Neurotypicals as Romantic Partners (humor)

Individuals with neurotypicalism have an intense desire for love and companionship, but their sensory and cognitive limitations, their need for indirect, stereotyped, or socially acceptable communication, and the overwhelming intensity of their desires can all lead to difficulties in establishing healthy, stable relationships. An estimated 50-60% of all Neurotypical marriages end in divorce, and countless dating and cohabitation relationships fail to remain stable enough to develop into marriage.

There is some debate over whether Neurotypicals are truly capable of loving an individual, or are only able to act out social rituals and demand emotional displays and support in order to feed their need for a sense of security and connection. Many people, however, report that Neurotypicals can be loyal and caring partners, if their special communication and emotional needs are properly accommodated. Loving a Neurotypical is hard work, but if you can brave it, you may be one of the few people who can provide a genuine version of the care, support, and connection that Neurotypicals crave deep down but often only manage to superficially simulate on the surface in their broken relationships with one another.

Neurotypicals are often unable to understand another individual's need for comfort and space, due to their sensory hypo-sensitivity and strong drive for interpersonal contact. They may overwhelm their partner with excessive physical affection, sexual advances, conversation, and insistence on spending time together. The partner of the Neurotypical may be driven to wits' end trying to meet the Neurotypical's insatiable needs.

Neurotypicals also frequently fail to understand simple actions, such as continuing to stay with the partner and perform basic tasks like sex and house-cleaning, as expressions of true love. The Neurotypical often needs specific, socially popular expressions of love, like fresh flowers, the words "I love you," a surprise date on the anniversary of when the two of you started being romantically involved with one another, and excessive moaning and groaning and flattery during sex, in order to really understand that she or he is loved. To keep your Neurotypical happy, try scheduling a specific time in the day or week, or a specific date such as a birthday or anniversary, on which you will provide a specific token of love, such as flowers, moaning and flattery during sex, or the words "I love you."

Remember, however, that not all Neurotypicals respond equally well to the same stereotyped gestures of love, and that their communication impairments make it difficult at times for them to tell you exactly which gestures make them feel the most loved, because they feel that you should "just know" these things. Experiment with different gestures, and watch the Neurotypical's response.

Neurotypicals can also be extremely moody and fickle, and may respond to one gesture of love one day but not respond to the same gesture of love the next day. Remind your Neurotypical partner that it is okay to ask for what they want, and that their need to ask is not an indication that you do not love them, and do your best to accommodate your Neurotypical partner's needs of the moment.

Also be aware that the primary gesture of love that reassures a Neurotypical the most could be something entirely outside your awareness of what you are doing. Try to open communication with your Neurotypical partner in order to understand what you are doing that makes them feel loved, and how you can do it more often, or whenever the Neurotypical needs it.

Accommodation vs. Exposure

I came across a discussion on whether a sheltered, accommodating environment leads to failures of adaptability in people with disabilities or quirks, which is quite relevant to a conversation I had with my bf this evening.

See, last night, I'd taken him to a party involving people he didn't know well acting, at times, kind of rowdy. I wasn't expecting him to feel as out of place as he did. But he felt very out of place and withdrew a lot, and was willing to put up with the situation far longer than he was comfortable with. By the time he wasn't responding to my affection anymore, I knew it was time for him to go home, and alerted the hostess.

This afternoon, he had an enjoyable conversation with someone who was on the train with us - someone from socio-economic-educational-religious background similar to his own, who wasn't wild or crazy or rowdy or anything.

And tonight, over dinner, we talked about how he seems to have trouble dealing with people who are different from the kind of people he's used to with his narrow background.

My folks have assessed him as sheltered and spoiled, and think, like one of the commentators in the link above, that his sheltered life impaired his ability to adapt to people.

But I think that my bf's sheltered background actually might have been helpful to him socially.

Why? Well...I think being exposed to a relatively narrow range of "how people behave" gave him enough consistency and stability in social situations that he could figure out at least a little of what was going on, and learn at least a little about how to get along with people that, even if not as generalizable as it could be, is still better than nothing.

Whereas if he'd been exposed to a much more heterogeneous group of people, spanning a variety of classes and subcultures and religions, he might not have even gotten an idea of where to *start* getting along with people. He might have just given up hope on even figuring any of it out.

