Speed-Dating for Adults with ASD (UCLA study)

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Are you interested in participating in a speed-dating event with adults with ASD who are romantically interested in opposite-gendered partners? We are looking for women and men with ASD to participate in a speed-dating event.

A speed-dating study with adults with ASD (18-30 yrs.) is being conducted at UCLA. The purpose of this study is to examine what characteristics adults with autism find attractive in others and how they use that information to choose relationship partners. As part of the study, you will have the opportunity to go on 10-12 mini-dates with adults with autism of the opposite gender. After each mini-date you will indicate if you are interested in getting to know your date partner better through exchanging email addresses. If each date partner indicates interest in getting to know his/her partner better, then it is a “match.” You will receive an email with the first name and email address of each of your matches within one week of the speed-dating event.

The length of time you will be involved with this study is approximately 4 hours. In order to participate in the event, you must complete an initial online survey that will take approximately 1 hour. The speed-dating event will last approximately 2 hours (at UCLA) and the post-event questionnaires, completed online over a period of 4 weeks, will take approximately 1 hour.

If you are interested in the study, please contact Siena Whitham (I'm not able to post my email address since I am a new member, but you can PM me if you are interested!)

That sounds like the most hideous way of meeting people I could possibly imagine.

You're asking people who are neurologically disinclined to socialize and who are by their very nature, socially awkward, incapable of small talk and suffer from social anxieties and sensory hypersensitivities to engage in the cacophony and chaos of an open social forum, in which they will be forcibly thrown together with a series of total strangers and expected to interact with them in some meaningful exchange of information in an extremely brief period and then evaluate the quality of the information obtained (if any).

In any three to ten minute encounter, two people with Autism are as liable as not, to spend the entire time in utter silence, rocking and avoiding eye contact, never saying a single word the entire time. Being put under the pressure of a time constraint and expected to socially interact is completely counter-productive and only likely to induce Selective Mutism.

Maybe I'll swing by after, for the Paraplegic Sack Race.

It would be very awkward but I wouldn't mind joining in. Plus I would be glad to discover the findings of the study and associate it with my experience on it. That would be very interesting actually. unfortunately I don't live anywhere near UCLA.

If I were young, single, and lived in CA, I would do it in a heartbeat. I would be excited to see the findings of the study and if they were terribly twisted in one direction or another because of NTs' analyses of Autistic behavior through NT tinted glasses.

I rarely feel socially awkward around other Autistics. Whenever I meet a new one it's like running into a long lost family member. I probably would have an issue with NTs' making all the rules, and when and if this study ever takes place, I imagine I will do more than a little eye rolling at some of the assumed outragous conclussions.

Still though, I think some appreciation of our differences of perceiving things as compared to NTs' could happen. I hope some of you participate.

To tell the truth though, I believe that the best way to understand anything about Autistics is to ask them. Look at the empathy thing. We always knew we had it but none of the "experts" felt we were worth asking.