"We can always go and fix other planets if we finish this one, I guess! Though I find it's helpful to pace myself and have multiple hobbies. You can make yourself nuts thinking about all the people you haven't helped yet. Rest and relaxation and connection and joy are important too."

She says the last sentence with a bit of an edge in her voice, because she's not entirely sure Leareth actually believes that.

And then she realizes she's doing that thing where the client appeals to the therapist for backup in winning a long-standing fight, and wonders if she should try to root out that tendency, because she doesn't really endorse it, but the words are already said.

...Important, yes. A priority, not...necessarily...? Though, you know, it makes sense to reassess his priorities now that some of his other highest priorities are at least partly dealt with...

"Leareth, the prediction market says you've got a slightly better chance of staying with Ramona if you occasionally speak some of your thoughts out loud in her direction."

Ask him how he knows this.

Thaaaaat is probably reasonable. 

"I think I - do know how not to make myself 'nuts' by dwelling on all the people I have not helped yet," that has been kind of an important skill for...basically everything he's wanted to do in the last two thousand years..., "but I have in fact not been prioritizing - rest and relaxation and connection and joy, particularly the latter two, for myself? And - it does, I think, make sense to reconsider that, given how the situation has changed. Thanks to Ramona." 

Awwwwwww!

Ramona keeps saying "awwwwwww" about lots of things that Leareth says to her and she's a little self-conscious about what a twitterpated idiot she's being about this but he's just so sweet and people don't have to not be twitterpated idiots when the situation calls for twitterpation.

"Often couples have different levels of needs for rest and relaxation.  And in that case, the most obvious thing to do is..."

"Time dilation!  The two members of the couple just run at different speeds, so that one of them can work in a Time Pod while the other stays out, or one of them can go into stasis while the other works!  Is that one of the available magical solutions where you're from?"

Ramona's usual approach is quite different, but this is a valid question! Thellim is better at this than Ramona was initially giving her credit for!

On Earth, with human clients and no magic, Ramona's approach is to help people develop skills of perspective taking and teamwork, so that they can help each other achieve their somewhat disparate goals -- she helps them complement each other, rather than squabbling about their differences.

But if you have enough magic to paper over the differences, heck, that'd work too.

She turns to Leareth. "I don't have access to magic like that. Do you?"

"Not on Velgarth!" They haven't finished exploring what new kinds of magic Milliways offers. "I - suspect if I had had access to that in Velgarth before, I would not actually have used it for rest and relaxation." 

"Well, no, the idea is that you work until your work-bar fills up, and then come out of time dilation to where Ramona is waiting to fuck you or play magical computer games or whatever other hobbies you've found."

"But if that magic's not reliably available on the planet you work on, you might need to... well, actually, we might need to table that for now and put it on a list of things for you to consciously have conversations about and work out solutions for.  Unless this seems like the problem between you, we shouldn't dive deep into it immediately, and should go on covering breadth-first more of the basic ideas in relationships."

"I'll just quickly mention that besides magic, other clever solutions include personality adjustment, inviting additional people into the relationship for load balancing, and asymmetrically effortful mutual hobbies.  If you don't find any clever solutions, you might end up just compromising about it.  The important thing is that you know you're doing that, and have some idea of who's giving up more and will require repayment elsewhere in the relationship, rather than them feeling quietly sad about having lost the negotiation."

"...I really do not think that inviting additional people into the relationship would help." (Leareth had been noticing this thought, and wouldn't normally have jumped in to say it, but has just been explicitly instructed that saying more of his thoughts would probably be good.) 

Skill issue, but fine, if you don't have the skills you don't have the skills.

"I... should probably mention that Leareth being monogamous is not currently a problem, but it might limit us in the long run."

Ramona sounds sheepish and apologetic about this. Some people are just monogamous! And that's okay! But she does worry about it.

"Ambiguity.  Do you mean he's monogamous in the sense that--"

"Or no, actually, this seems about as good a time as any to introduce our next topic in the fundamentals of relationshipping, namely:  Gendertropes."

"There's several classical kinds of relationship that are known to almost never work.  Maybe a relationship like that has worked at least sometimes over the course of all human history, but it's not the way to bet.  Other times, there's relationships that statistical surveys show to sometimes work, but only if the people within them do particular things to adapt."

"For example, let's say you've got a couple where one partner wants kids who'll have two parents, the other partner doesn't want kids, and at least one partner doesn't want to invite anyone else into the relationship, even asexually for parenting purposes."

"That relationship is unlikely to work, at least on my home planet.  It's not just common sense, sometimes somebody tries it anyways and, yep, it sure doesn't work, and then we collect statistics and do causal analysis showing that this was an unusually bad idea, even after controlling for the fact that the people who did it were the sort of people who'll try things that are known to be bad ideas."

"A civilization collects knowledge over time about relationship typologies that never work, or only sometimes work -- or, rarely, work unusually well -- based on ways of classifying the people in that relationship as individuals, such as 'does want kids' or 'does not want kids'.  Advanced societies organize this knowledge based on what we call 'gendertropes'."

"The analogy I want to use is that gendertropes are like a standardlibrary, but I don't know if Leareth's world has programming languages... they're like a preamble that anyone can include at the start of their autobiography, that will make some chapters shorter, because the preamble already explained what you'd otherwise have to explain yourself."