Given that my bf thinks in terms of binary inputs and outputs, he would have needed some kind of rule that would apply most of the time in order to have any success with making friends. With a homogeneous group (basically Conservative to relatively liberal Orthodox Jews with an upper middle class, highly educated background), any social rule he came up with or learned from his parents or others would have a better chance of applying across people and situations than in a heterogeneous group. The input and output modulation for heterogeneous groups may have had to be too refined from the get-go for my bf to have a chance to figure it out.

So yes, my bf finds it hard to adapt to people for whom the rules he learned for dealing with "his own kind" don't work (and even though I'm not from the same background as him, they happen to work well enough for me in general). But he's fortunate to have been able to learn any rules for dealing with people at all, rather than having just given up on it as a hopelessly chaotic mess, and that those rules in combination with the rest of his personality actually managed to land friends over the years.

I suppose it's possible that he could have adapted rather than given up if he grew up in a less sheltered background, but I don't think it's obvious that the sheltered background in itself hurt him, and it could have been just what the doctor ordered for a person of the so-called broader autistic phenotype. Build confidence and learn basics in an environment in which there is not too much variation and chaos so as to overwhelm and confuse the autistic-type. Then expand on those basics.

Maybe it wouldn't work for building a varied palate...but even in that case, throwing too many different kinds of foods at the person too quickly still might not be wise. They might instinctively cling to the first few foods anyway. Deprivation of comfort might just promote further defensive clinging to a narrow comfort zone.

Autistic-types might not be able to avoid sensory overwhelm ALL the time, but a comfort zone they can retreat to when they need it is probably a good thing. We don't usually take away neurotypical children's blankies or shock them or deprive them of candy we just waved in front of their faces when they suck their thumbs, do we? Some degree of comfort and chaos management is probably necessary. A semi-sheltered life, with some of the hard knocks that come with any life even if it is sheltered, might not be all that bad for an autistic-type.

Rules and the Prime Directive

So...I've been talking to my bf A LOT to try to figure out what's going on in his poor confused head. And also talking to some friends about the situation, because they often ask questions I didn't think to ask, and then relaying those questions to him.

This seems to be the best model I've worked out so far:

My bf has two kinds of rules: absolute rules and social rules. The absolute rules are things he learned in childhood, be they religious rules like "don't eat pork" and "don't drive on the Sabbath" or rules related to the sensory integration quirks and imprints he had at the time like "I can't eat soup 'cause I don't like the texture" or "hair washing, hair cutting, and nail clipping are unpleasant so I'll procrastinate them as long as I can." Absolute rules are only broken in isolated unusual situations, if at all. I've never seen him try a new food that has a wet or slimy texture; the hair washing, hair cutting, and nail clipping are only done often enough to look reasonably presentable, often with much nagging from his mother re: the hair cutting; Kosher laws are never broken except by accident (and he's lax enough about it to take the risk of eating in a restaurant that isn't Kosher certified, as long as he doesn't eat meat or poultry); and driving on the Sabbath is only done in emergencies like having gotten unexpectedly stuck in traffic on a Friday evening.

The social rules are adaptations to the presence of certain friends or communities in his life, and are generated according to the Prime Directive (which may be closer to an absolute rule): "Don't piss off my friends." He values friends deeply and fears deeply to lose them. So he finds out, as best he can, what a given friend or group of friends likes or doesn't like, and follows the rules to make sure these people stay friends with him. Social rules are changeable when the life situation changes...except, it can often be hard for him to realize when a life situation has changed. He told me the story of how he was given a bedtime at 8:00, and he just kept going to bed at 8:00 for a very long time, well into adolescence and possibly even young adulthood, not thinking that the situation that caused his parents to impose that bedtime might have changed once he was more grown up. (If he were still at home, he could have asked his parents if he could go to bed later now that he was older; if he were already at college, he could have just gone to bed when he felt like it. I don't remember how long he said he followed that rule for.)

"No interfaith dating" turns out to be merely a social rule for my bf, because it was not taught to him at home or in elementary school explicitly. His elementary school was a Jewish private school, but was nominally Conservative and quite open, allowing in many interfaith children. To not lose the tuition from these children's parents, the school decided not to teach about the rule against interfaith dating.

