Family life

Marriage and relationships

Since most fae species live for hundreds of years, they have a rather different attitude to sex and marriage from that of most human cultures. Serial monogamy is probably the most common form of relationship, but polyamory and other arrangements are not unknown, and attitudes to gender tend to be flexible. For more information, see Gender and sexuality.
However the fae are the product of the human cultures that imagined them, so they do ape human customs when it suits them, including formal marriage. Pure-blood fae may intermarry for political or dynastic reasons, but they seldom marry their human lovers.

Children Since pure-blood fae were once immortal and even now can live for centuries, they have fewer children than humans or mixed-blood fae. Average numbers are difficult to calculate owing to the complex nature of fae relationships, but pure-blood population levels are only barely holding steady, suggesting that on average each individual produces only slightly more than one child in a lifetime.

Changelings

In the past, many fae were fascinated by human children and stolen thousands of them over the centuries. Human midwives and wet-nurses were often been brought in to deal with the more mundane aspects of parenthood, and the child captives were treated more like pets than children. Typically the fae “parents” would grow bored of their child captives when they grew up, and return them to Earth, but the prettiest and most charming were allowed to remain, and became the ancestors of the present human population of Andlang.