Got broken up with over special interest

Whenever I (21 F) get hyperfixated on something, I always have an ‘favorite little guy’ who stays with me until the end of the fixation. Typically they’re villainous or otherwise ’bad’ men with tragic backgrounds that I positively fall in love with. Usually they leave after about a year, I find an. new one, and the cycle continues. However, there’s been an exception to this rule for years. Ever since 2022, I’ve been super into a specific manga series. The main villain of it has consumed my life wholly, and every time I get a new hyperfix, he remains. I fine him very hot, relate to his story heavily, and I enjoy engaging with OC x Canon and selfshipping with him. It’s something I’ve been doing since early 2022.

In 2024 I met someone who I really liked. We were together for over two years, but we always had issues because of this character. After going to a convention (where I cosplayed this character), I got blindsided with a breakup. And the cause was, of course, this character. My now-ex felt as if this character was more important to me as a partner, and that selfshipping and finding characters hot meant I was trying to substitute things in our relationship. I tried to explain that real relationships and shipping an oc with a character I really like is not the same to me, but he didn’t listen.

The hardest part is I’m Asexual, but feel comfortable fantasizing about characters I like because they’re not real. Engaging in sexual acts is incredibly shameful and hard for me, so he thought I wasn’t into him at all. I explained that even if I stopped caring about this character, I would find a new one and do the same thing. He said I have ‘bad taste‘ and said the only way he’d stay with me was if I fully stopped feeling this way about characters/stopped the oc x canon shipping. So now I’m single and miserable knowing that this part of me I can’t really change has gotten in the way of a relationship I truly loved, and that this may happen again.

+ I’ve had other issues revolving around this series and character since it got an anime. At one point, the drama had one of the series‘s cast roped into it. After all that, I’m still into it, so I don’t think it’s possible for me to force this interest away. I’ve tried. So I really can’t just stop doing the things he had an issue with.

I’ve never posted here, don’t really know if I want advice or just people with similar experiences. I just needed to say it somewhere.