"Let's say you've got a desire disparity, a very standard sort of problem that arises in a relationship where one partner wants to have sex twice a week, and one partner wants to have sex every day.  The question you want to ask is not 'What sort of thing happens on average, what sort of solution usually works, in a relationship where one person wants sex twice a week and one person wants sex once a day?'  Instead you want to ask:  'What sort of people are we, as individuals and in our expression of our own sexualities, who have found ourselves this scenario?'"

"If you've got a 15-year-old male with a high sex drive who's into older women, in a relationship with a 45-year-old woman who thinks he's cute but doesn't have that much time for him, the standard first-thought solution is for him to form a harem with three women like that.  On the other hand maybe you've got a 30-year-old woman with the 'desperate demislut' gendertrope, where she's got a very high sex drive and constant horny thoughts, but her mind is extremely picky about which men she can express her sexuality with; and she's found herself just one man, who unfortunately isn't as horny.  Then it makes more sense for him to consider implanted testosterone pellets."

"The first culture I found myself in, after I got isekaied from a plane crash, was one where everyone just had one concept of what it was like to be a man, or what it was like to be a woman.  They didn't even have the concept of it being different on average when a 15-year-old man dated a 45-year-old woman than when a 45-year-old man dates a 15-year-old woman, because they hadn't formed the idea that on average 15-year-old men are different in their expressions of sexuality and relationships from 45-year-old men.  They had the differences, to be clear, what they didn't have was the concept.  They just had one ideal for what men were supposed to be like, and one ideal for what women were supposed to be like, and they believed every male and female was supposed to live up to that.  I explained the idea of gendertropes to them, though, and that fixed most of their problems."

"All of your examples are about men and women and how much sex they want to have with each other. Is that everything you can do with gender, in your world?"

This ontology does not seem nearly flexible enough so far.

"Some men have sex with men, some women have sex with women, and some people are lucky enough to be able to fuck anything but my civilization never did develop a pill for inducing that mental property.  I myself have the Meddling Asexual gendertrope in that regard.  Neither I nor any of my alts have ever shown any visible sexual attraction to what you would otherwise think were some pretty attractive men, especially once they got themselves and their clothes cleaned up; but I do feel an impulse to feed them if they look hungry, or manage their sexual relationships with other people."

"But I suspect what you're really asking about is, for example, whether two people who both have trouble initiating conversations, but at least one of whom hates awkward silences, should try to go on dates, and the answer there is likewise 'usually no'."

"That does seem more - generally applicable - than a system that is only about whether someone wants children," which had been Leareth's initial impression, very confusingly since neither him nor Ramona had brought that up, "or what frequency of sex they prefer, but - having trouble initiating conversations or disliking silence are both just...personality traits? I am not sure what they have to do with someone's gender. ...At least, in Velgarth I have not really observed either of those traits to be more common in one gender." 

"Well, the first civilization I found myself inside -- that wasn't my native one -- thought that it was the man's responsibility to make intelligent conversation, and the woman's responsibility to look interested and giggle.  Every man.  Every woman.  Also they were giant bug aliens with weird suboptimal equilibria where nobody had an individual incentive to express the thought 'what if we did something else which is not that' even though it was valid, but that's a long story."

"In general, there are personality tropes and interpersonal relationship tropes; people sometimes fall into regular-ish categories of being people, and people with regular-ish traits sometimes interact with one another in regular-ish ways.  'Gendertropes' are a proper subset of personality tropes that are being primarily expressed relative to the proper subset of interpersonal relationships that are sexual or romantic relationships."

"To put it another way, if it makes sense to say that somebody is a 'man' or a 'woman' and not just that they have personalities, or that they're 'married' and not just hanging out with one another, it makes sense to subtype and subdivide them further for extra predictive points."

Ramona still can't tell if Thellim would be Problematic on Earth with respect to various kinds of queerness? This ontology seems like it would have room for everything, but then Thellim also keeps strongly implying binaries where Ramona doesn't think in binaries.

But having that conversation across an interdimensional inferential gap sounds exhausting. Ramona usually gets paid to do that. She'll probably let it go for now as it doesn't seem super relevant to why she and Leareth are here.

Leareth is still confused, and having kind of a hard time pinning down what he's confused about. 

"I - recognize that many, perhaps most, people are more physically attracted to the physical signs of one gender," which Leareth separately does not really get, but mostly because he's not really attracted to either by default, "but it - does not seem obvious to me that someone who finds it hard to initiate conversations, and would prefer that other people do it, would be differently bothered when that mismatch is in a romantic context as opposed to with their friends, who could be of either gender?" 

He frowns. "...I think for myself, none of the traits Ramona has that I find admirable are - particularly about the fact that she is woman? I am fairly sure I find them equally admirable - and attractive - if Ramona happened to be a man." 

It's incredibly valid for Leareth to be genderblind about his partners! (Ramona is using a more Earth notion of gender here, she still doesn't understand Thellim's definition at all.) Ramona would fight tooth and nail to protect Leareth's right to experience attraction in whatever way makes sense in his brain!

Ramona tells herself this in a VERY LOUD mental voice to drown out the little sad voice that wanted Leareth to think Ramona was sexy in a feminine way.

None of this shows on her face.

"Just to check, can you easily tell which people are men and which people are women even if they don't have specially coded clothes or hair... actually, maybe your world has dress codes or hair codes and you've never had a chance to try, but I'll still ask if you think you could."