I agree.....you can't become neurotypical. You can only develop coping strategies, for the traits you have that are messing with your happiness. And you might not even get far with that, if you can't admit stuff about yourself that stings your pride - e.g. being something of a social failure, being unable to read people very well, even having unusual eye contact or body language problems. Go into denial and you're lost.
Having said that, I've noticed that whenever I'm in a new relationship, I become a lot more flexible and NT-like.........it also happens if I make socialising my special interest, and I've seen at least one other Aspie who tries very hard to seem NT, and it kind of works.
I guess what happens is that if you have a strong social or sexual drive, nature gives you a hand, you become highly motivated and supercharged. Mostly I experience this as improved flexibility....e.g. I can adapt to the rapidly-changing "social wind." I can (to some extent) read between the lines of conversations and work out what they're feeling instead of my just taking everything literally.
As long as the relationship doesn't bring me any significant anxiety or grief (like finding out my new partner isn't going to protect my feelings very carefully, is too flirty with other men, wants to risk her life, is too individualistic to want to share her life with me very much), I seem able to keep that supercharged state indefinitely. But as I've never known a relationship lasting more than a couple of months or so without such grave stuff rearing its ugly head, I don't know whether I could stay NT-like for a lifetime.
In my current reationship, which is still fairly new, we've just come through some pretty grave stuff in which I found things out about her that would have made me run a mile if I'd known what I was in for before starting out with her. Luckily we seem to have largely sorted it out.......I do still have some anxiety that everything will slide back, and I resent the fact that her mistakes caused me so much upset, when all she had to do was to get it right (note the perfectionism?), but so far I've barely gone back into my Aspie shell with her. That gives me a lot of hope, because I've often suspected that I couldn't keep up my NT-like performance for a lifetime even if the other person was as near to perfect as it gets.
I suppose it's rather like my experiences with inclusive, non-judgemental, benign friends......my traits seem to vanish. But when I look closely, I'm still an Aspie. When my partner asks me what I'd like for dinner, I still don't know, because I feel I need a short list to choose from. I still can't easily shift my attention from one thing to another, if I'm deeply focussed. I still don't understand, or even want to understand, the NT behind-the-scenes Salsa-dancing crap that they call the mating game.....lies, even the sins-of-omission type where I'm not told stuff I have a right to know, can still devastate me disproportionately. I can still feel horribly upset to see that I can't always read the minds of sexual predators - there was one hanging about and I was stupid enough to try to trust him, and only figured it out when he goofed and blatantly damned himself out of his own mouth. He didn't get far, but I'm still feeling quite fraught that it was only my weak Aspie mind-reading skills that saved the day, and that I had to intervene and appear possessive for quite a while before my warnings were finally heeded in the nick of time, and that my partner was initially encouraging the bastard......that kind of sexual naïveté scares me terribly, and in this case it very nearly brought down the whole house of cards.
I guess it all boils down to whether or not the other person still seems worth the effort......if they start to look too risky, I feel a strong urge to protect myself and go back into that self-sufficient shell where they can't get through to me any more. That shell has protected me from some real maniacs......sure they've hurt me, but nothing like as much as they would have done if I'd remained all open and flexible to them. Another way of putting it is that I lose interest in a relationship if I start to feel that I'm never going to get it right.......it's similar to my special interest "hobbies" where I get to the point where I can't be arsed any more because I've been banging my head and failing to make any progress in spite of my best, sustained efforts. But give me just one person who shows me that they are worth the effort, and I'll put in whatever it takes to keep the relationship working properly.
SUMMARY:
You can't become normal, but it's amazing how normal you can act for really great people, once you realise that you can trust them. In fact I often feel that Aspie love is better than NT love......I've often been shocked at how socially acceptable it's become for mainstreamers to disrespect their partners.
14 Feb 2012, 3:18 am
