Dating questions

These are questions that were not addressed on the about and that are specific to the dating aspect of this server.

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Q: What level of committment are you looking for, exactly? I'm a little confused by how you've described it.

A: Simply put, I've been in relationships where I treated the other person like the center of my world, and that wasn't healthy for me. I find that society normally expects people to regard their romantic partners this way. I furthermore have other partners who are and will continue to be important to me, even it's not the same kind of relationship as I'm looking for with this site/server.

However, I am still looking for a meaningful relationship and connection, not something where I'm just going through the motions of romance for fun, even if it starts that way. I am looking for the level of committment and closeness you would normally associate with a very close friend.

If this is confusing to you, you might not be used to prioritizing your close friends, and if so, you might not be a very good fit for me. You need to be someone who understands nuance in terms of the prioritization of relationships, as well as someone who needs to understand why someone would give importance to a non-romantic relationship.

Q: Why are you so insistent on ONLY having men or male-/masc-aligned people in this server?

A: Some people are gay, which normally means they're only attracted to one gender or gender category, the same one they're in. While the concept of "mspec gay" exists and is valid, and mspec people have labeled themselves as gay in the past, most people who consider themselves gay are only attracted to the same gender as themselves, and that's okay. I am gay in this sense.

If you are a woman or non-binary person and do not identify as a man, significantly align yourself with masculinity in your genderqueer identity, or would not use words like "boyfriend" in a relationship, you are not within my attraction. I might be willing to try a QPR or kink relationship with you that mspec headmates in the system might individually consider romantic, but this has to be understood at the onset. I have tried to be romantically attracted to genders other than men, and it just doesn't work for me.

If you are not a man at all but still identify with the label of "gay male" or related modern synonyms, you may be within my attraction and, if you would be a good match for me in other respects, you're welcome to try this server.

As a reminder, this rule only exists for this server, which is specifically about dating. Check the Social Rodent website for a list of servers I run that are not geared towards finding a very specific person for a very specific reason.

Q: How would you feel about somebody who is a man but also a woman, or is aligned to both binary genders?

A: The short answer is, it depends and I'd have to talk about a few things with them first, but if they dated us, they would have a fairly unique experience that included the sapphics of the system.

The long answer is, most members of the system who are gay men are not attracted to femininity or womanhood, while not being repulsed from it per se. That means that, if you are bigender, they are much more likely to focus on the part of you that is a man or is masculine, at least in a romantic context.

However, our system has sapphic/lesbian headmates, and they ARE more likely to be actively attracted to the part of you that is a woman or that is feminine, although it will probably be through a non-binary lens, as you would presumably not consider yourself a binary person.

This is notable, because our sapphics normally have familial feelings for people who we date who are exclusively men, but they believe they would feel romantically for someone who was a man and a woman at the same time.

These sapphic headmates make up only about 1/3 of our population, but some of them are main fronters and might front more if we dated you.

If you're bigender/androgyne/etc. and you're okay with being treated that way and having that kind of experience, please talk to me about that while applying.

Q: What kinds of acts do you consider romantic?

A: It's hard for me to know what I consider romantic over the internet, due to having only a very limited experience with romantic online dating, and most of my frame of reference for a romantic relationship comes from cohabiting with a partner in the past.

I would like to have long and meaningful conversations with someone, message them throughout the day, share and receive updates about our lives, give and receive emotional support from each other, express verbal affection over text, send each other pictures of each other and give each other compliments, send each other things in the mail (if the other person lives in the U.S.), maybe draw art of our headmates with you, and do kink over text if the other person is into it.

This might sound a lot like a close friendship instead of a romantic relationship to some people, but this is what a romantic relationship involving me looks like.

I can't play most video games with you due to not having the money for them or the fine motor skills necessary to be good at them, as I was not allowed to play most video games as a child. I can't have lengthy voice calls with you due to living in a house with a lot of roommmates and thin walls. This might be disappointing to some, but I don't think those things are necessary to love someone.

Q: What is your idea of a date over the internet?

A: Honestly, I think the phrase "internet dating", at least in relation to what I'm doing, is a somewhat misleading term, because I don't really see what I do with people online as a date.

However, I think it's entirely possible to have a romantic relationship with someone without "dating" them per se, and this is what we would be doing by default.

