View source for What Each Owes the Other

The arrangement between ''Jor'' and ''daes'' is not one-sided, though it is not equal. Both owe the other something, and what each owes is different in kind.

== What he owes ==

; Provision
: Food, clothing, shelter, medicine, and rest — everything her keeping requires, at whatever standard he can afford, and that standard is visible to everyone who looks at her.
; Judgment
: She has handed him the decisions. He must make them, make them well, and keep making them. A man who cannot decide things is not gentle; he has failed at the only thing truly required of him.
; Knowing her ''kapashra''
: How much a person can carry — finite, and different for every person. Loading her past her point of failure shows a lack of understanding, and he is not excused by not having asked.
; Not overloading her
: Which follows, and is worth saying on its own, because it is perhaps the most common way a decent man fails. Not cruelty. Simply asking for more than there was, and not noticing.

== What she owes ==

; Obedience
: The most obvious, and the least interesting.
; Attention
: Knowing what he wants before he says it. A slave who has to be told everything is doing half the work.
; Honesty about herself
: The heaviest. He is owed her thoughts, her fears, her wants and needs. A slave who conceals what she is thinking has withheld the one thing the arrangement actually needs from her, because he cannot judge well for a person he does not know.
; Her best self
: What she is in a room is what he is. Her carelessness is his.
; Trust
: Her life, safety, and direction handed over entirely — the largest of the five, and what makes the others coherent.

== The asymmetry ==
It is real and the world does not pretend otherwise. He is not obliged to be open with her; she has no claim on his thoughts or reasons, and a man who tells her nothing has failed at nothing. She cannot have a bad day and say nothing. In practice most long households become mutual anyway; a man who has kept the same woman for many years and never once told her what was troubling him is unusual, and a little strange, and everyone in his house knows it. The obligation runs one way. The habit rarely does.

== The weight on him ==
He carries another person's entire existence at all times, with no day off and no one to hand it to. The philosophy tells him force is weakness and competence is compulsory, and does not tell him what to do when he is tired, or wrong, or scared. She can help him carry it, and in most houses she does — he tells her what is wrong and she listens, or at least he is not alone with it for the evening. None of that moves the weight off him; it means somebody is standing beside him while he holds it, which turns out to matter a great deal. The men who talk about it talk to other owners, and that is a large part of what the [[Hearth Keeper's Guild]] is for, whatever its charter says.

== Failure and feeling ==
Failure is not shameful; unlearned failure is. An ''ell'' is a loss taken with dignity, and a person who takes one well is thought better of than one who avoided the contest. ''Skaella'' is mastery built by practice, which means everyone who has it was once bad at the thing. The shame is in failing the same way twice. Emotion is not weakness: ''Krai'' is weeping and carries no shame in any city, and a person who does not weep when they plainly should is thought to be holding something in, which is regarded as worse. The ethic is narrow and consistent — feel it, do not perform the feeling. What is judged is the man who needed help and did not ask. That is the one form of failure the world does not forgive, and it applies to both of them.

== See also ==

* [[True Mastery]] · [[Health, Injury, and Correction]] · [[Hearth Keeper's Guild]]