"That's incredibly reasonable!  Usually the fundamental question of couples' therapy is 'Under what circumstance could some other person solve our problems when we, sensible people with more information, have failed to do that ourselves?' but if you'd just like to pay somebody else to do the hard parts that makes a lot of sense too!  What sort of informational asymmetry are you starting out with, here?  It sounds like maybe the man is from a dimension too primitive to have invented professional specialization and also relationships, and the woman is from a dimension more advanced than that?"

"That's incredibly reasonable!  Usually the fundamental question of couples' therapy is 'Under what circumstance could some other person solve our problems when we, sensible people with more information, have failed to do that ourselves?' but if you'd just like to pay somebody else to do the hard parts that makes a lot of sense too!  What sort of informational asymmetry are you starting out with, here?  It sounds like maybe the man is from a dimension too primitive to have invented professional specialization and also relationships, and the woman is from a dimension more advanced than that?"

(Thellim hasn't yet remedied her ignorance of her planet's history -- it would help if somebody could tell her why dath ilan's history might have been screened -- but it stands to reason that 'couples' therapist' would be one of the very first professions to come into existence once professional specialization started at all, since it requires no material infrastructure and relatively little math.)

"That's incredibly reasonable!  Usually the fundamental question of couples' therapy is 'Under what circumstance could some other person solve our problems when we, sensible people with more information, have failed to do that ourselves?' but if you'd just like to pay somebody else to do the hard parts that makes a lot of sense too!  What sort of informational asymmetry are you starting out with, here?  It sounds like maybe the man is from a dimension too primitive to have invented professional specialization and also relationships, and the woman is from a dimension more advanced than that?"

(Thellim hasn't yet remedied her ignorance of her planet's history -- it would help if somebody could tell her why dath ilan's history might have been screened -- but it stands to reason that 'couples' therapist' would be one of the very first professions to come into existence once professional specialization started at all, since it requires no material infrastructure and relatively little math.  You'd definitely expect to see it before, say, ironworking.)

"That's incredibly reasonable!  Usually the fundamental question of couples' therapy is 'Under what circumstance could some other person solve our problems when we, sensible people with more information, have failed to do that ourselves?' but if you'd just like to pay somebody else to do the hard parts that makes a lot of sense too!  What sort of informational asymmetry are you starting out with, here?  It sounds like maybe the man is from a dimension too primitive to have invented professional specialization and also relationships, and the woman is from a dimension more advanced than that?"

(Thellim hasn't yet remedied her ignorance of her planet's history -- it would help if somebody could tell her why dath ilan's history might have been screened -- but it stands to reason that 'couples therapist' would be one of the very first professions to come into existence once professional specialization started at all, since it requires no material infrastructure and relatively little math.  You'd definitely expect to see it before, say, ironworking.)