Experiencing love and "romance" outside of what the norm is is so fucking weird. We always call it romance, but it really...isn't. Like one of our alters has "fallen in love" with one of our partner's alters, but they're aromantic. Like. No romance at all aromantic. But they still both feel strongly about one another and agree to be "boyfies" (their term for boyfriends.) Our system is grayromantic and experience alterous attraction. We also have very complicated relationships with romance, love, anything like that due to us being autistic, but also our disorders. Feelings fluctuate a lot for seemingly no reason, either our PDs or different alters.
Our alter only really knows that it is a feeling stronger than whatever love is, platonic or romantic. It is a desire to be by them, to see them smile. Our partner's alter expressed the same thing. It's not...necessarily romantic??? But since we don't really understand it ourselves nor know how to describe it, it's just...a mess???
Our experiences with any connections or strong feelings are never easily explained. We usually settle for simpler labels just to make it easy. Like using genderfluid. Truth is, our body's (and host's) gender is very complicated and confusing. It stresses them out trying to understand it since there's so many contributing factors including drama. So they stopped trying and just decided genderfluid and nonbinary. Any more specific xenogender labels are used infrequently and randomly.
Like we are on the asexual, aromantic, and aplatonic spectrums. Everything certainly fluctuates. The body ultimately identifies with grayromantic, aceflux, and aplatonic. But aside from alters having different experiences, there's also just...a lot to consider even for those labels for us bodily and for host.
It's so hard to understand our own feelings about everything. It's even harder for us when those involve connections with other people. Especially with how much our disorders affect our relationships and how connected we feel to others. Everything we sit exists outside of the standard expectation of what it is meant to be.
I guess we just never fully consider it since it's complicated and hard for us to put to words. All we know is that whatever we feel for our partner and some of their alters and whatever else, it is some form of strong mix between platonic and romance yet also without it. It is simply an urge to be with them. A special person, an exception person, a chosen person, a trusted person, a safe person. We don't understand why, we don't know why, we just know they make us happy and to return the favour will be the most cherished blessing of our life.
-Ekko