Significant Others

See, a core aspect of Snapeism is that Snapeists are married to Severus Snape, all acting as his sister-wives. This is, like other aspects of their belief system, taken extremely seriously. It is ceremonial, it is very religious, and it is very much a real marriage in the eyes of the wives, who wrote their own Snapeist vows for their Snape weddings:

I promise to be always faithful in body and mind, and never love another man. I promise to love and cherish you all of my life. I promise to respect and honour you all of my life. I promise to dedicate all of my life to you. I promise to stand by you in good times and bad times. I promise to protect and guard you, and to prevent you from any harm. I promise to provide anything you need for you. I promise to take the best care of you. I promise to use your name with the respect it deserves. I promise to always wear the ring with your name in it, as a symbol of my love. I promise to obey you, no matter what. I promise to respect your wishes and not to be selfish. I promise to look after you in sickness and in health. I solemnly promise all of this to you, Severus Snape, my only love. May these words create a strong loving bond, which can only be broken by death. If I break the promises made, or treat you not in the manner I should be, I'll make sure I'll die. May all the good forces and spirits bless our love eternally…. So it will be done...

The above is just one example of a vow written by “Lady Darkness.” If you were wondering if she was being serious, don’t worry: she posted several pictures of her Snape shrine in response to queries about whether she actually worshipped Snape or not. (Sadly, those photos have been deleted, but there are threads referencing them on archive.org archives of fan forums.)

Anyway, you can clearly see how dead serious the Snapewives were about their faith and their fictional husband. They absolutely considered their marriages legitimate, and wanted them to be treated like any other marriage to exist. This begged the question, then: should Snapewives have to divorce their real-life husbands to marry Snape? The majority of the Snapewives were middle-aged women who had been married to real men for years, and yet… this is a wedding after all. Weddings can’t happen if one party is already married to someone else. Snape himself gets a pass because all of his wives are “on the astral plane,” whatever that means, but the women’s husbands are physically real.

People did all sorts of mental gymnastics to justify being married to their husbands and Snape at the same time. One woman claimed Snape regularly possessed her real-life husband, especially during sex. Apparently Snape’s spirit would just take over his body, so whenever he was being particularly affectionate, it wasn’t him—it was just Snape showing how much he loved his wife. Others claimed that if Snape could have multiple wives, they too could have multiple husbands. Still others broke up with their boyfriends and fiancés in exchange for Snape’s love. The majority just kind of hand waved it.

Other people simply could not justify being married to two people at once, even if one of those marriages was “on the astral plane,” and decided to stay essentially celibate, only having sex with Snape’s spirit (don’t ask me how that’s supposed to work.) This divide did cause arguments that almost eerily mimicked early Christian schisms, and they were one of the reasons Snapeism eventually died.