“I guess? I - look, I met a lot of Osirian women, and I didn’t want to marry any of them, and then I met you, and most of our conversations were either fights about religion or fights about Cheliax or attempts to make up for fights that neither of us actually wanted to have, and I noticed you were weirdly important to me, and then we got kidnapped to another plane and most of our conversations were about how to protect the even more incompetent alternate versions of us from their own bad decisions and terrifying superpowers, and then I noticed I was in love with you, and - I don’t really know where I’m going with this? I guess that I think if I wanted you to be a different way then I’d have fallen for someone who was that way, probably?”

"I guess. But you might have - very different intuitive ideas about what marital bliss looks like."

"Yeah. They wouldn't be from Osirion, really, they'd be from the palace, but if anything that's worse because the palace is horrible."

"I see."

Petpetpet. "I don't have anything particularly horrible in mind I just - the whole idea is that I wouldn't recognize it, right -"

"Yeah."

"If we were really married right now instead of pretending I think - we'd be cuddling in the bed because I wouldn't be scared it'd turn into anything else. And I'd probably feel more strongly about earning enough money to support us, even though I know you like working."

"That makes sense. If we ever get back to the previous incarnation of our usual lives then I think how we support ourselves is kind of a moot point, given Elizabeth. If we made it back to Golarion we could sell one headband and never have to work again."

"I have a very generous allowance from Osirion, too. I don't mind you working, it just feels like if someone needs to be making sure we have enough money then it ought to be me, just like if someone needs to defend us against intruders or something it ought to be me."

Snuggle. "I agree, but mostly because your ranger levels are permanent."

"Maybe I should ask Connor whether he feels like he ought to take care of Diamond Queen Elizabeth and if so how he satisfies that."

"Yeah, maybe.

"I don't - object to people I care about trying to take care of me. I'm more worried about, like, if we disagreed about something would you feel that you had the right to make unilateral decisions for the family without consulting or convincing me, or would you feel like all of my money actually belonged to you, or that I shouldn't be allowed to make agreements with other people even if they didn't actually involve you at all, or do you have some - weird expectation for how I ought to prioritize different concerns that will lead you to be shocked if dinner ever isn't on the table at six, and probably a bunch more things in that genre that I haven't thought about yet, and what you would do when you ran into them - "

"I...think agreements among married people inherently involve each other? Not agreements like that you will send your nephew a birthday present, but I guess I would expect you to talk to me about things that were bigger than that? And I'd talk to you about the same sorts of things. I can't imagine trying to do anything important without consulting you unless there was no time to consult you and I was going to do my best to adjust course once I could, or something. I - guess I have the instinct that if we're married then your money is my money, aside from the wedding jewelry, but I don't feel that strongly about it, like if you want to declare your coin purse is part of your wedding jewelry and yours alone we could do that."

"I have no idea what the significance of wedding jewelry is. And - some of those things are things where there are two decent equilibria, right, like, if we actually jointly control a budget then it's fine if all of the money goes into it, and if you have the final say on all important financial stuff then that'd be annoying but tenable, right, as long as I also had some money that I had the final say over, but - if you have all of the money and I have none of it then that's not tenable, you see? Or stops being tenable the first time we have very different ideas about the importance of something."

"Uh, the Osirian rule is that a woman owns her wedding jewelry. My brother got married recently and spent - eighty thousand gold, I think? It'd probably resell for less than that, but that's how much is his wife's and he has no say over."

"...that sounds really depressing. Only being allowed to have any money ever again if you sold something your husband gave to you. Something that's probably special and that you'd probably rather keep. Like, I'm not saying it's unliveable, if the jewelry's enough for everything you'd ever really need, but it's - depressing."

"Then I guess we shouldn't do it like that."

"...yeah. I guess not. Anyway, just - things like that. A lot of things that a reasonable person really ought to ask about before agreeing to anything. Although possibly it would feel less likely to be an enormous task if I knew you a lot better and basically trusted you to make reasonable decisions in all things, which I do not."

Snuggle.

Snuggle.

"I want to note that this is by Chelish standards an extremely weird first date conversation."

"This is a pretty normal Osirian first date except for the part where we're touching. 

What do people do on Chelish first dates?"

"One of us asks the other to dinner or to watch sports or a play. I think probably seeing the play before dinner is the better option, then you have something to talk about. If you don't already know the person very well then you mostly try to have the sorts of conversations that let you know whether the other person is bearable in extended one-on-one interactions, you're not really supposed to discuss anything very important. Or you invite them to a festival and spend most of your time eating and dancing and playing festival games and accidentally getting lost and trying to figure out where you are. And if you're trying for sex you probably invite them home at the end of the night. I think. This is slightly theoretical, I've never been on one."

" - really? Huh."

" - which part of that's surprising, I don't know which parts other countries hear about."

"Oh, just that you hadn't been on one. The rest is - the version I got in cultural education classes was that teenagers and young adults spend lots of their time falling into and out of relationships in which they're pressured to have sex immediately so they aren't given up on as boring or old-fashioned or clueless or bad at it."