Another perspective from a system...
My wife was among the first people to know I was a system, even if she didn't fully understand it at the time (to be honest, neither did I, we were teenagers in the 2000s and there wasn't much information out there).
I've been a system for so long, but I never identified with the term. I thought everyone had different people in their heads, that that's what people meant by "facets" of your personality or whatever. When one of us fronted, I just thought of it as like.. the same as when people act different at school vs. home vs. church, or with family vs. with friends or whatever.
At first, there were 3 who fronted, 2 who did not (ages 6 and 9), a persecutor, and the host. The 3 who fronted were a protector (V) who managed external demands of my parents and my home life, one (M) who managed school demands and academia, and one (K) who managed my alone time and some of my darker impulses (drugs, self-injury), but also held my creativity. The little ones held trauma, in very different ways.
Sex used to be nightmarish for me. My 6yo (S) is sex-repulsed and carries the trauma of CSA in the form of fear and internalized religious shame. My 9yo (A) is very hypersexual but is essentially acting out trauma, so consent is really hard to negotiate because she is overly compliant and wants to be "good" and loved.
The others also had really complicated relationships with sex. K used sex to get drugs and favours, but only would do so while wasted. V used it to connect to, and control, other people. M carries a more complex version of the sex repulsion S carries: religious trauma and purity culture make her averse to most forms of sex.
K has splintered several times. The first split was the persecutor (N). The second, most recent split gave us a near-constant banshee wail (C). Over time, N's role has become less adversarial, and we found that he is the only male headmate, and that he sees his role as filling the needs of the others to act out their trauma. Each of us has a "villain" and the earliest of these, our abuser, was male. So he is also male. In a sense, he is a copy of what we have most feared. He understands the need for a safe space (internally) to explore that trauma.
A was, at first, a copy of myself prior to an extremely traumatic loss at age 9. A few years later, a second major trauma hit the towers, creating another copy (X, age 12). They are "sisters" in that they are the only true copies of me at specific ages. X largely has the role of managing A, but she is also less risk-averse and more spontaneous. She's also the best at video games.
So there's a broad range of ages and personalities and preferences. K is 15, M is 16, and V is 19. Each of them aged along with me for many years, then halted at a very specific point. But we have been these ages for many years now. It impacts us less as time goes, except for the little ones. S is a spooky child who has always seemed too old to be so young. A will never grow up, her entire demeanour is just playful. Her distress is intolerable to everyone else, so keeping her happy is a priority.
The thing about having really different motives for sex, and honestly often entirely separate relationships, is that 1, that leads to a lot of cheating, in that the body/host is dating/fucking multiple people (and for a long time, we had much more amnesia and sometimes did not know about each other's relationships!!!), and 2. not everyone is psyched about the people other headmates chose.
My wife was technically V's choice, and even now, we often jokingly refer to V as my wife's "girlfriend".. they have a relationship that has been independent of the host/collective for almost two decades now, lol. Some of us were more skeptical than others. One of us tried to sabotage the relationship out of fear that we were getting too close and she would find out. We didn't confide about our "inside selves" to anyone before her.
But my wife has worked to get to know each of us, to build a relationship and trust and rapport, to know what we think, and to encourage us to listen to each other and try to find compromises between us for conflicting wants or needs. This directly impacted N's relationship with the rest of us, for one thing. K's relationship with the collective has also improved considerably.
Sex used to be so hard. Now S literally just "leaves" (she's kind of a dream creature of sorts, and she vanishes all the time of her own accord). How sex works depends on who is fronting, of course. But anyone can "tap out" at any time; N basically gave us a "safety switch" where he will hijack and tap out if there's distress. He notoriously can hijack control and has access to, as far as we know, everyone's separate memories/thoughts/feelings.
For me, for us, getting comfortable with sex started with all of us having a relationship with the same person. My wife calls us her polycule, which is funny. We all have a very different relationship to her, and we also experience moments of what we call "integration" (not in the way that therapists use it, that would not work for us and has a lot of existential terror to the idea tbh) which is when we are all in thus flow state of collaborative existence.
This got really long, but I rarely talk/write about this. I live my life, largely, as a singlet. On Tumblr, several of us have sideblogs, and we browse often as if we were all sitting in a living room in Janet's void, watching a holoscreen and reblogging based on who likes it/wants to reblog it. This main blog is the catch-all for external interests (media, social issues, work/thesis complaints, talking about research/science, shitposting, etc.)
We link to two blogs in our about. One is the Bear Blog; we all like bears, so there is a dedicated bear space. We mostly talk about the Katmai bears and reblog bear art and photos. The other is a hockey blog, and that's only linked because we used to post hockey here as a general interest until X got REALLY into it. so she mostly runs the hockey blog. K and N have a blog that is mainly aesthetic; V has a very different aesthetic blog. M has a studyblr that isn't very active. We have a text-only blog that is largely maintained by V, N, and occasionally M. There's a pretty pastel blog that is mostly to show A.
So we mainly interact as singlets, or as a collective I/me. We do use she/they pronouns, not because we're non-binary (although technically we are.. bigender? multi-gender? idfk) but because there's more than one. N uses he/they pronouns internally. Most of us are she/her (S, M, V, A), or she/they (X, K). We've been using she/her for C thus far, because the banshee thing, but who knows. So far she likes to ride in the car, listen to metal, and look at string lights. She seems to hate everything else.
We have a Worksona (eligible pilots: V, N, X if necessary) and a Schoolsona (eligible pilots: M for any subject, N for humanities, V for psych, K for science, X for math/stats). These personas are basically host facets that any eligible pilot(s) can embody. This means the friends we make at work or school are strangers to many of us, and we feel distant from them at times.
But like.. my wife is the only person we can all exist with, at the same time. That's very intimate to me personally, because I'm.. uh, "closeted" I guess? Nobody really knows this about me. I have friends who only know one or maybe two of us, but it leads to a disconnect; I feel leas close to them when I'm someone else?
I hope this makes sense, I know it's a lot of information but the context feels very relevant to understanding how we form relationships and how weird it can be when a person who lives in your body knows/likes this person, but they're a stranger to you and you're not sure how you feel about them, but you're kind of thrust into this weird poly situation where you didn't really feel there was a choice. We've been there, and it sucks for everyone.
