"Huge opportunity cost," nods Isabella.

"I'll just tell Laurië she needs to make us more ridiculously rich."

"While I find it entirely plausible that she is literally the best singer of all time it is also entirely possible for multiple Elves to have musical careers, incidentally."

"Yes but then it'd be the kingdom's research budget, not mine personally -"

"Laurië will indulge her more often than I will."

"Aha. That I can't help you with."

"We'll manage."

"...every human society has this convention? Do they have the same assumed age of onset? Can you marry someone incompatible?"

"Every human society has it in some form but there's a lot of variance in the details and - archetypes. Age of onset is high-variance anyway, I was obvious young, some people decide to change all their paperwork in their twenties, some people are mostly one thing with an exception, whatever, I'm not familiar with statistics on averages between cultures. It's not legal most places to have same-role marriage unless that role is 'switch' but some people reportedly manage to make it work informally."

"Not legal but it works?"

"Beats me how, but sure, our mom has some friends who are a married sub couple, they're from Canada and Canada has it legal."

"How would you make it illegal - do you just force them not to live together -"

"...no? You just turn them away when they apply for a license? Marriage laws don't have anything to do with who can cohabit."

"Apply for a license?"

"...there's some disconnect here and we are not going to naively figure it out in the next five minutes..."

"...I can spell out the assumptions on my end - when a man and a woman lie together then they are married, this is visible to everyone around them, I could decline to acknowledge this but that wouldn't make it less true, I could write it down in some kind of register but that wouldn't have any bearing on the fact of the marriage -"

"...yeah okay no humans don't have that. Marriage does not, like, tattoo us or whatever. It's pretty much the writing it down in some kind of register thing plus social baggage."

"...huh. And no senses, no extended telepathy range, no enforcement of fidelity -"

"We're not even mostly telepathic in the first place!"

"It does none of those things - senses, what senses - how does enforcement of fidelity work -"

"When you're married you develop three or so new senses that are related to your relationship or your spouse - knowledge of when they're in danger was common back before we came to Valinor, Nerdúnar and I can tell when the other one's inspired and in the flow of work and we can transmit each other concepts and abstractions much faster than standard osanwë speed - and you can tell when your spouse is experiencing strong emotions - married Elves die if raped -"

"...humans don't have any of that. Uh, why would 'die if raped' be phrased as 'enforcement of fidelity', that conjured up a completely different picture..."

"...I mean, if you did it on purpose you'd get another marriage bond -"

"Elves don't do that either, huh?"