Should I tell a new partner about my Asperger's?

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I met a guy from okcupid a few weeks ago. Since then, we've hung out several times and we've gotten involved physically. I really like him, he seems to like me, and the physical stuff is really good, but I have trouble finding much to say to him. We have plenty in common (similar nerdy interests), and I don't think he's getting bored with me, but it's taking me longer than usual to come out of my shell with him.

I'm wondering whether it would be wise to tell him that I have Asperger's, or if I should wait. He's made some comments about how quiet and guarded I am, but I think he finds it endearing at this point; he just thinks of it as a personality quirk, or a trait of the region where I grew up. I'm pretty high-functioning and independent. Panic attacks or meltdowns are rare for me these days. People don't guess that I have Asperger's unless they're really familiar with other people on the spectrum, but everyone can tell that there's something not quite right about me.

I know this is ultimately up to me, but I'm curious whether anyone has any advice or experience in situations like this? How do you decide when it's best to tell someone? With the last guy I seriously dated, the topic of Asperger's came up in conversation on date 3 or 4, so I took the opportunity to say "Oh yeah, I have that too," and that was that. Maybe I should try to steer a conversation in that direction, and see how he reacts to the topic in the abstract?

I am an NT in a relationship with an Aspie. We met on-line, so I would say a similar situation. I would not have guessed that he was an Aspie, but I could tell he was quirky. We connected very quickly and I was drawn to his playfulness. He told me on our second date, mainly because I asked a specific question about something he said. I am glad he told me though. It didn't scare me away, but it did raise a lot of questions for me. He was very open with me and while we had to talk out a lot of things in the first few weeks of our relationship, I believe it has made us stronger. However, if he had not told me, I would probably have assumed he was a jerk at certain points and walked away. I am glad I didn't because he is genuinely the most amazing person I have met. I admire his outlook on life and he spoils me like crazy. I just hope I spoil him equally ) We continue to talk about different issues. I am bracing for a meltdown, although they are very rare with him. I doubt I would cause one... I am pretty submissive with him, but I know someone else could push him into it. I know communication is the key to any relationship, but especially with an NT/Aspie one. We admit that we will never fully understand how the other one thinks, but we appreciate and respect each other.

I would probably mention my Asperger's if it came up in conversation, or if I needed to explain one of my many quirks. But I wouldn't go out of my way to tell him.

I'd get it out, day one. I figure it would ease someone about certain qualities of me, so that the person wouldn't think that I'm acting a certain way because of something they did/are doing; especially how a lack of facial expression can be unnerving to those who use faces heavily to gauge others, I don't want them to 'read into me' and assume I'm sociopathic.

I cared for propper diagnosis and telling my partner, when we were starting to plan children. I did not see much reason to care for it before, because I did not really hide myself, so he knew anyway that I am the person that I am. And if he chooses to like that person, its ok. And if he had chosen not to like that person, I would have been sad, but an diagnosis could not have changed anything about it.

While when it came to kids, from my opinion he should know, that the way I was, may be ,unlike a personality-issue, inheritable to potential kids.

If you are going to have a future he needs to know eventually, and it might cause trust issues if he feels you tried to hide it. He may not need to know all the facts right away, that might be overwhelming, but it should be brought up soon before you get to involved. Maybe tell him next time he comments on one of your aspie traits since obviously he has noticed them.

Hmmmm. Interesting question. I've been doing a lot of belly button gazing about my past, and indeed, about my future, since retiring from my professional engineering career at the state retirement age for men of 65 on the first day of spring in 2010. However, as I'd contracted a severe bout of amnesias back in 1983, the day that my one and only child was born, by emergency Caesarean section, in the Christmas bank holiday period, due to the pressure in my head, of filling up with body fluid, as my thyroid had packed in, unexpectedly, and, my family doctor, who never once raised his eyes from his desk when I visited him every Saturday morning for a repeat prescription for a Ventolin Inhaler for my chronic asthma, did not see that I was taking on the appearance of pop-eyed goldfish as my eyes were forced out of their sockets by the fluid pressure behind them, I hadn't belly-button gazed much in respect of the events in my life that had led to my wife and I courting the initially casual relationship that we had in our teens that resulted in us becoming engaged to be married.

