Is this the right place? She'll assume so. In she goes behind him.

It definitely looks like an office where therapy happens, yes, modulo the exploding stars in the background.

"Hello!  I'm Thellim, and I'm apparently the Milliways couples' therapist now."  Thellim has never done any couples' therapy before, but has read about it in books and is pretty confident of her ability to disentangle realistic couples' therapy tropes from fake tropes that are just there to ensure the characters' relationships never actually resolve.  "What brings you to my office today?"

Leareth does not actually have the slightest idea what...happens...in couples' therapy, apart from the not-entirely-unconfusing contents of several half-finished conversations with Ramona. (He may have a Mindhealer on staff, but this doesn't exactly mean that Nayoki specializes in the 'untangling interpersonal problems' side of things.) 

He doesn't want to put words in Ramona's mouth, either, but he glances at her and clears his throat. "I think we are interested in learning more about 'couples therapy' and whether it is the right tool to approach some - difficulties that we have uncovered." 

"The main problem from my perspective is that Leareth does not actually seem to have any idea whatsoever how relationships work? And it's awkward if I am the one to explain it to him, because I have mixed incentives. So I was hoping we could get a qualified couples therapist to do the explaining parts, and then I could just be a girlfriend instead of a girlfriend/counselor combo."

"That's incredibly reasonable!  Usually the fundamental question of couples' therapy is 'Under what circumstance could some other person solve our problems when we, sensible people with more information, have failed to do that ourselves?' but if you'd just like to pay somebody else to do the hard parts that makes a lot of sense too!  What sort of informational asymmetry are you starting out with, here?  It sounds like maybe the man is from a dimension too primitive to have invented professional specialization and also relationships, and the woman is from a dimension more advanced than that?"

(Thellim hasn't yet remedied her ignorance of her planet's history -- it would help if somebody could tell her why dath ilan's history might have been screened -- but it stands to reason that 'couples therapist' would be one of the very first professions to come into existence once professional specialization started at all, since it requires no material infrastructure and relatively little math.  You'd definitely expect to see it before, say, ironworking.)

Leareth had thought he wasn't going into this with any specific expectations of what 'couples therapy' entailed, but he apparently absolutely was not expecting that, whatever that was. He's not sure whether to be offended or not. (It seems like it wouldn't actually help to be offended so he settles on not.) 

"I -" Where do you even start. "I think that the difficulty is not with my entire dimension, there are plenty of people I know who have relationships that seem to be perfectly functional. It is probably more that I have not had reason to focus on romantic relationships for - a very long time," does he want to get into the details of his immortality mechanism and missing memories right now, no, not especially, "and I am not actually sure which parts of the standard relationship format are important to each of us."

(He thinks it's entirely reasonable on Ramona's part not to want to explain everything, but this is admittedly mostly based on the belief that it's reasonable for anyone not to do things they find unpleasant in some way, he hasn't entirely followed what actually bothers her about it.) 

"Agreed that I don't think it's everyone in Velgarth, it's mainly Leareth."

Well, and actually, quite a few other specific individuals she could name, but that would be a major distraction from what they're here to do. Regular people in Velgarth seem fine? Probably?

"That last thing he said is kind of case in point. He's not sure which parts of the standard relationship format matter to me because: 1) He can't name the parts of the standard relationship format; 2) he hasn't asked me what's important to me; 3) possibly he hasn't actually tried to model me, he just kind of goes around doing... whatever seems to him like it would help, but then doesn't inform me of any of that or check to see how I'm actually doing?"

It's sort of hard to explain without sounding like she's blaming him. Maybe that's because she's kind of blaming him a little bit. He's so... odd. But adorable? But odd.

So far this sounds like the sort of problem that ought to fold as soon as anyone makes a serious effort about it for fifteen minutes, but obviously these people have long since thought of that and determined that their best course of action was to employ a therapist anyways!  "Well, I'm sure not going to claim to understand what any of that's about, on as little information as I have!  If I asked literally all of my questions I'd waste a huge amount of your valuable time, so I won't ask you what your home dimensions are like, or who you are as people, or what matters to you in life.  Instead, I'll ask what the two of you are getting out of each other?  Or if that's not the historical cause of your relationship, what brought you together as a matter of historical causality, instead of mutual gains from relating relative to your next-best alternatives for mating?"

Leareth is finding the last sentence somewhat hard to parse, but he can definitely answer 'what are the two of you getting out of each other' at least from his side of things. 

"Ramona solved some of the most intractable problems in my life - in my entire world - and did so without paying any of the costs I had been resigned to in my own plans. I am not sure how to convey how deeply grateful I am, and how badly I want her as an ally. ...I said something like that to her, and she asked me to clarify whether I was expressing romantic interest, and I - thought about it and decided I would in fact be interested if she considered my interest welcome. So." A slight shrug. "Here we are." 

Leareth is admittedly not actually sure what it means or cashes out to, for him, to be romantically interested in someone. He is mostly pretty sure that he feels some kind of very strong, very positive way about Ramona - he wants something very very badly - and his instinctive answer to her clarifying question was...definitely not a no? 

Awwww. It's so sweet! Ramona's heart is melting all over again. He really is such a good guy, and the way she helped was really pretty straightforward?

