Tony Attwood is a moron!

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Some of them might be dating drug addicts, or people they meet in less than licit lines of work.

Maybe they're exciting to be around and do a better job of engaging with the feelings of potential romantic partners.

Some approaches work better than others. Clearly those guys have one that works.

^
I knew of one drug addict who was an astonishingly accomplished pick-up artist and as far as I can tell a complete idiot in most other respects - not that I think being a pick-up artist is an admirable thing. One of his other achievements was injuring himself by firing a gun at a fly that was sitting on his toe. Predictably, he died young. Moral: be careful who you envy.

Until relatively recently, in historical terms and in most societies, a couple's parents had greater influence on who married whom than the people who got married. If the traits of aspie men appealed to in-laws, that was another path to reproductive success.


That is your personal experience, which may be biased by seeking out people with similar experience. Another source of bias is if you base your opinion on men who know they are aspies. To know the actual frequencies, you would have to include men who are not diagnosed either by professionals or themselves. You would need a representative survey, determine who is somewhere on the autistic spectrum even if they don't know it themselves (this bit would take time, and how do you know those willing to take the time are not different from those who won't?), then relate that to their relationships.


Is that still your opinion based on personal experience, or is that based on research that can quantify and correct for the possible sources of bias? How sure can you be that the aspie men without partners are not a minority?

Jobs, relationships elude adults with autism

I've seen a figure of 9% for married Aspies, and one of only 50% for the general population, and the divorce rates are quite high. There's also the question of undiagnosed Aspies who have jobs and spouses or partners but wouldn't be counted in the stats. And there's the question of the ones who don't want to marry or don't want jobs. I was nearly always in work myself but the experience was bad enough to often make me feel that if I'd had any other way of paying the bills I'd have quit - in fact I did quit "prematurely" as soon as I could afford to. My father (never diagnosed but almost certainly an Aspie) always had a job, and was married. I know one who's seen as unemployable but has a degree and has enough benefits to live on, and has had a couple of relationships I'm now on my 4th marriage. So I think it's a mistake to be daunted by statistics. I'm not saying it's easy for everybody - far from it - but if you really want a job or a relationship, Aspies are learning animals, often with high intelligence, and when they pit their wits against a problem they very often solve it. My advice would be to figure out what you're doing wrong and how to put it right. Like I say, it's not easy, but the problem isn't going to fix itself, so you can only get what you want by looking for solutions.

Given that only 5-9% of diagnosed aspies ever marry, I'd say its safe to assume that all the undiagnosed ones are in the unmarried 50% of the general population. Your father is of an older generation and I already covered why aspies could get married then. And if you've already been through 3 failed marriages then that's probably because they keep ending badly for you.

As I've explained elsewhere, I am already too old to achieve what I want in life. Even if I were to find some magic solution to whatever obstacles were in my way all my life, it is already too late for that to help me now.

There were all kinds of reasons for those failures, but my ASD certainly wasn't the whole story. Take a look at the divorce rate in the general population. And my current marriage is still going strong after a couple of years, most of which we've been walled up alive together because of Covid. The fact is, here I am, happily married.

Statistic still show you are in the minority.

I've never been married. I haven't had a girlfriend in over 12 years, and when I did it was because she was looking for someone vulnerable she could abuse and I settled out of desperation. I've only had sex once in my life and that was over a decade ago. I've actually been raped more times in my life than I've had sex with a woman.

It is not safe to assume that, based only on the numbers you have quoted. Based on the numbers alone, anything is possible from all undiagnosed adult aspie men being married, to none. If you assume that undiagnosed aspies differ little from diagnosed apies, you might conclude that 5-9% of them are married. Maybe. Or maybe when the aspie traits are conspicuous enough to suggest someone should get a diagnosis, they also interfere with relationships more. As long as you don't know that, you can't justify the certainty with which you generalise to all aspie men.

I think you meant to say that undiagnosed aspies differ little from diagnosed aspies. Taking you literally, you claim that none of the diagnosed aspies are married. Then they would differ from the diagnosed in that they would have worse relationship skills.

Sorry to hear that. My experiences were never that bad, but when I started out I was completely hopeless with girls, and the first few encounters were basically me being either used, rejected, or both. But somehow I managed to pull out of that state.

