Why do women lose their special interests?

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I don't know if I am posting this in the right place. If I am not, please move it to the appropriate section.

One of my biggest social struggles is that I don't have any female friends my age besides my younger brother's fiancée and trying to make new female friends my age feels almost impossible. Part of this is because it seems like a lot of women I encounter have lost interest in things that were once their special interests.

For example, my aunt introduced me to someone she knew (Also an aspie) who said she liked anime but when I met her, she told me that she no longer watched any. She also didn't even seem to want to be friends with me because she looked indifferent when I tried to bring up something else to talk about. There was also another one I was hoping to be friends with for a similar reason because I was told the same thing just like with the previous person but she seemed like she had lost interest as well.

I worry that the number of potential female friends will disappear and it will have the same effect on finding a girlfriend with similar interests. Just why does this seem to happen?

I don't know, but I don't lose my special interests. So there are women out there who keep their special interests, albeit autistics. What are your special interests? Mine:

creative writing
psychiatry and psychology
disasters
autism
room decorating
philosophy, my God stuff I figured out
airport security
the Holocaust, especially Auschwitz
Probably more too.

Heavy metal and punk as well as electronic music
Anime and manga
Comics
Science fiction (Mainly books these days)
Paleontology

Sadly, a lot of the women in my culture think they have to fit a certain mold to either be considered worthy of friendship or as dating partners. How so? They limit themselves so they don't appear "weird" or "un-Christian". It's like they feel they must come off as stupid in order to be attractive to men.

They make it a self-fulfilling prophecy to think they are only good at shopping for clothes, talking on their cellphones, reading sappy romance novels as well as listening to sappy music, and that they are weaker than men. They also can't fathom the idea of dating or even befriending a man who is non-Christian. A non-Christian man is no different than a serial killer to them.

As a man, I strike out because I don't call myself a Christian just so I can appear "normal", constantly commit transgressions because they will always be absolved, and hope that I am on the winning side instead of actually trying to live like Christ. I also don't confuse jingoism and xenophobia for patriotism. SJWs think I am getting high fives from other guys, especially other white men, and that they are offering me their daughters' hands in marriage. No, they are telling me to "f**k off" and that I am the scum of the Earth.

f**k that right-wing propaganda.

I never lost my special interests, but I did learn to talk about them in a more feminine way kinda, but a large part of that was just natural... me realizing I had feminine feelings towards my special interests.

I can't side with the left wing either, though. SJWs think I automatically have white privelege but they don't know a damn thing about what I've had to go through and still do to this day. I am dehumanized by the people SJWs claim are the ones who have my back because I don't mindlessly call myself a Christian, I dislike pop country music, I prefer to read a good sci-fi novel instead of watching football, I don't drink or smoke excessively, and I think homophobia as well as sexism and racism are bad things. But despite that, SJWs think I am a Donald Trump Jr. who gets everything from the "patriarchy" and I have a legion of servant girls who perform oral sex on command for me.

I feel you, Marknis. I'm center all the way, or as someone once said, the opposite of moderate... I take the best of every world and leave the rest.

your sample size is...two women?
haha.

but i think most people at least shift in special interests over time. i know i do.
also, you don't have to have perfectly aligned interests with someone to be friends with them. and with things like anime and comics, i think it can be hard for a dabbler (such as myself) to tell someone who is really into anime that i like anime, since i've barely scratched the surface. is it possible that she never specified whether anime was a special interest or just an interest?

i'm also wondering if you get out to any punk/metal shows? because even in the most religiously strict areas of the US there are active subcultures. i just can't help but wonder if your outlook is clouded by your idea of what it's like rather than seeing small realities underneath a surface level perspective. and i realize going to shows can be uncomfortable so it's not like i'm berating you if you're not getting out. just asking if you really know what you're talking about when you make such general claims about living in the bible belt.

I wasn't proposing a sample. Those two incidents just really stuck out to me out of them all. It's happened other times.

They told me straight out they used to be passionate about it. One even used to draw it so it was more than just a simple interest in it.

