Nod.

"Is there anything else it might be useful for me to convey?"

"I really didn't mean to hurt him. I love him. I don't even think he's obviously wrong he just has a stance that is not compatible with - this one trivial thing."

"It seems not so trivial to you, so it isn't to him."

"It's usually pretty trivial to me, I didn't even realize I had strong feelings about it until he said he was going to file a police report."

Nod.

"If I'd guessed I could have just - made a point of finding out peoples' thinking on the question before I said anything. I should have been more careful of that."

"It seems like it would be - trying - to sound out opinions on the subject before deciding if you're willing to share."

"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 -"