"My parents are happily married, though, and there's only two of them, so I don't have a lot of experience with that kind of thing."

"I also had two parents! My dad died when I was a baby, though."

"That's sad."

"Yeah. I don't really remember him so it's not a looming feature of my life, though?"

"Mhm. It's sad for your other parent, though."

"Yeah, she hasn't remarried. He wasn't the first husband she lost but he was the first she was expecting to keep, I guess? Or she thought it'd be weird while I was still a kid and hasn't started thinking about it yet now that I'm not."

"Do you have any half-siblings?"

"Not alive. Variously distant generations of half-niblings, though."

"That sounds...hard. On your parents."

"It's a dragon thing, I think I explained? We live a really long time. ...Oh, uh, possibly relevant is that full-blooded dragons have a stupidly high infant mortality rate? I can't even remember off the top of my head how many times they had to try to get me. So our choices are basically 'marry a series of shorter-lived species, see children live to adulthood reliably' or 'marry another dragon, watch a dozen babies die'. Also people who've never been married before seem to be bad at picking relationships to last four thousand years, dragons who marry other dragons early divorce more than average, so the first marriages are sort of practice? Some folks sidestep most of this problem by marrying vampires, though. They've got flexible lifespans. Divorce problem still exists but infant mortality problem does not."

"...Uh. I think if I was a dragon I'd marry a vampire or never have kids."

"That's also an option."

"I have a large number of negative feelings about that system but it probably wouldn't be practical or helpful to enumerate them."

"Not really, no."

"Mostly they have to do with the idea of dead babies."

"Yeah."

"So why do vampires have variable lifespans?"

"So, they drink blood, and they live as long as the average of all their lunches."

"...Huh."

"Yeah. I feed vampire friends sometimes. If I was going to marry one I'd be her sole food source. Probably the kids too."

"That makes sense."

"Which would mean I couldn't have all that many. I dunno how many I even want though."

"Me neither. It'll depend on a lot of things, probably."

"Yeah. For one thing I don't even know who I'd be having them with, I don't even have a girlfriend right now."

"It's kind of odd how you gender the word (significant other/non-committed). I hadn't even known my language could do that."