And right now, he's in a really tough situation because it's getting harder and harder for him to obey the Prime Directive now that he has both relatively close religious friends and relatively close secular friends (especially me), and has to straddle two directly opposing social rules to keep all the friends he currently has: give a nod to the "no interfaith dating/marriage" rule with the religious people either by keeping me secret from them or by assuring him that it's not serious and may never become serious, while also maintaining the relationship as it is with me (not dumping me).

Things are okay as they are, and I'm indifferent to marriage anyway, and am pretty sure I don't want children. He's kind of ambivalent about both - could go either way. But now that it's getting hard for him to keep me or his feelings about dating me a secret from his religious friends, and he's finding out that they stand by the no interfaith dating rule strongly. So it might be getting to the point where he can no longer obey the Prime Directive. Somebody or another is gonna get pissed off sometime or another. He'll probably adapt when he needs to, but he'll probably procrastinate the situation as long as he can.

Oh yeah...I just realized that there's at least one other rule that I guess would be a social rule, but is such a general social rule that he cannot really fathom an exception to it unless someone tells him otherwise in a specific situation: in order to make people like you and stay around you, you have to talk to them. He overapplies this rule and ends up talking almost constantly in general social situations, to the point of dominating conversations and driving hapless NTs away because he doesn't shut up long enough for them to think of something to say (maybe he expects them to interrupt and add in their own two cents?) or he obsesses over things like money and diet that they don't like to obsess about themselves.

So now, let's talk about my boyfriend...

I saw him today. We talked about his fear of "judging" the strictly religious people in his life by choosing to live his life differently, which has always puzzled me. But now I think I can follow it.

-In order to explain why he's choosing to live his life differently from how he was raised - he basically goes by old Conservative Jewish rules and restrictions as practiced by his parents, particularly his father, when he was little - he would have to explain why he feels the rules are wrong, or at least, wrong for him.
-He doesn't really feel like there's a strong enough distinction between "wrong" and "wrong for him," nor does he feel that he has the authority to go out and tell them they're "wrong."
-He feels that by judging their way of life to be "wrong," he would hurt them. And although these people are relatively distant from him in his life now, he thinks in terms of the past, when he first became friends with these people, and feels that they are still friends and still important in his life even if he's barely kept in touch with them and they are no longer physically around to tell him what to do. (Sometimes it's good to be a little sociopathic, and be able to make sacrifices when you need to and not make it this big ethical disaster.)

So I asked him about why he doesn't practice religions other than Judaism. Are they wrong simply for him? He said that when two choices are equally valid, he generally goes for the one with the precedent, maintaining the status quo. He only changes when some unusual situation opens him up to it, and he can set a new status quo. That's basically what he did when we started to get emotionally close: an unusual situation established a new status quo with me, and now he wants to maintain that. (And no, I don't think I'm simply a status quo to him. He genuinely enjoys my company. But the status quo factor makes him more passionately insistent on keeping the relationship together. And also, as with the old friends, he wouldn't want to hurt me by choosing them, and their rules that he feels uncomfortable with but follows anyway 'cause he knows no other way, over me.)

So "the problem" of him feeling torn between his upbringing and me hasn't been solved, but at least it makes more sense now.

And it's really sweet that he cares about his old friends so much. So much for him being "inconsiderate" or "autistics lacking empathy." He just doesn't consider in the cold, calculating way that most of us do. "But they're not close friends anymore. And if they disapprove of the way you're living your life, then they're judging you - so screw them."

The Angry Wives' Club

The most prominent NT opinions on autism in general are spread by mainstream psychology and by desperate and frustrated parents who buy into the notion that autism is a dire disease that should be cured by whatever means imaginable.

In my sub-sphere, the world of NTs in romantic relationships with autists, the most prominent voice is the Angry Wife, exemplified by the average member of the infamous "AS Partners" forum. From what I gather, you pretty much have to be an angry NT wife to join and for your posts to be published: they screen newbies heavily to keep out trolling and unsupportive posting (some people have reported trying to give them a piece of their minds and getting censored), and they only allow the NTs to join. With some of the things they say, I can see why they're so infamous. Aspies as Dementors? (What if these wives themselves are the Dementors who have sucked the souls out of their Aspies, hence the extreme withdrawal and lack of emotional reciprocity they complain about?) All AS/NT marriages end in divorce? (Who doesn't fall out of love these days? And those that don't have to put some work into maintaining love.) Only they exist? (Do the husbands only exist to the wives as someone to blame?)