"I was glad to help! It really wasn't a big deal! It's what I do every day! When he looked straight into my eyes and told me how much he wanted to spend more time together, achieving great things... well, I do really like to be appreciated. And he's not unimpressive himself! I would say he has accomplished much more than I have, and I'm attracted to competence."

(Leareth thinks it's clearly not true that he's accomplished much more than Ramona did! It's maybe fair to say that he's put more time and effort into solving Velgarth's problems - nearly two thousand years of it -  or, at one remove, into acquiring the skills he thought he would need to start solving those problems, but it's the results that matter, and he had self-evidently not actually solved everything. Or very many things at all, really, or at least that's how it's felt recently. Maybe Ramona was in some sense more lucky than competent in an absolute sense, in that the particular skills she brought to the situation were extremely well targeted in a way that would never have occurred to Leareth even in ten thousand years, but the outcome is the same.

He's tried to say this to Ramona and it felt like either he failed to communicate it at all or it wasn't actually a distinction she cared about it; he doesn't expect anything to go differently if he just says it again, so he stays quiet.) 

So if she's parsing this right -- they've both done things that would make them incredibly wealthy elites of the man's world, maybe based on 'Ramona' optimizing it with her world's superior degree of professional specialization and knowledge.  And then they decided to have a relationship based on their past history with each other, even though either of them could've utilized their wealth and prestige to get almost any other mate they wanted on the whole planet.  That is romantic!

Thellim almost opens her mouth to say all this out loud, but then reconsiders whether it's the most important thing she could say next.  Besides, if they're having relationship troubles, probably the last thing they want to hear is that somebody else thinks their relationship is cute.

"It sounds like the two of you are together based on your past history and having been through a lot together.  That's very respectable!  But it means that you might not be starting out with a strong model of what benefit you're both deriving from the other in an ongoing relationship -- what you each want from each other, and what you each have available to give in return."

"What did the prediction markets say about your chances of staying together after the first date?  And what facts did the primary market movers cite as decisive, if you paid for them to list that, which at your inferred wealth level I'm sure you did?"

"Prediction markets? I've heard of those, but we don't have one for our relationship."

Leareth is fairly sure that the therapist isn't speaking a language he knows - this place comes with an impressively thorough translation effect - and he's hearing something about...gambling to create a kind of Foresight, with bookies placing bets based on their odds. It's a brilliant idea; it's not entirely new to him, but he feels slightly off-balance that he apparently never, in centuries, thought of using the concept in such a broad-scoped way before. Though really the problem is that Velgarth isn't exactly a place where he can convert even arbitrary amounts of personal and organizational wealth into that. (Also it would require the people making bets to have a lot of personal information about him, surely, which Leareth isn't incredibly comfortable with.) 

"- Apparently Ramona's world does have that concept," he says after a moment. "Mine does not. - we have not had an enormous amount of time to go over all of the similarities and differences between our planets." 

(Because they've been spending a lot of time in bed.)

(Well. Moderately awkward time in bed, though yes, quite a lot of it in terms of the fraction of time they've had mutually-agreed-upon romantic interest.) 

(Ramona's world is more advanced than Leareth's on multiple tech trees, as it turns out.)

What kind of planet has heard of prediction markets, has the concept without --

Okay, Thellim is considerably raising the estimated degree to which she doesn't know anything about these two dimensions and that's maybe important to the relationship.

"Well, if you've never run a prediction market on your relationship then we should probably spin up one of those before doing anything else," Thellim says, starting from the part she is sure about.  "Right now I don't know if we're starting from a relationship with a base 10% ten-year survival chance or 90%, and those different states of knowledge call for different policy proposals."

Also Thellim has no idea how one goes about doing couples' therapy, if you can't see how market odds shift with each revealed fact of history, or get conditional forecasts on different policy proposals.

"Okay... but... like, who do you imagine is going to bet in these markets, exactly?"

Leareth is so confused. "Are there - recognized categories of relationship where some have high odds of lasting and others do not?" Why would anyone bother to have a relationship they expected had nine-in-ten odds of not working, though... "- Or is the idea that some people prefer to have relationships on the basis that they are not expected to stay together long-term...?" 

"There could be relationships with a 1% chance of lasting, or 30%, or 94%, or even 47%!  Subjective relationship survival probability is a continuous spectrum, driven by all the known facts about the relationship.  It's just, when you're starting from 10%, you want to try big changes that don't cost you a lot when they fail.  Conversely when you're starting from 90%, you probably have some slack to spend on highly motivated attempts to fix whatever remaining small flaws exist in this very valuable relationship."

"And so far as I can tell, Milliways just has prediction markets the same way it has drinks, security, and couples' therapy.  We spin one up, we get one.  If we were allowed to know more than that, Milliways would have told us earlier."

"...I am not sure how I feel about that," Leareth admits. "I might have operational security concerns - how do the contributors to the 'prediction markets' know enough about us to make predictions...?" 

"Yeah, if they're just supposed to go on general knowledge of relationships tend to go, they might not be taking into account some of Leareth's... uniqueness." It's not clear whether Ramona is in favor of all of this uniqueness or not.