:Is it a...ritual that the Valar gave you, then? A spell? How does the part where the souls become bonded happen, magically speaking?:

Uh. It's a feature of Elven physiology that men and women are designed with compatible organs for intimacy, and when they're used for that, the couple is married.

:I...see. My people have a different word for that - a large number of words actually - and it is not the same thing as marriage at all, for us, and does not cause any soulbonding. Marriage is an official ceremony before a group in which a couple becomes culturally recognized as together, and also does not cause soulbonds. Your people...have only one concept for all three of these things?: No wonder he's felt slightly confused a few times. It's a much deeper well of misunderstanding than he had realized. 

Yes, they're the same thing. One feature of the marriage bond is that other people can see it in your eyes, so while there's traditionally a party afterwards there doesn't have to be, you're still obviously married.

:Literally, as in it changes your eye color?: Leareth hadn't thought it was possible for this to get any weirder. 

Not exactly? He sends over a mental image to compare by. Married peoples' eyes mostly look different in the same not-purple undertones that Quendi could see in their sky but Leareth couldn't.

:Hmm. I hope it will not offend you if I say that all of this seems rather odd to me: Leareth tries to chase down the implications, all the things he heard or thought about before without having that piece of context. :I suppose it would not come up in general here, but I know it has at least once, and in the Outer Lands it surely did: and might again. :Is it very bad for the remaining partner if their spouse dies?: 

...yes? But not - in a qualitatively different way than the death of a parent or a sibling or a child or a close friend would.

That's probably a relief. :In my world, that sounds about right for marriage in general, but for the kind of thing where souls are bound together, it is significantly worse than that and...generally not something that people survive. I suppose I am less alarmed by your kind of marriage now: 

People can die of grief but they almost always survive the death of a spouse if they have other things going on in their life and it's not likelier to kill them than any other death.

:...Noted: Leareth thinks back. :I suspect that our earlier conversation was at cross-purposes. When you spoke about - sexual favours not within a marriage, I interpreted that through my world's lens, since it is taboo in some but not all societies, by our definition of marriage:

Running it through his mind now, that would have to only – and definitionally – apply to a same-sex relationship. No wonder they have strong feelings about it; it's all the cultural taboos around relationships smushed into one dimension. 

Yes. A marriage can only occur between a man and a woman; the act that produces it is impossible with two men or two women.

:Which is not true in my world. Some societies have strong feelings that the official form of marriage ought be restricted to opposite-sex partners, but not all. And certainly lifebonds – the form of soul-bonding that we have – can and do occur between two men or two women: 

Huh. Maybe a tiny bit wistfully. 

:As an outsider coming here, your way feels somewhat unfair, but I suppose that is my own cultural bias: 

Leareth returns his attention to the notes he jotted down on their supplies. :You mentioned farming equipment – are you also bringing seed-grain, and seeds for other edible plants? You would want several plantings worth, I would think, in case the first year of crops fails. Though if weather were the unlucky factor, my kind of magic can ameliorate bad weather to an extent, bring rain when it is needed or delay frost. Also, I am guessing you have forms of magic for keeping food fresh, since the foodstuffs you selected are not otherwise preserved, but it would seem wise to have some backup supply of less perishable goods just in case: 

Keeping food ...fresh? We have seeds, and seedcorn. I think the....unfairness is that Melkor introduced Marring into the world such that people ended up wanting things they shouldn't have, rather than it being bad design or something to make men and women complementary.

:My personal opinion on the phrase 'things people shouldn't have' is that it is not a coherent concept – there are desires some people have that would harm other people greatly if satisfied, but aside from actual suffering caused to actual sapient beings, I do not think that a thing a person wants can be bad or judged less valid than something else: Shrug. :Meat will generally spoil if you leave it out? Bread lasts longer, but unless it is very dry army-ration style bread I would not expect it to last years: 

The problem is precisely that you hurt people but he does not, really, want to persuade someone of this who has never heard it in their life before.

Spoil in how long?

:It depends on ambient air temperature, colder is better – a week at most, in my world, in weather like this: Leareth is increasingly baffled. :Does this not happen here?: 

No! Do you know anything about the mechanism by which it happens?

:My understanding is that there are very, very tiny...animals, you might say, but far too small to see - that are found in most things and in the air, and will begin eating the food themselves and multiplying, with byproducts that make it unsafe to eat. And also smell and taste unpleasant, generally. Though some have a useful purpose – do you have wine, here?: 

We do! With the Valar's direct involvement, though.

:You mean, every time you ferment wine you need to ask the Valar? That is– well, I clearly ought to have asked more questions when I visited the biology school. I wonder if the Valar do something to interfere with these types of processes more generally? I suppose food spoilage would not be very utopian: 

Yes, they've made Valinor without decay. We've even discussed that because the buildings won't last forever, but I wasn't thinking of it as operative on the timescale that matters for food.

:Buildings generally deteriorate due to different processes, I think, which are slower. Though some are the same – wooden buildings can become infested with termites, stores of seed-grain can be eaten by many kinds of insects. Do you have insects here?: