Hypothetical question? Sexually active aspie son/daughter?

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No, not really an intimate experience just innocent young curiosity.

When I moved out of home I mostly just read and struggled to get any sleep. I would just walk around most of the night. I did not get into any trouble!

It must by pleasant feeling anyway

Well, time to stop stalling and face this unsettling, almost-revealing-but-not-quite-at-this-point-anymore post.

What are we even disagreeing on again?



Amazing. I’m not sure if I should ask how on Earth you did it. I’ve spent a lot of years trying to figure out how people do everything in life I could barely dream of, and I’m still at square one—only, much older.



I don’t know what you mean by that. I think it’s obvious independence is good for you. That wasn’t my point—it was that noöne has any obligation to help you achieve it, let alone to make your situation better in any way when you’re still not independent.



It’s their prerogative. Parents have every right to bring you into the world to be the way they want you to be, not the way you want. You owe them everything, because they didn’t have to bring you into being in the first place.



And rightly so, since you seem to have overcome them. Victor’s justice. What I can’t begin to wrap my head around is how you even had the slightest chance to win. In my experience, parents are very much invincible if they’re determined not to let you have your way. My story is very much the opposite of yours: one of utter defeat, weakness, hopelessness and slowly coming to terms with how despicable and worthless I am as a person.



I wish the time I’ve wasted in my life could be described as what feels like “ages” at fifteen. But no, fifteen years is about the time that’s gone by since I first tried to sort a few things out with my parents, to no avail.



You know that’s pretty vague and you can always fail to motivate them to take that responsibility, or to give them a chance, and thus justify denying them the same opportunities you had, don’t you? I think it’s what naturally tends to happen, and, more importantly, parents have every right to do it.



Does that even disagree with what I said? Of course it’s not granted—you have to conquer it yourself. Meanwhile, you shouldn’t expect it to be granted to you. Therefore, things like sex or romantic relationships have no place till you earn access to them by being completely independent, so noöne can bar you from them anymore. Before you gain your independence, barred they should be expected to remain.



No time for that—I’m too busy fighting for my independence, at a ridiculously old age, in utter shame, with little hope of actually achieving it, much less to get to experience a tiny fraction of what you experienced before you even stopped being young.



It didn’t sound ranty at all to me. It reminded me how absolutely sh***y I am as a person compared with someone like you, but it’s not your fault that this is the case, and I’d rather face the truth than hide from it.



I think I can relate pretty well with that part …



…, only to be completely dumbfounded by that. In my experience, you simply don’t have that choice, but I can see the reply coming: I was indeed highly irresponsible and have thus rightfully suffered my just deserts by seeing my potential and my dreams slowly but surely go to waste, unable to take control of my life. I hate my parents, have a superficially good relationship with them only because I’m afraid I’ll find myself homeless at any time and will still need their help to survive, can’t afford to try to stop them or other people ultimately introduced by them in my life from making every decision they want for me, again, because I know I wouldn’t be able to survive without them, and profoundly hate myself and my weakness and dependence.

No, I don’t understand how you could have that choice, but I’m used to being told in different ways I did have it and was too cowardly to take advantage of it.

Congratulations for not being like me.

This is how I feel exactly. My son had a close girlfriend for a brief time and she actually broke up with him because he freaked out when she tried to engage in sexual activity with him. However, he is 20 years old and he knows about sexual safety and protection. When and if he dates again, we will embrace his choice of partner as long as it's a healthy relationship. My neurotypical 19 year old daughter is dating and I see it as being the same.

"Correlation between responsibility and freedom" is right. My parents didn't prohibit me from dating verbatim, but they imposed so many restrictions on my life, including an 11:00 PM curfew at age 22 (which I always broke), that dating was impossible. Which made getting sex impossible too. As a result, I dated very little until I moved out of their house at age 24. I lost my virginity to an escort (and still made curfew that night ), because no girl wants to be with a guy who still has a curfew at 22, and Quasimodo-ugly to boot. My parents were none the wiser.

That's a funny story about the escort and making curfew! Good for you!

Being the fact that my parents are both conservative christians, I would more then likely be shamed and cut off if I were ever to become sexually active. I recall one time them telling me that they would cut me off if I ever were to do such things outside of marriage. I know for a fact that they would shame me endlessly as well.

I don't know if it's your son's case, but it seems pretty clear that the best way to ensure a son won't have sex is to let him stay sheltered and isolated enough. With enough isolation, he'll have no way to come even close to having a girlfriend in the first place. Besides, all his peers, male and female alike, will see him as a pathetic mama's boy and lose any trace of respect for him, thus perpetuating his isolation.

Nature loves positive feedback loops---they're an excellent tool to weed out the weak.

Of course, this strategy doesn't work nearly so well with a daughter, because there'll always be plenty of worthless louts wanting to have sex with her. In order to make sure she doesn't have sex, willingly or otherwise, you have to keep her locked up, preferably without the outside world knowing she even exists.



Sexual safety and protection? Sure: don't have sex, ever. There's no beating that. At twenty, that's all I seemingly needed to know. I'd been exposed to some arcane talk about contraceptives and the like, but not enough by any means for me to know what to do if I accidentally found myself having sex, and it was pretty obvious that was just about the last kind of accident I needed to worry about. Sex simply belonged in a completely different world from the one I inhabited. Choosing to abstain from sex made as much sense to me as choosing to abstain from travelling to Mars, or choosing to fall when pushed over the edge of a cliff---it was no choice at all, nor should it be expected to be one.



I have a hard time understanding that as anything other than a roundabout way to say he's not allowed to date again, period. How can you decide whether it's a "healthy" relationship before he's already dating? The only way for him not to date before you've given him your approval is for him not to date at all.

I've certainly been deterred that way from seeking a lot of desirable experiences, or even opportunities to improve my education: answers that boiled down to "Whenever you're already doing it, come back and ask us for permission or whatever you need to start doing it".

Needless to say, the real problem is dependence. A twenty-year-old should be making their own money and not expecting anything from their parents ever again. If they don't, their parents have every right to treat them like dysfunctional, overgrown kids and deny them any freedom beyond the freedom to walk away empty-handed to fend for themselves or perish trying.

Indeed! So how do you keep your children with as little freedom as possible? By denying them a chance to develop or show any responsibility, and refusing to acknowledge it if they accidentally manage to show some anyway.



How did you manage to date at all? It seems a superhuman achievement to me under those circumstances.

I'd say my parents were more effective, but perhaps it's just that I suck even more at life than I know I do. For starters, there was no point in forbidding me to date, because we didn't have a concept of dating. They sent me away to study when I was eighteen, but by then the habit was firmly entrenched that I spent as much time studying as possible, which they considered pathological, and they kept pressuring me to reduce the time I devoted to studying so I spent more with them, to do household chores or, more often than not, to spend time doing hardly anything at all. This made it unthinkable for me to pursue any goal of my own beyond studying. They also made it pretty clear they were no fans of letting me work while I was still studying, and I'd come to believe I was physically unable to juggle both activities anyway.

Therefore, even while living away from them for years, I had no realistic and non-suicidal way to even approach anything which resembled dating. I stayed as socially isolated as I was before, and that's all there was for me to expect. Having no money of my own helped immensely, to be sure.



Ha, ha, who needs a curfew when you just systematically go from home to school and right back, having nowhere else to go, nor the time, the money or the company to do anything else? Another alien concept to my family.

At 11 p.m., I tried to be sound asleep, for my own interest, so I could get enough sleep and not be late for school. Besides, when I was still at my parents' home, they drove me to school and got angry if I complained when we were chronically late, in turn making teachers angry with me. After all, my parents were doing me a big favor by driving me to school, so I had to suck it up and be very grateful. How else would I get there?

How old are you? Assuming you're an adult, don't you dream of becoming independent and giving them the finger? Or have you accepted you'll never be independent, existing always as property, first your father's and then your husband's?

I'm pretty sure the parents don't care that they're creating a Catch-22. After all, power over your children is the best part of being a parent. And sadly, too many parents get carried away with that power.

Through lots of lies. I found all my dates online, with my first successful online date being at age 21. My parents never monitored my online activities. Also, halfway through college, I started taking dance lessons. So I simply started telling my parents I was going to a dance lesson, when in reality, I was meeting my online date. They'd hear the word "dance lesson" and not question me further. I also told them I was going to a dance lesson the night I lost my virginity to an escort.

It sounds like your school didn't have buses. What about city buses? Could you take those instead? Anything is better than your situation.

I'm sure they don't. I began to learn mine didn't when I finally talked to them about all the issues I saw holding me back. At first they seemed willing to listen, but it achieved nothing, and soon they got fed up and began to mock the whole idea of Catch-22s, all the while the Catch-22s remained firmly in place.

I was twenty-four and still completely dependent on them, so they had a lot to be fed up with, to be sure.



I don't know if that's the case at all, but what matters is that they have every right to do it. As my parents told me countless times very plainly, if you don't like it, you need to walk away. They don't need to care if you have a chance to survive at all---it's your problem, not theirs. Therefore, they don't need to care about minor, non-life-threatening issues you may or may not suffer from while under their roof, either. In fact, if they see you less than blissfully happy, they can get offended, like mine often did, so better put on a permanently grinning mask, lest they suspect you're not enjoying yourself and kick you out.



Amazing.

It never occurred to me to tell them that kind of lies. I'm sure I'd have gotten caught sooner, rather than later, and the consequences would have been formidable.

I did try to get to know people online when I was twenty-two, and absolutely desperate. My parents knew I was doing it and tolerated it grudgingly, because they themselves had always tormented me about my inability to socialize, but they also saw the computer as a vice, and I'd internalized their judgement. All I accomplished was to meet once with a group of people I had barely anything in common with, most of whom were considerably older than me, and then, about a year later, to begin to make plans with a few people to go abroad in the summer and look for a job there. I only met one of those people once, though, and, while my parents had initially approved of the idea, they suddenly changed their mind when I offended a psychologist I was seeing and she promptly decided I was unfit to go work abroad.



Oh, it did, but they weren't very handy to take on the way to school.



We lived close to a city, but not in it. There were buses, but I took them only a few isolated times, when my parents told me to and gave me the money. They'd already decided against it as a daily solution, probably deeming it a waste.



If only! There's always something worse, as my parents took good care to remind me many years later, when I learned of the wonderful things other people did and asked them for a chance to do the same. Instead, they got offended by the comparison and always came up with examples of how you could be worse off, telling me I needed to be very happy and grateful that was not my case.

So how it looks now?

Did you get any GF or BF

Of course not. I’m as close to finding a girlfriend as you’d be to finding water before dying of thirst if you were dumped at a random point in the Sahara.

If it weren’t for the fact that I’m not married, that’s exactly what would happen if any of my children, afeter being forced to be sterilized.

It also doesn’t help having PTSD from all the sexual, verbal, mental and emotional abuse from the local girl gangs that gave me all sorts of grief as a teenager. It also didn’t help that my parents had ZERO tolerance for what passes for teenage rights of passage. To refer back to Spiderpig’s post, that exactly what would if I would try that with a girl. You don’t even want to think what they would do for any type of sexual deviancy or sexual orientation, other than being totally asexual and asocial.

I guess it’s a good thing you don’t have children then. I wouldn’t like my frustration to prevent my hypothetical children from gaining as much responsibility and the corresponding freedom as early as possible, in all areas of life including sex, more or less like elsapelsa said. I don’t know how I, and their hypothetical mother, would deal with the responsibility that would entail for us, but at the very worst, I’d try to encourage them to become independent as soon as possible, so they’re not subjected to our whims and tantrums any longer than they need to be. It’d probably help if their mother, like elsapelsa and unlike me, had some experience of this herself.