"Not having thought about it enough?" shrugs Aurin. "I was so thoroughly distracted by girls that I didn't notice my much smaller inclination to kiss boys, at first."

"Huh. Okay."

"I dunno, maybe that sort of thing doesn't happen to you all? Love at first sniff."

"Heh. No, experimental phases are totally a thing in my world. Just not for me personally."

"Is there a set of genders it's usual for each one to be into, or... not?"

"Most people are attracted to most genders, but it varies wildy. Sometimes there's a stigma if you're not attracted to any genders you're interfertile with," she admits.

"What about if you are attracted to some of those but wind up settling down with somebody with whom you are not?"

"Well, it depends on whether it's Sealed or not."

"...Uh, if you promise not to add any more people to the marriage, and it's not currently possible for the marriage to produce children, there's some stigma for that, but if you leave open the possibility of adding someone who could make children happen people won't bother you over it even if you never actually do."

"Are marriages normally multi-person arrangements, then? That's not unheard of for humans at home but it's usually two people."

"Not always. I only have two parents. Anyway, the more people there are the rarer the arrangement is, since of course everyone in the marriage has to want to be married to everyone else."

"No sort of networky things? I have had as many as three girlfriends at once but they weren't all interested in each other and one of them had a boyfriend who the other two and I weren't seeing and so on."

"'Wants to be married to each other' can amount to, 'you and I get along really well and would be happy to live together in this house both having sex with this third person but not with each other and cooperatively raising any children that ensue.'"

"S'pose. Do married people sometimes have outside partners, then? Who aren't the childrearing type or whatever."

"If the marriage isn't Sealed, yeah."

"But Sealing cuts that off along with the possibility of marrying extra people?"

"...Technically it doesn't absolutely preclude it, but the cultural associations with Sealing--you're not supposed to do it if you still want outside partners."

"Some people at home say that about getting married at all. Monogamy is very popular."

"That sounds...inconvenient. Is there a cultural expectation for getting married at all, where you're from, or do most people just live together unmarried?"

"It is very much the normal thing to do in most modern Elcenian human cultures to date around, more often serially than in parallel, in one's teens and twenties, and eventually pick one person to marry and be monogamous with indefinitely. Variations include not doing the 'eventually' part, not being monogamous with your eventually in one fashion or another, and getting divorced because you picked the wrong eventually. And there are cultures - fewer now than there used to be - where they do arranged marriages."

"Divorces happen sometimes. They're a lot messier when you have more people involved."

"They can be pretty bad when there's only two, but yeah, I bet it's a lot worse if it's five people all packing up their stuff and yelling."

"I think when it's five people it can be okay if it's, like, two of them don't want to be married to the other three anymore and vice-versa but the two and the three still want to be married to each other, but yeah."

"Oh, yeah, I guess you could also get fractures like that."