NT vs Aspie Men - Help

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I am a 50 yr old undiagnosed aspie woman. I'm divorced and ready for a new relationship. The problem is that although I get a lot of interest from NT men, I find most of them uninteresting. On the flip slide, when I come across men I think are like me whether they know they may have AS or not, I can't seem to get there attention. I know I'm not very good at reading subtle signs but most NT's make there interest hard to miss so I usually end up dating them. What does a woman have to do to get you guys to act? I really need to know. I lose eye contact and have a hard time communicating my interest just like you do so sometimes it feels hopeless.

My advice would probably be to be more direct with a potential AS partner.

Diagnosed Aspie here.......back in my romping days I can well remember being told that "it's the man who makes the first move" - I hope society has made some progress since then, I didn't like the burden of it and I knew some women who didn't like the passivity of their set role either.

I'm just trying to remember how those women who became my partners managed to reel me in - I certainly never won any prizes for making the first move, so I guess their input must have been quite significant. One of them was at a party with me, and she said she felt like going for a walk....I sensed she must be inviting me, so we took a stroll together and she was socially adept enough to get me talking. She lingered, which gave me enough time to figure that I'd best kiss her, so I did. At the time I felt I was on great form, but she said later that she'd been seriously wondering whether I was ever going to respond to her.....I just wondered why she hadn't simply told me at the time that she was interested, instead of giving me hints, but eventually I found that hints were pretty much all I was going to get. I'd love to know more about the evolutionary reasons for that kind of thing.

Another one kept staring and grinning at me whenever we were alone together. It was so overdone that even I noticed and figured she must be interested, though I found her way of indicating it rather spooky. Anyway, with that knowledge I didn't find it difficult to ask her to spend time with me and make the "right moves," and we were soon a couple.

I guess there are a lot of Aspie men who hate the whole idea of the man making the first move, either because they don't know how or because it doesn't fit with the way they think.....whevever I've "played the neurotypical" I've felt that I was somehow stooping to a low level...it tended to feel like selling out, and the idea of being seen to behave like that and to lose the game would feel extremely risky, like the risk of being caught stealing would feel to somebody who themselves felt deepdown that it was very wrong to steal.

So I'm not surprised the NT guys tend to beat the Aspie guys to the punch. We do tend to need things spelling out to us, and I suspect that most NT women would sooner die than spell out their feelings for a man. If you're not averse to being explicit about your interest, that might be the quickest way for you, though there are no guarantees, and I'd be wary of recommending such behaviour - I don't understand why NT women are scared to be explicit, but there might be a good reason for it.

Maybe the best hope is in compromise - making it clear who you're interested in without screaming it from the rooftops. I think that most people tend to like anybody who likes them, so if you can prove you like somebody by what you say to them, without going over the top, then sooner or later they ought to feel the warmth and reciprocate.

What always used to spoil the game for me was that I could never keep a level head.....rather than keeping a finite interest in a woman, I'd rapidly get obsessional about her and everything would get too important and scary, I'd be kind of locked onto the need to win her, everything would get out of proportion. On the other hand, when I did manage to keep things in proportion, the women in question tended to act as if I didn't care enough about them.

I guess you could always sign up with a dating website and specifically ask for an Aspie, if that's what you really want. I've used dating agencies myself, and though they can be good for cutting through the palarva, they can bring problems of their own. I think it's better to get to know a person in real life before even thinking about a fully-fledged relationship with them, but it's possible to lose some of them because they're too impatient or desperate for that. In my experience, it's very rare that they'll just talk about that....more likely they'll just find somebody else or disappear for a few weeks, presumably to galvanise me into getting off my butt, though all it ever did was to make me angry and suspicious. But your experiences might turn out very different.

Tough diamond, I have read your reply a couple of times. I know Aspies, male and female, want the other to make the first move. It's a conundrum isn't it...lol. I'm surprised our species hasn't died out all together!.. So...have you ever been the pursuer because you realized that if you weren't, it just wouldn't happen? If so, how did you go about it?

I never did a sustained pursuit exactly.......when I was very young I'd fixate on some girl or other, but I'd just hang around them hoping for a window of opportunity which never seemed to happen. I didn't dare explain how I felt, and looking back that was probably for the best, because I really didn't notice those girls as people at all, I was a lot more in love with the idea of getting a girlfriend than I was personally attracted to them as individuals. So in many ways I deserved all I got - i.e. nothing.

One thing I tried was to tell a mutual friend that I was interested in the girl, and get him to report back on the response.....both times the message came back that I wasn't really in their league, though one of them did start making eyes at me a few weeks later. Trouble was, as she'd said already that she didn't want me in that way, I lost patience with her mixed messages - couldn't see why she was messing with my feelings like that when she could have just told the guy that she might be interested and saved me the need to stick my neck out. I suppose she was just trying to make sure I wasn't too much of a wimp.

I did slightly better when another mutual friend told me that a girl liked me. I tried to get the friend to help set up a date, but she started to lose interest. I was gutted. The friend recommended that I went to see her (I hadn't visited her before) - initially I felt that was completely out of the question, but by some strange coincidence I saw a TV programme in which the hero did exactly that, and that made the penny drop - I found her house, knocked on her door and we quickly arranged a date. I really felt I'd learned something that day, I'm sure if I hadn't got off my butt then we'd never have gone out together.

I think that's about all. It's usually taken a long time for me to pair off with anybody, and there's always had to be quite a lot of signs that the lady was interested. I don't mind going halfway but I've never really gone out on a limb for anybody - so when I've pursued, it's been the occasional, isolated flash of brilliance rather than any kind of sustained effort. Even years later, when I'd become a lot more relaxed about women and more confident in my own attractiveness, it still seemed wrong to chase them. I'd worry about putting undue pressure on the woman when I really didn't know whether we'd make a good match or not - I hate failing with relationships and would rather not start one if I'm not strongly convinced that we're likely to do well together, so it seems somehow irresponsible of me to go chasing after them when we don't yet know what we've got to offer each other.

If I ever were to really chase a woman, I'd want to be able to honestly say that I felt sure we were right for each other, but that's never been true at that stage of the game, and as my faliures mounted up, it became increasingly hard to feel that I could offer anything but a very tentative chance - i.e. nothing to get worked up about. Looking back it's amazing I ended up with as many partners as I did - I guess that one way or another, they all gave me enough attention and time to pluck up the courage to move things little by little towards romance. My ideal is still not a chasing game but a gradual coming together, with each giving out little signals here and there to encourage the other until one of us says, "I think we really need to talk about where this friendship of ours might be headed." Very much like making any other kind of friend, except that eventually it goes a lot deeper, if it's the right one.

I agree it's a conundrum, but I guess my experiences prove that it can be done. It does take a heck of a lot of patience though.

The way i first signaled it to my good friend was that I said I was going to bed, and gave him the option to sleep in bed with me, or on the couch, or to leave...and he opted to stay.