Nod.

"Anyway. There are going to be a lot of things I can't foresee. But it'll help if there's enough food."

"Well, we can do that."

"That'll be good."

Flop.

Snuggle. ...defensive glance at his alt.

His alt does not seem to be judging them at all!

Snuggle. 

"You know there's not actually any evidence that any of you are more disapproving of snuggles than you are."

"I mean, his society doesn't kill kids, so it probably judges extramarital sex. I think everyone - picks one of those."

"They do? Why?"

" - uh, because the only way a society can manage how many children it has is by putting a lot of pressure on people to not have them when they aren't committed to supporting them."

" - well obviously I think it's horrible to have children when you aren't committed to supporting them!"

" - okay I guess there's also an added premise that if people are having extramarital sex then they'll have kids they don't mean to."

"Yeah, that? Horrible. We do not have that. The Valar will fix it for you, too. Sex can only result in pregnancy through an act of deliberate will by both parties."

" - well that sounds really convenient."

"I don't really spend much time thinking about it but, yes, it sure is."

"So then do people just - run around sleeping with whoever they feel like?"

" - mostly not while running around? That sounds difficult."

" - nah I just mean, uh, I wondered whether, if you don't have to worry about pregnancy, everyone just has sex a lot and it's fine, or if it's still - 

- uh, in the palace in Osirion you don't have to worry about kids but it's actually bad, because no one loves each other or respects each other except incidentally -"

" - you should only have sex with people you respect."

- nod.

"I think - uh, the general advice I've heard is that you should only have sex with someone if you are really happy with the stories you have to tell yourself about it, all of the ones that might be true. So if you would be really unhappy to ever have the story 'we loved each other and had sex and then stopped loving each other and drifted apart' as part of your life, then you shouldn't have sex with anyone you aren't married to. But if you're happy with the story 'we spent a year together in the mountains doing mathematics and having sex, and then we promised to hold each other in our hearts fondly and never saw each other again', then that's fine, right, to do that. And some people are fine with 'we met and had sex that evening and never saw each other again', but that's rarer.

And some people really won't be okay if they love someone and lose the person they loved, but that's not about sex at all for them, and they can't save it by not having had sex, and they can either try never to love at all or to accept some chance of heartbreak in their life."

" - oh."

"I'm not, like, a philosopher of sexual ethics."

Snuggle.

"It's a harder problem. For humans. Mostly because of the accidental pregnancy thing and partly because - if you all have to work and you need to have kids between twenty and fifty or not at all, and you need other people to survive and one of the main  kinds of relationships people have involves sex - there are just a lot more pressures on everybody. Probably. But the accidental pregnancy thing probably accounts for a lot of the problems."

"It sounds really hard. I'm sure you're doing the best you can with what you've got."