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- well, she was sitting at her house in the stupid demiplane that Diamond Queen Elizabeth had a bunch of people stuck in, doodling things in her notebook, but now she's somewhere else. They're on the outskirts of a town, near a pedestal with a pendant on it. There's tape around it, but no glass.
She's so tired of this stuff.
"Not really your fault. I guess I don't know if Osirians even have any gradations between those things."
"Not with a man and a woman, not really. I guess there's, like, 'had a promising first date' and 'had a promising second date' and 'had a promising third date' but those aren't the same thing either."
"Yeah.
"It's like - the way friendships work. No matter how much you like someone immediately after meeting them, you don't immediately consider them your best and most trustworthy friend, right? And - I guess I always figured it would be really dumb to marry someone who wasn't your best friend. Not everyone does, of course, but the ones who don't don't stay together, or else they do stay together but they fight constantly, or have concerningly businesslike attitudes towards each other that seem like they'd feel awful and empty from the inside. So there are - gradations, you know, like for friends, and until they've proven their love and their loyalty the way that friends do, in the normal course of interacting with each other, considering marriage is - I dunno. Kind of inappropriate, or something."
Nod. "Except that with romantic relationships there are also - I dunno, other categories of intimacy that you're testing out to see if they make you happy or uncomfortable, and - I dunno, I keep trying to interpret things as tests and then remembering that if something feels off it's probably just that everything's all out of order. Although that also means that everything kind of feels off all the time."
"I think probably if everything seems wrong, you should not do it."
"Well, that's easy to say. Sort of unclear what it cashes out to in practice."
"We should...find other evening activities? You're not giving up on anything, we could always come back to it if it stops feeling like it's wrong."
" - I don't mind the snuggling. I don't think. I - the ride in the carriage was mostly really nice. It's all complicated stuff about conversational topics and worrying about which things I should hold off on to avoid making you uncomfortable and - overinterpreting everything and wishing that there were a world outside that we could safely do things in."
"Ah. Okay. That's harder. Especially the part where we cannot safely do any other things.
You're not going to make me uncomfortable if you - communicate what you mean by things? Like, a kiss on the cheek is nice if it means 'I like this and don't want to go too fast', and it'd be all right if it meant 'I want you to kiss me', and it'd - suggest a problem but not itself be a problem - if it meant 'we should have sex', it's just good to know."
"I'm trying. I think. Communicating with you is hard. - which is sort of the whole thing in a nutshell, right, I feel like a minimum bar for any serious commitment to someone is just - understanding what they mean when they say things. And - probably we'll eventually get better at it, if we keep talking, but - I guess that's a lot of what dating is supposed to be. And it's - worrying, I guess, every time I get something that sounds to me like an indication that you don't think that getting to a point where we can understand each other is very essential to this whole endeavor."
"That's good. And I didn't mean you didn't, right, just - I am not going to seriously consider marrying you until we do."
"Well, good.
"I wonder if there are any normal getting-to-know each other activities we can do just in the apartment. And on our very limited budget."
"...I dunno, maybe I've never done any. Maybe I can work out the category from first principles. You'd want something that facilitates normal interactions and low-level intimacy, and maybe pushes you toward different corners of conversation space than you'd tend to explore on your own. Certain party games, probably. Maybe we could try cooking something."
"I have never cooked anything in a kitchen but I guess maybe it's not that hard."
"I don't actually know what a hundred percent of the things in there do. But that just makes it a more interesting challenge. I bet we'd get way less out of cooking something if we already knew exactly what we were doing."
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