What would you do with the Silmaril peal's resources?

[MaggieoftheOwls]

I mean, by some reasonable standards Midnight has not had a romantic relationship since he killed Findekano's parents.

[DanielH]

Well, yes, but not by his standards.

[DanielH]

Low-cost improvement:

I would announce in all known flat Ardas and all ones discovered in the future that we are making a change to how marriage works: from now on, any consenting adult Eldar can get married as long as, beforehand, they each explicitly and uncoercedly state their intents to marry; if this arrangement is unsatisfactory, please come to us for a case-by-case change to how the rules work and we may be able to accomodate it. If enough cases build up around a common theme we may edit marriage again similarly.

This is all completely true upon being said by a credible source, fixes all the common issues, and avoids pointing out (before all the social groundwork is in place) that gay and plural marriages are now possible, while totally allowing them for anybody who wants them.

[Ezra]

Plural marriages are already possible, they're just frowned-upon (and harder to do by force).

[DanielH]

I meant “these three people are getting married”, not “this person is marrying both of those other people”. Although I suppose it might manifest itself equivalently to (n choose 2) standard marriages.

[lintamande]

People would be upset by the change to marriage; they mostly think it is morally right that you can't have premarital sex and would disapprove of making that feasible to do, even though exceptions for rape would be popular among people who have heard of rape.

[DanielH]

And they would consider accidental marriage better? The punishment for getting carried away for a night should not be permanent in this way, even granting that there should be some punishment or deterrent.

[lintamande]

Accidental marriages are very very bad but also vanishingly rare (and the most typical case is a couple who wants to get married and is not looking forward to the year apart getting carried away and whoops no year apart). I think people'd favor an annulment procedure for cases of accidental/nonconsensual marriage.

[DanielH]

Okay then, I could say this is true for nonstandard relationships as a compromise, because Elf/human ones had been an inconsistent edge case. Nobody who didn’t know better would consider “nonstandard” to mean anything other than “Elf/non-Elf” I could combine it with more active wishing or something to patch the accidental half-elves issue.

Better, of course, would be to aim for public tolerance if not public acceptance, but that could take longer and require more resources than a relatively-standard marriage reform.

[DanielH]

It’s nice to see what life looks like not at the very top of the hierarchy, which I think alleviates some of the complaints that lead to this thread.