This sentence is a doozy. 'When can we stop having to argue'. Nobody ever had to argue. Everyone that did so made a choice to do so.
No, they can't. It did not and does not work that way.
You're treating romance as one big unchanging question that requires one big unchanging answer. If that was the case then yeah, it would be pointless to drag it out. But it's not. It's a journey, like every other part of Mathilde's life. It involves Mathilde figuring out what she wants, and the thread figuring out what it wants for Mathilde. Forcing the thread to lock in an answer sight unseen would be weird and it would cheapen the characters and the relationship.
Which is fine and fair... but the process of "the thread figuring out what it wants" involves, well... the thread arguing about what it wants.
It's very hard for the thread to have a process that concludes in a decision about "what we want" without
debate. If the debate grows tiresome, then it is probably because the debate is, for one reason or another, not given a chance to achieve resolution or closure.
As an example unrelated to romance, Xantalos has a quest in which the lizardmen get teleported from the End Times into Warhammer 40k. Well, Warhammer 27k or so, I think. Anyway. The point is, we've got ongoing options in that quest about how to deal with the native species on the planet the lizardmen got teleported to. Any of these options are going to have ramifications, and they're irreversible, and they're one of the most important decisions of the current plot arc. BUT we have good reason to postpone our choice until we have the resources to implement it, which won't be for another few game turns.
This means we've had several rounds of bitter, relitigated debates over the issue, for obvious reasons, ever since the options were first offered to us. Why? Simple. Because it's never
over. There's never a good reason to
stop arguing, in and of itself.
...
Now here, you're straight up saying "stop arguing," hopefully we can honor that.
But if people keep being in a position to make choices on the issue, and if nothing is set in stone, then it's really hard to ask people to stop having opinions on an ongoing subject, or to stop trying to persuade others. If every time we have a turn vote, Mathilde gets a "dump Panoramia" option, then it's a bit of an ask to try and get people who never really wanted to date her in the first place to
stop arguing for dumping Panoramia, for instance. They're being asked to behave as if the matter is resolved, while simultaneously being given an option to de-resolve it and told the thread is still supposed to be figuring out what to do.
It does present kind of a dilemma, I admit.
We could... try to ban
discussing romance and just let people vote their individual preferences privately, I guess?
Dhar contaminated food and drink? I'd hope almost certainly. One of the big reasons Karak Eight Peaks originally fell in canon, apparently, was the skaven contaminating the wells with warpstone. As we were on the way to Karak Eight Peaks to fight skaven, I'd expect Kragg to remember the records of what had happened before and defend against it.