Over the years I realised I'd been doing a lot wrong. It began to dawn on me that at the youth club I'd been going to, I'd been wandering about looking lost and desperate, invading conversations and trying to dominate them (because I had no idea of sharing and was trying to force them to give me some attention), and following any girl about if she was so much as polite to me for a few moments, obsessed with making her my girlfriend. I'd dishonestly contrived to try and display myself as a fashionable, hip kind of boy, because I thought that would make me popular, but I had no idea how to do that, so I made wild guesses at what might be a trendy thing to say. As everybody was into the psychedelic scene, I made barely sane remarks, and all I achieved was to creep everybody out.

Not surprisingly, people just though "oh no, not him again" and mostly shunned me. There was also an inherent problem between me and the group I'd chosen to host my immature antics - I'd mentioned to a kid at school that I was looking for somewhere to socialise, and he suggested his youth club. Trouble was, he and they were middle-class and knew each other, while I was working-class and turned up alone from the "wrong" side of town. It was like being a lone immigrant, marginalised by definition as an outsider and an alien. But I didn't realise how hard the task I'd jumped into was going to be - I couldn't have hoped to achieve much. It took me years to figure out the mistakes I'd been making and why I'd failed so badly.

The lessons I learned were that I was desperate, that it was OK to feel desperate but downright stupid to act desperate, that I needed to consider the nature of the group I was thinking of joining and to find a better fit, to stop trying to impress people in such a poorly-devised way, to be more straight with people about who I was, to give up that silly pressure on myself every time I went out that charged me with getting a girlfriend or a date by the end of the evening as if it were a matter of life and death, to just accept that I couldn't build Rome in a day, that it would only happen when the time was right and the girl was right, and to start being picky - that was probably the most counterintuitive thing, that just because I was starving didn't make it wise to try and eat the furniture. In order to get North, I had to go South.

And it took me a few years to realise that I actually felt little interest in other people, and that until I started taking an interest, it was never going to work - it was pointless pursuing girls just because I wanted one; not only would it put them off to see how self-interested I was, but also, why in the world should anybody try to make a lifelong partner out of somebody they didn't have the faintest interest in as a human being with their own hopes, fears, and dreams?

For all I know your experiences and mistakes, and the lessons you might need to learn, may well be rather different from mine. I share mine here not as a prescription for you, but just to give you the look and feel of what it is to learn from failure and bad experiences.

I have traced my likely ASD line over 5 generations: great grandmother, grandfather, mother, me, daughter. Seems like the men did as well as the women, in this case. I have thought of the female ASD perpetuation hypothesis also. But when you think more deeply about it, it may be an oversimplification. There have been plenty of disruptions in society that can cause behavioral differences to play a huge role putting some people ahead. When a plague hits, suddenly the more social people may be at a huge disadvantage, for example.

It is more likely than undiagnosed aspies are similar to diagnosed aspies (at least as far as any two aspies are alike). That they would differ significantly is the unwarranted assumption. It is possible that some aspies are undiagnosed because they're symptoms are less noticeable and have less of an impact on their lives, but it is much more likely to be because they never were exposed to sufficient information about AS. But even if that is the case, then as a diagnosed aspie I fall into the camp that is largely failing at romance.



And when was it that things changed for you? I sincerely doubt that you were anywhere near my current age when they did. I'm less than a year away from my 40th birthday, and still nothing has changed or improved for me. Its already too late for whatever worked for you to work for me.

It was a gradual thing over many decades, and it's still a work in progress, though I get by these days. The arrival of a woman who was interested in a relationship with me was always a rare thing, always caused by unusual circumstances. Small numbers of randomly-occurring, lucky events were at the root of it - events that might just as easily never have happened.

