I usually consider the characters that are male (as I am male) an extension of myself. The female characters that I play, I play in third person. Split personality? Maybe.

I'm sort of like this too. My druid is always ME, whether I'm role-playing or not. My male paladin is almost always "him." I don't think I'm more separated from him and when I'm actually RPing, it's a very personal thing. But when I talk to other people about him out of character, I feel like there needs to be something there so people don't think I think I'm a male or something. It's weird, I know.

I will also yell at my male paladin as if he's a different person sometimes. "C'mon! The guy is RIGHT THERE! Why didn't you hit him!?"

I do this when splitting between OOC and IC stuff. I want things for my achievement-hunter and collector toon so refer to it as "I want", "I am getting" etc. Gameplay aspects like raids, where it's my skills being tested, get 1st person treatment during combat. I talk about abstracts like throughput and dps numbers as "mine."

But I play specifically on an RP server, so my characters are not myself. Most of the time, I refer to my characters in 3rd person--*especially and always* when talking about RP and IC related matters. One of the things that made my priest's IC relationship work well was said by my friend: "it's not creepy to RP this stuff with you, as we're just telling a story together about these 2 people." This was after he had awkward encounters with another female RPer who tended to get a little too personal with her RP partners and scare them off. It felt good that we could trust each other to delve into that particular minefield and keep the IC, IC.

I like to write, and have been RPing online and tabletop for years. My characters have stories of their own and are their own people (much as I can make them different from each other and myself; some more than others, depending!). So I approach it like a writer telling a story.

It also helps keep a distinct barrier between my IC actions and words, and my OOC actions and words. There are characters I love IC whose players I cannot stand--and players I love whose characters I dislike. For me, as a long time RPer and writer, the split between "character" and "player" is a strict one, as is the gulf between "story/game" and "real life." I always feel bad for people who can't make those distinctions--and I tend to avoid them.