I don't know if you and he are contemplating becoming engaged to be married, which has prompted your question, but, like it or not, your aspergers syndrome defines who you are so much that you come here to ask the question, so even though you don't consciously regard your aspergers syndrome as defining who you are, subconsciously you do, hence, why else ask such a question.

I've been coaching and counselling people about living with aspergers syndrome since being successfully diagnosed and treated by a private consultant clinical psychiatrist for c.20 years after I suffered a nervous breakdown at my desk in my office at my place of work. As the breakdown occurred on the job, my employer picked up the tab for the psychiatrist, otherwise there was no way that I could have afforded his fee, to receive such immediate psychiatric intervention. As the breakdown had been triggered by 'memories' of my youth popping spontaneously into my conscious awareness, whilst I was sat there at my desk, in my office, at work, my psychiatrist used hypnotic regression analysis and therapy to poke around in the embers of the fire in my head that had been the memories the fluid pressure had put out c.10 years earlier, and found that I had been diagnosed with the syndrome that became internationally associated with Hans Asperger having catalogued it, rather than Grunya Sukhareva, whom I prefer to credit with its discovery, in keeping with an early childhood in which I had been diagnosed as having both childhood autism and savant syndrome, and both of my familial bloodlines, having been subject to those conditions too.

I apologise for having rambled on a bit there, but I'm trying to get my head on straight to give you the best possible answer that I can, given my peculiar circumstances. The easy answer is, yes, you must tell him. But that begs the question, what does your having aspergers syndrome mean about you. Well, you probably know as well as I do that aspergers syndrome is a label for a complex bundle of autistic and possibly other symptoms that manifest in the incumbent of them in response to internal and external processes at times predictably but at other times completely unpredictably. We aspies live with the condition day in, day out, so, whilst sometimes it worries us that we have it, even get paranoid we have it, we have to live with it, or try to find ways of intervening in what it does to us. I can therefore tell you both from my own life of autism and aspergers symptom, and from coaching and counselling thousands of others with it, that because our brains are wired differently to 'neurotypical' brains, we think in completely different ways to 'neurotypicals' particularly as to something we have to do that they don't have to do, namely, cope with living in a human body with a differently wired brain to them, with the result that we are twenty-five to thirty times as likely to contemplate, attempt, and / or commit acts of extreme prejudice against ourselves than they are, when things don't go the way we want or would like them to go. For example, I have attempted suicide six times in my life, the first time at three and half years old, the next four as age seven and a half, and the last time when I was fifty-five. Penn State University has just published a research report that confirms that my first five times were typical of their 'universe' of anecdotal guinea pigs, you might even say 'stereotypical autistic' [http://news.psu.edu/story/267913/2013/03/11/research/autistic-children-may-be-greater-risk-suicide-ideation-and-attempts].

And it isn't even as simple as suicide. In view of my seeming inability to even kill myself properly when I was a child, when things started going egg-shaped in my mid-teens I self induced amnesias that switched my memory and identity off, and became zombie-like. I did that again the day my one and only child was born because I had been told my life would have to change completely to become a proper father. When in that zombie-like state I also became prone to wandering as I didn't know who I was, where I lived, etc. Also when I was like that, I had a few narrow escapes from being hit by vehicles even trains when I crossed roads and railway lines absent-mindedly and without thought for my life. [http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/local/new_york&id=9407546] I can even remember a few occasions when I have deliberately 'run-away' from my duties when under duress, and not cared whether it ended with me living or dying. On one occasion I slammed out of the house after a row with my mum and daughter, because I felt they were 'ganging-up' on me, got in my car and drove east with the intention of keeping driving across Europe until I ran out of motor fuel and money, where I would live rough or die from exposure.

If I had told my prospective fiancée that was what she was going to have to put up with by marrying me, would she have taken the risk? Who knows? She was besotted with me, and I with her, in my freaky 'tongue in your ear' kind of way, so I guess she would have. But whatever. That was over 50 years ago, and now I'm 68 and she's 67 and we are still contentedly living under the same roof. We don't 'make love' any more, and sleep in the same bed. We are simply companions and wouldn't have it any different, and despite all our dreadful ups and downs, and my occasional violent meltdowns, would go back and do it all over again, and not change any of it, because it was a fantastically brilliant theme park ride.

