"Less trying than the present situation, and it's not as if it would have bothered me to never tell anyone."

"- I'm not sure it will occur to Cam on his own that it would not have bothered you to never feel at liberty to mention it."

" - well, I can tell him. I have close and fulfilling relationships with lots of people who don't know."

"That's not exactly the same thing, at least to my mind."

"...I wouldn't choose to construct my expectations about intimate relationships in a way where they'd be damaged by not mentioning something I was almost never going to feel free to mention? Is that a more Bellish way of putting it?"

"It is. But you did mention it and now he feels he's disappointed you, I think."

"I don't want him to feel guilty. I shouldn't have said something if there were perfectly reasonable circumstances under which I'd wish I hadn't, that's not on him."

"I think there's some fairly fundamental disconnect here and I'm not sure how to tease it out."

"Yeah. I don't know how to be more helpful."

"Why did you mention it to him to begin with, do you happen to remember?"

"I wasn't sure if it was something that in his time period it'd be considered misleading not to disclose before becoming intimate."

"Was it?"

"No."

"So - if you explained your reasoning to him he probably doesn't explicitly think this but his background assumption would be that there'd be some other reason to bring it up, that it was an optional vulnerability to present. Which he has failed to handle in the way you would have hoped."

" - I mean, the other reason to bring it up would be so he could understand why I'd have irrationally strong reactions to cases like this one, but I couldn't have told you what I'd have wanted him to do as a consequence of having the information - be slower to lose patience and announce he was handling it unilaterally, maybe - but I was not consciously expecting him to do that, and I wouldn't want him to, ah, trust me to handle things unless they're child rape cases, that would be horrible -"

"I wouldn't have automatically assumed you wanted him to do anything with the information, necessarily. I think - mm, if there were something comparable in his history he'd probably want to tell you about it sooner or later for - 'just for completeness' seems trite but more or less encapsulates the idea?"

"There's that too but if I'd known that having told him was going to make certain multiverse policy decisions stressful that would be more significant than completeness. Like - I do think that it would be a cost to our relationship not to have ever mentioned it, but I'd rather incur that cost than be terrified like I was today -"

"I would ordinarily think my impression on this was being colored by how Elves are compared to humans and psychologically-humans about marriage but Kib's the same way so I think it applies - this is awkward to put in words, I can rephrase it if I need to - if policy decisions have effects like this on the relationship something somewhere has gone horribly wrong, and if the expressed regret is having disclosed information that adds to the completeness of a relationship, the obvious place wherein something may have gone horribly wrong is in attempting to have a complete relationship."

"- maybe do rephrase that -"

"If you regret telling him things that he regards to be part of a fully realized partnership to tell, then from his perspective that reasonably backpropagates into regret about embarking on that serious a partnership in the first place. Wishing you hadn't told him reads as wishing you'd been less involved, in general. I don't think he actually expects you to dump him but he may have serious doubts about whether this is because you're young or chasing sunk costs or something."

" - oh. No, I'm treating 'I have panic attacks at the thought people close to me think that child rape cases should be reported to Ganymede without the consent of the victim and have enough information to act on that even if they currently think highly enough of me they can probably be dissuaded' as a inconvenient thing about me which I should mostly work around until I can look up the state of the art on trauma processing or whatever and make it stop being true. The deficit is with me."

Nod. "That makes sense. What he heard was that you wish he didn't know, not that you wish you could - cope with him knowing - so that's where he's making inferences from."

"I'll talk with him about that."

"That will probably help."

"Thank you for stopping by."