"Basically the sex stuff. Some of the things like the no working while you have kids also doesn't really work outside of, uh, paradise."

Because there is too much work to do?

"Also because of the money thing, and because we can't have kids at arbitrary ages, that interacts with the money thing because you can't just save up for fifty years and then get around to it."

Ah. Yes, that's what we would do if there was too much work to have babies, we'd just wait.

I think the rule about not pursuing people you can't marry might be so you don't fall in love and then pine forever, and the rule about not engaging in intimacy that doesn't marry you is that you might get carried away and marry unwisely.

"...Humans rarely pine forever. It's probably happened but it's not a major thing."

Elves do that. If they fall in love with someone who doesn't love them back or something. It's not always forever but I do not know of anyone who is over it already.

"And the second part is basically exactly what wouldn't work for humans. When human societies try to have rules about people not having sex except when they're married, they don't work - people break them, you wind up with grandparents raising surprise babies and the father skipping town or whatever."

Oh. Well, I think sometimes people take some time away from an accidental marriage but not from children, that'd be awful.

"As noted birth control doesn't always work and we did have to invent it, before that we just didn't have any. Anyway, when humans try to enforce rules like that it winds up running mostly on social stigma, which means people who break the rules, which they do, because sex drive bellcurves like everything else and some people basically can't not if there are any opportunities, they hide it, including conspicuous consequences like babies that they can pretend are someone else's."

- oh, Elves can see when other Elves are married, you can't be secretly married unless you also run off. 

"Well, we separate sex and marriage and also can't do that."

I guess I can see how that'd make rules harder to really have.

"I mean, it makes them harder to enforce. I'm not sure it does anything about how unpleasant they are all by itself."

If other people are breaking the rules then it's more frustrating to follow them, and you wonder what other rules those people are breaking, and you have to figure out how to respond to them doing so, and all those things are not good for communities and relationships.

"Sure. Doesn't really address the part where some people want to have sex."

I guess if it didn't get you married lots of people'd find that pretty tempting.

"...I think I'm going to chalk this one up to species difference probably. Or maybe you are just weird and your culture doesn't expose you very much to others' potentially antisocial experiences. On account of the bliss of Valinor."

Might be part of it.

"Which may or may not be anything like cases on Earth where the government tries to restrict what people can say but when they do that here it's really bad."

Huh, why?

"...it's possible the answer is 'because we aren't telepathic'. Uh, a government that wants to do that is usually doing it because certain ideas destabilize their hold on power."

That seems like a pretty good reason, is it not?

"...maybe it seems like one without historical context."

Maybe. But governments falling apart sounds bad.