First "girlfriend" was when I was 16 - I'd taken part in an amateur pantomime and somebody told me a girl in the audience had said she fancied me. So I got them to set up a date, which the girl then backed out of, apparently she'd decided to go out with somebody else. The mutual friend suggested I went to see her. I wasn't going to (I felt too shy), and was getting all depressed, having given up, but I was watching a bit of TV fiction in which one of the characters did just that, and he was a bit of a hippie, and I admired hippies, and this idea dawned on me that I had nothing to lose but a bit of pride if I went and did likewise.
[continued below - excuse split posts, CloudCrap is being a complete PITA today and won't let me do it any other way - sorry also about the length]

Last edited by ToughDiamond on 12 Aug 2021, 12:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

.....It worked, kind of. She said she'd already got a date but if that didn't work out then she'd give me a try. A few days later I heard that the other boy had made a complete mess of it and so our date was on. It seemed to go well, but when I turned up for our next date, she had a girlfriend with her, and she got rid of me on some excuse within half an hour, with some vague idea of meeting again some time soon. It never happened. She wrote to me to say it was over - said she'd been in love with another boy all the time, he kept deserting her and every time he returned she took him back again. So he'd come back and I was history. I guess she'd only gone out with me to make him jealous or to ease her loneliness till he turned up again. And anyway, I hadn't been very impressive. Never asked her a single question, didn't know what to do except to feebly copy what little I'd seen that boyfriends were supposed to do. We never shared so much as a joke together. She could have been anybody for all I cared. I just had this narcissistic need to have a girlfriend. And the only thing I learned was that sticking my neck out by going to see her had been surprisingly effective, that maybe girls liked boys to show a bit of courage or something. Later on I went through a very possessive phase, probably because I'd unconsciously learned that other boys could be a major threat to me and that I just didn't have what it takes to hang onto a partner.

........Notice all the random, improbable things that had to happen, to enable that "partnership"? It was sheer luck. After that I spent 2 more lonely years getting nowhere. Finally in desperation I discovered an easy way out, I enrolled with a dating agency, eventually got a letter from a girl, and after a few weeks we met. It was another disaster, mostly. Not knowing what to do, I just visited her when she said I could, and every time I tried to advance things by putting my arm round her or whatever, she didn't seem to like it, and I got the impression I just wasn't attractive enough to her. We had little in common, and again I wasn't interested in her much as a human being. I remember the way she would engage with her siblings in smart, lively banter that I didn't know how to emulate, while we just sat there together having embarrassed, maudlin conversations. Eventually she said somebody else had asked her out, I said I didn't mind (I couldn't afford to mind because I didn't have any pull with her), then one night she said he'd told her it was him or me, and that she'd write to let me know if she chose me. I asked her to write anyway to let me know however it went. She didn't.

After another few months of failure I was "lucky" enough to meet a girl at a party. I'd begun to behave a bit more genially and positively by then, and she probably noticed that I was comfortable engaging in banter with my male friends and wasn't just an isolated lonely blob, but she still had to make it very easy for me. She became my first serious partner because for some reason she was serious about me. But once again, it was only some quirk of fate that threw us together, and I don't know how I'd have fared if we'd never met.

........One of the lessons that life was beginning to show me, that took me years to see, was that there's not that much difference between being able to get along with men and getting along with women. It's mostly about learning to relate to people, and developing that "skill" with men was much easier than it was with women, because being heterosexual I had none of the baggage of desperately wanting a relationship with a man, so I could relax. I'd always had at least one or two male friends - mostly outliers and counter-culture types - who tended to stick around in spite of my poor interest in them as people. We shared music a lot (playing guitars and records), which was very helpful. And I was usually a nice guy, and fairly considerate as long as it was clear what they needed from me.

The little bit of social success I got was just enough to allow me to build on it, though even now, if my wife and my tiny circle of friends vanished, I would be pretty much back to Square One, and I don't know how I'd ever build a social life again. It's still very hard for me to make friends and keep them, so I do my best with the ones I have, which still isn't a great performance. My head is just above the water through the grace of fickle fortune. I'm still too shy to be outgoing, and it's usually very hard for me to even suggest meeting anybody unless they've made it plain they want that, and not many people do. I've often said that if I weren't a musician I'd probably have spent most of my life in a social wilderness.

I remember when my son was approaching 30, he said he was worried that he'd still not had a girlfriend. I recommended that he tried to get into situations where he'd meet as many women as possible. I don't know whether he took my advice, but he got a partner after a year or two, and they're still together after about 8 years, apparently happy. I fear for his chances of finding another partner if that relationship were to fall apart. But like me, he's got a few male friends who are outliers, and they're quite close through their shared interests.