To be clear, I'm not opposed to having an actual date with someone over the internet, I just can't do a lot of the things people do with partners over the internet (voice calling, playing most video games). If there's something you want to do as a date, feel free to suggest it!

Q: How do you feel about people who are heavily involved in politics?

A: I know some of the phrasing on this site makes it sound to some like I'm looking for someone who has no involvement in politics, or that I equate politics with pointless internet discourse. This isn't correct, but it is correct that I sometimes take issue with how people act on their politics, even if I agree with them.

If you are a political person in the sense that you read theory, you go to protests, you do work in your local community, you believe everything has political context, and you explain political concepts to people when they come up, that is perfectly fine and you are welcome here, as long as your politics are left-aligned.

However, I have met a lot of "political people", including in the leftist sphere, who are very aggressive about their politics, make every conversation about heavy political theory, equate reblogging posts with activism, believe everyone is morally obligated to be an activist at all times, and care more about being mean to conservatives online than they do about making a difference in their actual community.

It's also easy for some aspects of politics to make people's mental health worse. It's true that people are affected by the politics of the countries they live in, and it's better to be aware than not, but quite frankly, it's really really easy to use politics as a way of self-harming, without even realizing it, and it's very uncomfortable to talk to people who use your conversations as a way to self-harm. Venting about being affected by current political reality is not self-harming behavior, but going on doomspirals about how everything is fucked forever and using politics to back up your viewpoint is.

In my experience, people who present themselves in a highly political way on the internet are less likely to be in the first category of people who engage in their local community and more in the second category with a skewed concept of activism. However, I know this isn't always true, and I won't judge you based on how you present yourself or how often you talk about politics. Rather, I will judge you for HOW you talk about politics or what you consider activism.

Q: Are you sys4sys or alter4alter?

A: Firstly, I'm aware there is some terminology for plural dating, but I have a hard time finding out what any of it is, so if you ask me questions with this kind of phrasing, please understand if I need to ask you for clarification.

Secondly, we're both. We are a collective because we inhabit one body, and we want to be seen as the collective. In our experience, relationships that are just between individual parts of the system don't work, because the parts in question may not always front often or at the same time, and you can't always make them front when you want them to. This has led to relationships of ours falling apart in the past.

However, we are not JUST a collective, and the headmates in the system are also individuals. We want the individuality of our headmates to be recognized and engaged with, which is one reason this server is so oriented towards dating other systems. If you see our headmates as individuals and are a system yourself, your headmates and my headmates will naturally develop individualized relationships with each other.

Q: How do you feel about source dating?

A: We know that "source dating" - that is, fictives dating other fictives of sourcemates - is a common thing in the plural sphere, and we aren't really against it. We'd actually probably like it, if possible.

However, we just don't tend to meet people who have headmates who are sourced from the same things our headmates are. Our number one source for introjects, at least who frequently front, are factives of musicians, namely from classic rock (with notable groups of introjects of Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson). Our headmates are normally fictionalized versions of these musicians and may not necessarily remember the same things that happened to your factives of their bandmates.

Whether we're attracted to someone for being their source depends. Many of the rock stars we have introjected are people we find attractive and who have influenced what we find attractive, particularly Trent Reznor. However, a lot of our introjects of fictional characters aren't necessarily attracted to their sourcemates, even if they're commonly shipped with them. We also recognize that introjects are their own people, so we would need to get to know your introjects as individuals before dating them. However, being sourced from a musician we find attractive or a character we self-ship with WOULD make an introject more attractive to us.

Q: You've mentioned there is no upper age limit for dating you. Do you have a thing about age gaps?

A: In a word, yes. I do think age makes people more aesthetically and emotionally attractive, and with regards to the Gen X'ers and Boomers I've been friends with (the only reason I'm not still friends with them is because they were from an area I moved away from and I now live in a college town), a lot of them were a lot more attractive and agreeable to me than some of the young adults I've met from running Discord servers.

I understand the likelihood of me finding and dating an older man in this avenue is extremely low, which is why I haven't made a really big deal out of this fact about myself. However, if you ARE significantly older than me (late 30s is the youngest I'd see as "significant"), that will go a LONG way towards me finding you attractive.

Q: Do in-space ages/qualities count towards you finding someone attractive?

A: Yes, especially if the headmates with those qualities are hosts, frequent fronters, or there's a lot of them.

