4-18-2026

I have been thinking about the possibility and inevitability of me dating within the system.

In-system romantic relationships are a big deal to my system, and virtually every alloromantic member of the system has them to some extent. Polyamory is normalized in my system, so you usually have more than one partner, too.

It varies from person to person in the system whether the polyamory is hierarchical or not. Sometimes you have someone with one relationship they treat as their most important or committed one, or one polycule that has that status, where other relationships are more for fun or just something to do to act on your attraction to someone.

In our system, sex isn't always considered part of romance, not just due to being ace-spec but due to normalizing platonic sex and kink. However, we usually see sex as something you can do to express romantic or even platonic feelings for someone.

We normally don't like people referring to sex as "intimacy", but when we talk about having sex, we're really mostly talking about forms of physical intimacy as opposed to something you do to satisfy an urge you have.

It's very common for members of this system to find each other attractive. We're collectively a man who is attracted to GNC men who present as androgynous (as opposed to feminine), alt/goth men, and older men, and we split a lot of headmates who fit those demographics.

It's hard for us to find people like this, offline as well as online, so we don't experience as much attraction to outerworld people. Even with our self-ships, we're normally more attracted to our OC F/Os - the ones who we purposely designed for ourselves - than we are to characters from published media.

Since we're such a large system with so many headmates in front all the time, the members of our system are basically surrounded by lots of men who are very specifically attractive to them, so we have a tendency to have an abundance of in-system relationships, many more than we would likely have in the outerworld.

With regards to outerworld people, we're theoretically gay and polyamorous, and we have queerplatonic partners. We would like a romantic partner someday, but it would be hard for us to find someone who really fits our preferences, let alone would actually be compatible with us.

We would probably be happiest with multiple partners, because we feel that different people meet different needs of ours. We don't see it that you're meant to find one person who can do everything for you. You're meant to get different needs met by different people. We see this as being the case in romantic relationships as well as friendships.

This is a part of why we're someone who wants to have queerplatonic partners at the same time as having romantic relationships. We understand that this isn't what queerplatonic relationships were originally created for, but we see it as helpful to conceptualize that you have a friend who has a level of dedication and attachment to you that a partner does. Being in a queerplatonic relationship with someone makes it easier for us to seek support from that person, as it's more accepted that that's part of the relationship, and it's harder to always know correct boundaries with friends.

However, we're normally not really attracted to our queerplatonic partners, but we see attraction as a part of a romantic relationship. For us, the ideal romantic relationship would be a very close friendship with someone we're attracted to and have sex or do kink with. I think it'd be very hard to have a relationship labeled as romantic with someone I'm not really attracted to.

I don't really know how I would get myself attracted to a person from the outerworld if they didn't already fit my preferences, but fortunately I don't have to worry about that with my system. If anything, this means my problem is one of narrowing down who in the system would be best to date.

As for who I would be narrowing it down to...I believe I am more interested in starting a relationship with someone in the system who does not already really have a committed romantic relationship. I want to be someone's "main person", and I don't want to detract from any of the relationships that are already present in the system.

I think Merrick and xier subsystem (Mechanical Maggots) are the most frequent fronters in my dating pool who don't have any serious romantic relationships. I've been spending a lot of time with them, and they're very entertaining people. They used to be an internal abuser in the system but now tend to present themself as some kind of mostly inoccuous cartoon villain.

I also do like Kepler quite a bit, who's also a Bauhaus songtive (of "Spirit", the single version in specific). However, they split in a relationship with Marlowe (a songtive of the album version of the same song), who's in Silent Hedges, a sidesystem of older goths.

Now, Crystal Cobwebs (the sidesystem I'm currently in) is collectively dating Silent Hedges, but I'm actually not sure if I'm going to STAY in Crystal Cobwebs, as it's possible that I'm actually part of a hidden part of Central Voidelia (the territory that Crystal Cobwebs is in). That's being looked into, and I'm not sure what's going to happen, but I'm trying not to be too attached to the notion of being a Crystal Cobwebs member.

I'm sure I'll wind up with someone eventually, though. No one in Local Void really stays single forever unless they want to.