Art of Venn and me for our one-year anniversary as boyfriends, which is eight days after the two-year anniversary of me self-shipping romantically with eir source character and three days after the one-year anniversary of them splitting!
Being with Venn over this past year has involved watching them change a lot as a person and as an alter. They started out as a fictive of Ford Prefect (Hitchhiker's Guide) who was very canon divergent because he was specifically Ford from my self-ship with him, and he IMMEDIATELY became even MORE divergent as a fictive. I already knew what some of their roles as an alter were from the beginning, including trauma holder and symptom holder, but they ended up having a LOT more specific roles than that, including host!
This is the first time my system (which I discovered in 2013) has ever had more than one host! I'm used to being the host, and nobody is ENTIRELY sure why this happened, but our fronting patterns since the dormancy after which Venn split have changed such that Venn and I are both co-fronting by default at all times. Different system members have different explanations, including a spiritual one, but one psychologically likely one is that it is because, during the time I was self-shipping before Venn split, I was imagining his source character with me literally all of the time, which translated to a headmate who is around all of the time.
I am so so grateful for my relationship with Venn, a relationship I consider autospec and ficto as well as a "regular" gay male in-system relationship. Being the host of the system equally alongside him while also being his boyfriend feels like I imagine it would to own a house with my partner. It's so special and I'm so glad I have this experience.