For example, if you are bodily 30 but most of your frequent fronters are in their 50s, and they act and talk reasonably like older people (I've seen servers full of Ghost BC fictives - the fandom with all the old men in a Satanic church - who used tons of modern slang and it was very jarring), I will see them as their in-space ages (as well as your body's age). It will contribute to your SYSTEM having certain traits in my eyes, even if your BODY does not have those traits.

The same would go for if you had a lot of goth/alt headmates but did not present that way in person. While I would not necessarily be as aesthetically attracted to your actual body as I would be if you were presenting in a way I find more aesthetically pleasing, knowing your headmates look a certain way in-system will contribute to how I see them in my mind and therefore who they are in my mind.

Q: Why do you feel that you would be attracted to someone with the same programming as you?

A: There are a few reasons for this.

Firstly, our programming was very sexual in nature and was intended to give us a different sexual identity than the one we appeared to have prior to being programmed. We were conditioned to find certain traits and people attractive, and we now find some of the traits of our programmer to be attractive (for example, he was already an older man at the time of the programming).

Secondly, the ability of someone to give us understanding and to relate to our experiences makes them attractive to us. This is probably very common for people in general. However, what is not so common is the type of experiences we have had that a person could potentially understand due to having gone through it themselves. Our programming is a very big example of that.

Q: What was your programming like?

A: Because this site is part of the world wide web, and I believe in getting to know things about people by talking to them, I will not be disclosing too many specifics on this site.

However, the detail I find the most important is that my scripts were based on fictionalized narratives about rock stars, from both the past (1960s/1970s) and what was then the present (1990s/2000s). A story about a fictionalized version of Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson, called Troy Razor and Meredith Maggot, was a central part of this programming. However, so were stories about characters based on David Bowie, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin.

This is the main aspect of our programming that both affects our attraction/relationships and where we have never met anyone who is confirmed to have this same programming as us. If you listen to us talk or ask us questions, though, you will learn more, as we are rather an open book about this topic in private settings, as we find this much less dangerous than the consequences of not acknowledging our programming.

Q: What intersex condition do you have?

A: While I don't feel intersex people are required to disclose their conditions all of the time, I can understand wanting to know what condition someone has if intersex is a big part of their identity and they are looking to date, especially if you are intersex yourself.

We have Partial Androgen Insensivity Syndrome (PAIS). We are not officially diagnosed with this, but due to medical evidence she has observed, our doctor believes we have this condition and treats us as an intersex patient.

People with PAIS have XY chromosomes, can be assigned any gender at birth, and may be born with ambiguous genitalia. We were assigned female at birth but were most likely born with ambiguous genitalia, if it's any indicator that we have an unexplained childhood surgery that our adoptive family refuses to acknowledge even happened.

We consider ourselves to be both cisgender and transgender male, at the same time. However, we prefer being thought of as intersex, or even gay or GNC, over cisgender or transgender (as a collective, some individual headmates may have different preferences), and we feel that "cis" and "trans" is itself a binary that people are forced into, just like how "male" and "female" are a false binary even if many people individually fall into it.

As a disclaimer, we know enough about PAIS and intersex to explain it to people, to be confident of our condition, to help someone understand if they would or wouldn't be intersex, and to hold a general conversation about some experiences of the identity, but we find it difficult to research much about intersex at length, because it is a medical condition, and we have heavy medical trauma, not just from the corrective procedures associated with our condition.

Q: What are you talking about when you mean that some headmates will have familial feelings for us, including at the same time as romantic?

A: We have a complicated relationship with both our adoptive and biological families and are more likely to have genuine familial feelings for people we are not biologically or legally related to. This includes seeing friends as family.

To some members of the system, family is an "alternative" to romance, such as how a woman headmate in our system might feel about a man we were dating who was exclusively attracted to men. Knowing that her romantic feelings would not be returned, she might feel more like a sister or a mother to that man instead.

Some headmates have both romantic and familial feelings for people at the same time. This fits into the kink known as "fauxcest". We do fauxcest differently than other people might, because we don't address each other with sibling terms (as, in real life, real siblings don't do that very much), but there's usually a conversation about what it means that we see each other simultaneously romantically and familially, and we then proceed to do things that would be done by either siblings or romantic partners, with both romantic and familial intent.

If you are not comfortable with fauxcest, it does not have to be a part of your relationship with us, because only a select few headmates are into that at all. However, we will probably have a conversation with you about this topic at some point, because it does come up with us.