I am going to break my silence about the internal workings of Starter Marriage, at least a little bit. I don't know how useful this will be in following the story, but I hope you'll at least find it interesting.
As someone (thank you!) noted, the choices that you make early in the game don't just affect what comes later, but what has come before. In effect, as you select choices, you are picking which story the protagonist has been in since well before the story actually began. By the end of "The Girlfriend Experience," the story has resolved itself into a handful of plots. Each plot centers around the central mystery of Starter Marriage, which is: Why did Annie leave? The plot also controls which person or people are the primary engine driving the story forward, and it's not always the protagonist.
While there are literally hundreds of parameters that are constantly changing as the story evolves, two particularly important ones are "trustworthiness" and "attentiveness." "Trustworthiness" is what it sounds like: how often does the protagonist lie or tell the truth? "Attentiveness" is, more or less, how much the protagonist displays concern about the other people in the game, especially his lovers. Of course, those aren't the only factors that control what happens in the game. Changes in the direction of the story are often based on the particular way a choice is worded, taken as a statement of what kind of person the protagonist is.
An untrustworthy protagonist doesn't just lie to other people. He lies to himself, and covers things up. This is true even though the point of view of the story is free indirect, rather than first or second person. So, yes, the protagonist will (potentially) lie to you.
The motivations of the other characters in the story also change depending on how the story evolves, and can be quite different from plot to plot.
As the story plays out (especially in the earlier parts), the choices determine what kind of person the protagonist is, and what happened in the time before the story we're looking at started. These are alternative realities: each plot is incompatible with the others.
And now I'm going to drop a few facts, just to make things even more interesting (or confuisng):
- Allison played no part in Annie's departure.
- The voice the protagonist hears during the night between "The Girlfriend Experience" and "Relationship Goals" is not Dante.
- Dante never controls the protagonist in the story so far.
- The decision as to whether or not to fly out to Annie is less important than it might initially seem.
- There are important characters who have not even been mentioned yet.
And: There is a huge clue to what plot you are in and what it means in Phase 4.1.
Thank you for all of your kind words and attention to Starter Marriage! It's been an enormous amount of work (and even more work to come), but the reception it has had makes that entirely worthwhile.