Angry wives aren't just on the Internet, either. Books like Aspergers In Love and An Asperger Marriage also tend to have a bit of a bad reputation among Aspies. My boyfriend has the "Aspergers in Love" book along with a few other autism-related books, but he never reads them. I flipped through "Aspergers In Love" and it didn't have much I could relate to in my relationship, with all the NTs being extreme NTs and the Aspies being extreme AS.

So where are the NTs who still love their Aspie partners, and don't believe that the stereotypical broken marriage is all that's left?

AS And Their Partners is a decent place to go. Unlike the angry wives' club with a similar name but a very different philosophy, it is open to both Aspies and NTs, is led primarily by Aspies in happy relationships with NTs, and takes a positive, egalitarian stance toward relationships in which one or both partners have Asperger's. People share adventures and tips on how to handle some of the problems that crop up. Unfortunately, the only section that's open to public view is the introduction section, where quite a few people come in introducing themselves with rants about their relationship, such that the public face of the forum tends to inadvertently promote the Angry Wife stereotype. (An Aspie online friend read some of the newbie posts, and thought AS And Their Partners was an angry wives' club and mistook it for AS Partners.)

NTs with positive attitudes can also be spotted on pro-neurodiversity AS forums that are open to NT allies, such as Aspies for Freedom and Wrong Planet. But given that these places are chiefly Aspie-oriented, the NT voices there might be a little harder to find than on AS and Partners, which caters explicitly to both Aspies and NTs.

Many of the pro-neurodiversity parents are probably also in loving AS/NT relationships, but as parents tend to do, they may talk more about their children than their marriage.

Considerateness is Relative

I've been reflecting on a case, a while back, where my bf had dropped me off at a bus stop maybe 15 minutes from my apartment on his way to his parents' house for dinner. He'd asked me if this was okay with me, and I said it was. On my way back home from that bus stop, my big sister called (or I called her - don't remember which). I had plans to meet her for dinner later on. I told her that I was walking home from the bus stop that my bf had dropped me off at. She was complaining about it: "He dropped you off at a bus stop? How inconsiderate! He should have taken you home."

"But he asked me if it was okay, and I agreed to it," I told her back. (Well, something along those lines. No exact quotes in any of the conversation recalled here.)

Seriously, he did consider my feelings. He asked me if it was okay. If I really wanted to be driven straight to my apartment, I would have told him so, and in all probability he would have done it. But I didn't mind a short walk.

So what would have been "considerateness" on his part, if asking me if it was ok with me was not? Assuming that I was a spoiled selfish princess who, even if I said it was okay for him not to drive me home, would have bitched if he didn't, because I figured he should know what I want and that I would avoid direct communication because it's rude not to thinly disguise your selfishness? Why can't we just openly accept that people have self-interest, and express it directly?

Dang. Spock's right. Humans are highly illogical.

(I hope I'm not painting too negative a picture of my older sister. She is not some stereotypical ignorant jerk. She knows a few basics about autism, and that some things just aren't easy for my boyfriend. And although she sometimes has a hard time being around him - it's common for certain people to both overwhelm and be overwhelmed by my AS boyfriend - she does her best to accept him and be around him, 'cause she knows that I care about him and that he treats me right. But she just has expectations in social situations that I don't, and that particular reaction just happened to be a good nucleus for calling out the arbitrariness and senselessness of certain kinds of expectations that are common in society, like the dance of "considerateness" or "politeness." Why is direct expression of self-interest taboo? Why should people assume indirectly expressed self-interest in everyone, when maybe sometimes people genuinely don't mind accommodating others or not insisting that others accommodate them?)

What's considered rude to one person isn't necessarily rude to another person. My bf considers my needs plenty, as long as I make them clear. He doesn't refuse to consider them because they don't make sense to him; he just does what he can to accommodate me. In my view, being inconsiderate would be refusing to honor my strong wants and needs at all, particularly after I have expressed them clearly. My bf doesn't do that, at least not on a regular basis.

Current Relationship Adventures

I've written a lot already, but the starter package of my blog would not be complete without some tales from my relationship with my AS boyfriend.