You can read all about my bizarre life in Dafydd Bach: Death of Innocence: The Compendium by David Adrian Thomas, Esq., M.C.I.H.T.. which is exclusively available from the Amazon Prime Kindle Select eBook and Free Lending Library

I would tell them it's nothing to be ashamed of. In fact it's almost considered cool these days.

YES YES YES YES YES
HOLY CRAP YES
YOU SHOULD TELL

In a perfect world, he'd already KNOW because you'd have told him when you first met (if it's on a dating site, put it in your profile). I tell everyone I meet regardless of possible dating-ness (which I don't actually have at the moment anyway) about my Autism if I know I'm going to see them multiple times. This makes things go a lot smoother for several reasons.

1) It helps them know WHY I might seem weird or 'off' or upset, or why I might accidentally offend people. My dad's very mildly Autistic and apparently when he started at a new job one of the guys took the man who's now his best friend aside and said "Hey, you'd better watch out around him! One of these days, he's going to snap and kill us all!" or something to that effect. (Fortunately for my dad, his best friend said something like "If he DOES turn out to be a crazy axe murderer, I wanna be on his good side!" and treated him like a person.) Like it or not, (I like it very much, actually) Autistic people can sometimes fall in the Uncanny Valley and seem very disconcerting to people because of our different body language and mannerisms.

2) It helps them understand WHY I'll be doing or saying certain things. Again, I feel like we all have an *obligation* to tell people because it helps them AND us. If I'm having an anxiety attack or a shutdown or sensory distortion, it's SO much easier to just remind people of my Autism than to explain the entire thing when I can barely talk. And people will understand why I don't want to be touched, and why I need them to tell me when I offend them instead of just "hinting" to me.

3) If, for some reason, anyone decided they didn't want to be around me BECAUSE of my Autism, good riddance! Nobody should be afraid to tell a potential partner about Autism because they'll run off or something, because if they do, who wants to date them anyway? It's kind of like a built-in as*hole shield.
If that guy reacts unfavorably to Autism, DON'T date him. People like that don't deserve dates, especially from cool people like us And what kind of relationship could you have with someone who's prejudiced like that? You can't expect to lie about your Autism to your partner for years. What if you ended up getting MARRIED? Autism IS genetic. You'd probably have an Autistic kid. You don't want a child like that at the mercy of a prejudiced bigot anyway.

I simply dont see the big necessity for giving something, thats obvious an name.. Its as if I would tell someone, that there is a big bright light in the sky, and that its called the sun. I dont think that anyone will say: "Oh, wow! Now that you mention it, I got aware of it, and can decide if I like it or not. Without you telling me, that there is a sun existing, I never could have decided, if I like the sun or not."

I dont want someone to endure me, because of my maybe negative treats having an diagnosis. I dont want someone to excuse things, that might bother him with telling himself, that because of an piece of paper he must endure it and be tolerant toward it. I dont think, that an relationship, lasting on: "Ok, there is a number of behavior in that partner that sucks for me, but because of that piece of paper I decide to endure it." will have any chance of long time lasting. Anyway if there is a piece of paper, if a certain behavior bugs someone, then it bugs that person, and thats the way it is.

I do not want to spend my life with people, be it partners and friends, that tolerate me because of an piece of paper. But I want to spend it with people, that like me, because of me being the person that I am. I dont have any prob, that this reduces the number of persons about 95%, but from experiences, the lasting 5% of people are real cool people, that I maybe never have gotten to know, if I had spended my time instead with the 95% left, that would have endured me, if I had showed them a piece of paper.

I dont see, why every s**t nowadays needs an official diagnosis. Be it ADHD, ADS, ... The person is the person that they are, yes I have a friend that I totally suspect to have that attention-deficit-syndrome. But why the hell should I need a piece of paper, to decide if I enjoy spending time with her?

I think people, that need a piece of paper to find some tolerance in my heart, are not the kind of people, I want to share my time with.