extramarital sex' is the short, simple version of the more complicated thing. The major problem with extramarital sex is that it produces children whose care is uncertain and damages the foundation on which a marriage, which should be a relationship of trust, is built - so, the thing popular in Osirion with taking lovers of the same sex is fine when everyone expects that, for example, but that doesn't fit into the short simple version, especially if you have to clarify that it is not fine if your spouse does not expect that."

"I'm a wizard. The Duchess of Chelam is a wizard. Really quite a substantial fraction of the city are wizards. We do not need to worry about unwanted children. No one speaks about this in terms of 'well, naturally you should do whatever you want with Iomedae's blessing' and if in fact we all should this would be exciting news to many people." 

"It is often - not always, but often - a mistake to take actions which you would not choose to publicize or that, if publicized, would present an example that others should not imitate."

There is literally not a single person in the county of Seguer who thinks that they should imitate actions taken by the countess because she is the countess and they are not. She should not say that.

"I wonder if you'd find it helpful to consider an explanation from a different angle. In healthy societies, men can only have respectable women by marrying them. This is to the advantage of all of the women in that society, because they are much better off with a husband than with an uncommitted lover. I would argue that it is also good for the men, because being a husband is good for men, but observably they mostly do not choose it, if they can instead have respectable women without marrying them. Perhaps it serves the man they'll be at forty but not the man they are at twenty, and it's the twenty year old choosing.

But while women, as a whole, are advantaged by obliging the men to marry them, an individual woman, especially if she won't end up with an unwanted child, might be advantaged by defecting; she might be able to enjoy the company of a man whose hand in marriage she couldn't secure, but who will happily sleep with her, and the harm this does to the overall balance of forces towards marriage is diffuse, while the benefits are very immediate.

For this reason in every healthy society I know of, women despise other women who betray the collective in this fashion. Women will call each other harlots with the same intent that men call each other cowards, and for the same reason - because the society cannot function if anyone gains by evading their duty."

" - well that does answer a related question I had which is why by all the gods the immigrants consider that insult a dueling offense."

"...is it not one, in Asmodean Cheliax?"