It's an adventure for both of us, as we are only each other's second significant others and the first since high school (and our high school relationships weren't as deep), and both of us have a lot to learn about love and ourselves.

The latest episode in the adventure involves the clashing of my boyfriend's religious upbringing and AS-related cognitive quirks with the need to make one of the biggest decisions of his life: what level he wants to observe Judaism at, and whether he's willing to risk losing ties to more observant friends by continuing to maintain and deepen his relationship with me and live his life in a way that goes against some of the oldest rules he's been taught.

All his life, he's valued community and hard-earned (or hard-maintained) social acceptance within it. He was raised Jewish, with a fairly strong level of observance taught to him in childhood and adolescence. As an adult, he can see a lot of the logic behind some of the rules he was taught, yet thinks that they are not the only way to obey the spirit of Jewish law and obtain the benefits. However, he has a hard time breaking many of these rules that seem unnecessary, for fear of social rejection and that vague but powerful sense that "bad things will happen." It's also not easy for him to uproot himself from past connections and contexts, such as synagogue communities and service styles he's comfortable with. Changes like these are no trivial matter for an Aspie.

So all his life, he's managed to slowly drift away from some of the stricter religious circles, while at the same time making an effort not to offend them and cut off completely from them, because he is afraid he will hurt them, and he doesn't have the dangerously abusable but sometimes useful NT ability to dismiss certain emotional or ethical problems by appealing to perspective and scale. ("It's only a minor slight. It wouldn't be a major slight in my eyes if they did it to me. They'll get over it. If they judge me, it's their problem." This is how we NTs would tend to think...or think we would think...in a situation like his.) Oftentimes, his emotions and the emotions of others, according to him, register as a binary all-or-nothing output of "positive" or "negative," so if people are a little bit disappointed with his choices, he can't tell that very well from having deeply hurt them; all he can see is "I caused a negative emotion in them. That's bad."

He sat on the fence reluctantly but with reasonable stability, maintaining the status quo and reasonable contninuance of his social acceptance and community involvement...until late last summer and early last fall, where we opened up to each other to the point where, by November, we figured we might as well call ourselves "dating" 'cause that's how most people would probably see us.

And that meant he was breaking a very big rule: don't seek romance outside the Jewish community. He bent it a bit too far.

He's been trying to maintain the status quo for a while by keeping me secret from his most religious friends (generally more distant friends - the closer friends and family are tolerant), but more and more that's getting harder for him to do. I'm a major part of his life now. He's going to want to mention me more often in general, or to mention me by accident within earshot of religious folks, or bring me to events where the religious folks will start to gossip. He's done a bit of this already. The results, though, were not especially promising: the religious people are not all tolerant and supportive of him making the choice to pursue a relationship with a Gentile.

So he can't sit on the fence much longer. He has to face the risk of rejection to stay with me, or lose his connection with me to easily remain on good terms with as many Jewish friends as possible. He has to finally work through what it is he wants, besides simply not to hurt or be hurt. His parents have been waiting for him to start making such decisions. His therapists want to see it happen too. But he's scared and confused.

And I'm not always the world's most supportive listener. I tend to push him a bit too hard sometimes, trying desperately to see if I can help him reason his way into putting hope in the social safety net he has among the more tolerant people in his life (he says they don't quite make a "critical mass" yet), or to see why most of us do not see anything immoral in choosing to live by beliefs and philosophies that a few people you know might disapprove of. I'm reading a book on listening, and I realize that I'm listening poorly in these situations much as he is when I vent about my non-relationship-related issues: I'm giving advice he may not be ready for, invalidating his perspective, and focusing on my anxiety rather than his. (Naturally, I'm anxious about the possibility that he might dump me so as to restore the old social status quo, but he wasn't entirely happy with it anyway and has reassured me many times that he really wants to stay with me.)

So here, he gets to learn about making decisions and clarifying his own feelings, and I get to learn about how to be supportive and avoid invalidation of the other (which is intricately tied to invalidation of the self).

It can be frustrating not being able to have perfect communication of one another's perspectives. It's frustrating to have trouble imagining how the other will react due to unusual cognitive style differences. But learning to stretch the imagination and relate to other people is good. Even the frustration doesn't register as all bad, because it's a sign of passion on my part. It's not easy for me to feel passion these days.