I do indeed go out to punk/metal shows but not all the time because the distance to them is sometimes too far (Sometimes three or more hours away) and I hate going very long distances alone, especially if my car got messed up which it has a number of times. When your spark plugs blow or your alternator goes out on a Texas road at night, it's f*****g terrifying. The furthest place I am willing to drive to alone is Austin because it's not dreadfully far from where I live (An hour away) and I can make it home easily. At those shows, I am generally treated indifferently and I only get approached if they think I have weed or some other sort of drug; they'll brush me off when I tell them I don't. In my city, no punk or metal bands of any sort come around. There are no clubs like The Mohawk or big venues like the Austin Music Hall, just dumpy dive bars that smell like cigarettes, beer, vomit, and piss that only have drunk rednecks playing acoustic guitars. There's just no interest for metal or punk from the general population here. The musical palette here is mostly country and rap music but especially country. If I go somewhere where people socialize, all they want to do is talk about country music as well as football. We don't have any independent CD stores and the big chains only sell that's popular. Even my guitar teacher tells me there is no real music scene here and he has to play out of town. Two of my co-workers who are in bands tell me the same. I've lived here all my damn life (Almost 29 f*****g years) so I know damn well what I am talking about. Why do you think I am so critical of the damn culture? I've lived it! I can't tell you how many times I've been told "Yew like dat screamin' s**t?" or "Dat's devuhl's mewsick!" when I mention my music tastes.

so women losing their special interests is a trend you've noticed in most of the autistic women you know?
do they gain other special interests or do they just become vaguely interested in fashion and homemaking and christian men?

i stand by my assertion that having varying types & degrees of interests doesn't make two people incompatible. it can only make it more difficult to interact at first because there isn't as much clearly technical to talk about. and i also stand by my assertion that asking why women specifically lose their special interests is a sh***y question.

but it does really suck that your type of music isn't easily available around your specific area. and if you aren't able to move elsewhere/travel i can imagine that feels pretty constricting. but what DO you want? a feminine female likeness of yourself? i'm confused about the point.

i used to be really into deep ocean biology and would paint stuff about it all the time. i still love deep ocean biology but i've gotten really into fungi and slime mold in the past few years. gymnastics was a special interest for awhile but eventually i couldn't keep up with the fast level progression, and while i'll always have a love for gymnastics the special interest has subsided and i've dispersed my sporting interest capacity into soccer and marching band and cycling over time. i used to be so into drawing when i was younger that i would draw all the time during school, but for awhile i've been really into welding/fabricating and don't like to draw anymore unless i absolutely have to. i've also gotten into playground theory which might have some relation to gymnastics as well as biological curiosities & metal working. when i was younger i used to be so into science fiction i would read all the time, even while walking. now i read more nonfiction about my current interests, and usually not while walking.

so, i guess to answer the simple question, people lose special interests because interests develop & change over time.

You might enjoy this Seaweed.

^so cool! have been watching while i work--thanks for sharing

I bet you're into bioluminescence, Seaweed!

That's so cool.

The deep sea is probably about as well known as the moon.

I didn't have just autistic women in mind. The one who used to draw wasn't on the spectrum and the others besides the one my aunt introduced me to were not either. The autistic women I know are very varied. One is such a strong Christian that she thinks atheism is bad and didn't like John Lennon for supposedly being one (I don't know if he was or not). Another is a Christian and her parents won't let her have male friends or even date despite being 30. I used to know one who was into Wicca and gothic things but I lost contact with her because she and her boyfriend kept falling on hard times. Another one liked anime as well as manga and did drawings but I wasn't allowed to hang out with her outside our support group events because I was an adult and she was a minor; I lost contact with her as well. I knew one who wasn't very social and decided to become an internet hermit. My first and only real girlfriend had Aspergers and she liked some of the same things I did but not very indepthly (Not a knock on her). A girl I used to hang out with considered Pokemon as well as hentai to be her "passions" but one day did a complete 180 and said she hated everything she used to like out of nowhere.

I never said I couldn't be friends with someone who didn't share every single one of my interests. That is a bad assumption you've made about me. Just one or two is good enough. If there are no common interests at all, the conversation tends to die. I'll wrack my brain to try to come up with something but then the other person will be looking away and soon move on.

You're damn right it sucks. I hate having to wait for months to see a band I like (Sometimes the wait will be in vain because the band might play too late or they'll only play at a city that's too far away) and I have nowhere cool to hang out after a crappy day at work. I usually just go home because I don't know what else to do with myself. I don't want a female clone of myself. I just want someone to have atleast one or two of the same special interests. I also feel like the only way I'll ever have another girlfriend is through a good friendship because cold approaching, internet dating, and speed dating do not work for me.

Last edited by Marknis on 17 Jul 2017, 9:48 pm, edited 4 times in total.

It was my pleasure.

I never lost mine but I can understand what you mean. Many females on the spectrum, rather than having one all-consuming obsession, instead have lots of mini obsessions. They tend to be more intense than the long term ones but fizzle out faster.

I do have times where I'm really enthusiastic about a specific interest more than others but generally my obsessions are consistent, sometimes rotating to one or another but generally limited to those topics of interest. The aspie friends that I have that do the short obsessive bursts are generally girls. I think the crux of this type of special interest is either due to being very distractible (maybe ADHD as well) or their interests are connected to a social group, i.e, online roleplaying is a low risk way of making friends. It's interesting, I guess.