Meeting a girl in real worl when you have zero social skills

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I should begin by saying that my current relationship, which is also my longest-lasting living-together relationship thus far, is with a man whom I knew for three and a half years before the relationship took an erotic turn. Initially, for the first one and a half years I knew him, he was my boss; then, after we both got fired at once from the same start-up, we became business partners and then gradually became friends. We have lived together for almost seven years.

Before that, my social life revolved around various oddball subcultures, some of which had a very high male-to-female ratio, with the result that I managed to have a very active social life despite very uneven social skills. Another of these subcultures had a more even male-to-female ratio, but also had a strong set of explicit communication ethics that made it much easier for me to fit in there than in a typical social scene.

Anyhow ....

Agreed on your basic approach to finding friends, but one thing I've learned the hard way is that a friendship cannot be based on sharing a single intense interest. If it is, then, once the interest fades, so does the friendship. Rather, a friendship needs to be rooted in having at least several interests in common, of varying degrees of intensity, and having basic values in common -- including, most importantly, compatible views on conflict resolution.

On the other hand, you also wrote:


For me personally, having multiple shared interests is as essential to a long-lasting living-together relationship as it is to a friendship. I realize that not everyone feels the same way, but I personally don't see how it's possible -- especially for autistic people with a strong focus on their interests -- to have a stable relationship of ANY kind without shared interests. Hence, for heterosexuals, I would suggest focusing one's social life on whatever interests one might have that ARE shared by a significant number of members of the opposite sex. Hopefully not ALL of one's interests are shared solely or primarily by members of the same sex, even if some of them are.


The world won't, but, if enough of us put our minds to it, we can build subcultures that work the way we need/want them to work.


Learning social skills, to the extent that one can, is a good idea of course. However, some people, including myself, have intrinsic difficulty with some "social skills" -- it isn't simply a matter of not having learned them.

For example, I can't do unfocused chit chat with more than one person at a time, especially in a group of people I don't know; my mind is just unable to process it fast enough. Also, I can't do normal eye contact rhythms because I can't multi-task between the content of a conversation and paying attention to anything else whatsoever, including the other person's face. I can make brief eye contact at the beginning of a conversation, but, once I'm into the conversation, I might as well be blind -- my mind simply ignores any and all visual stimuli and I have no idea what my eyes might appear to be looking at if anything.

I would imagine that there are plenty of autistic people, both women and men, with these same issues. So, while we should of course develop whatever social skills we can, that can't be the complete solution.

I think we all need to put our imaginations to work on building autistic-friendly subcultures. The autistic community itself is not sufficient to solve our problems, especially for heterosexual autistic men, due to its high male-to-female ratio.

This is another reason why we need to build autistic-friendly subcultures, so we can all have friendship networks (and the many practical benefits thereof) like many NT's do.

Meeting people through other people is not only a good way to find romantic partners; it is also the best way to find jobs.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 30 Oct 2018, 4:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Indeed, forming relationships at work is high risk. My current relationship happens to have started out as a business partnership. For precisely the above reasons, we were very slow and cautious about letting it turn into anything else. It eventually did and happens to have worked out well, but I would not recommend it as a general strategy for anyone else. I do strongly suspect, however, that relationships that start slowly and cautiously are more likely to be stable in the long run.


Sounds good so far. However ....


It's great if you're making enough money to afford to support the family on your own, especially when the children are small. But wanting this for the entire duration of your marriage, and for the sake of power over your wife, is a bit ... creepy. Do you REALLY want a wife who might end up being utterly miserable but afraid to speak up because she is financially dependent on you???

As I see it, the problem in many of today's relationships is NOT the desire for equality. I see the problems as:

1) Unrealistic expectations based on popular movies, romance novels, etc.

2) Lack of awareness, by many people, of how to be assertive without being aggressive, how to give and receive constructive criticism, and how to negotiate mutually agreeable compromises.

These are skills that even many NT's never learn (even if they are excellent at more superficial social skills). Yet they are skills that, I believe, many autistic people can learn without too much difficulty. Certainly these are more autistic-friendly social skills than, say, the art of cocktail-party chit chat.

Doesn't seem that way to me. He does say most men want longterm relationships, and his advice is given with that end in mind. I do think (for reasons already voiced in my reply above) that his advice would not have worked well for any man seeking a relationship with ME in particular, and I suspect that his advice is probably just not feasible for many autistic men. But I don't think it's fair to call him a PUA, even if what he writes may have some resemblances to a "PUA manifesto."

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 30 Oct 2018, 5:12 pm, edited 2 times in total.

What subcultures were those just out of curiosity? Subcultures, churches, and things of that sort can often be a great way of easing oneself into the social world in a less hostile/competitive than normal environment.




I agree that friendship should not hinge solely upon a single interest but having that single interest in common can be the foot in the door that gets you spending time with that friend in person, building rapport with them, accumulating shared experiences to bond over, and discovering other interests and things that you have in common which you can also leverage to strengthen your friendship. Practically speaking, it is easier at the start to find a person who has one thing in common with you and build on that than it is to try and find the person who already shares 5 things in common with you. Another reason for this is that, as you spend time with them, you may both develop a new interest at the same time together and that interest would not have already existed prior to your meeting each other.



In my experience, an NT will almost never (or maybe never) share your focused interests with the same level of intensity that you do so all and everything can't hinge on that alone, although a shared interest at any level of intensity is certainly a great thing to have. Shared values are highly important as well and, since they are usually based in religion, family, cultural tradition, or something else less fleeting that an NT or even autistic person's interests, they tend to last longer and be more stable. It can also be troublesome to try and get yourself interested in interests specifically because those interests are held by a significant number of opposite sex people because you can end up just putting on an inauthentic act and becoming some sort of cringey soyboy or sad friend zone character who just creeps everyone out because they can tell that he is not real and he is not being honest about what he wants.



Subcultures or tribes are definitely a good way to build small friendly communities and a lot of people have success going down that route. Just look at Zoroastrians (Parsis) in India. They are basically a tiny tribe with a unique identity and, because they are so tight-knit and they help each other out so much, they have become one of the wealthiest ethnic groups in India. Unfortunately, because they do not accept converts, take in outsiders, or accept inter-ethnic marriage, and because they lose people to mixed marriages faster than they make babies, they are also fairly inbred and their numbers are falling like the Challenger space shuttle - it looks like they are going to be extinct within the next century or so.



I have dealt with those same issues throughout my life and my natural tendency is to avoid eye contact all together for the reasons you have mentioned. It is just hard to focus on too many things at once. The goal in my eyes is not to become NT but to be the most highly competent version of myself that I can be. With that in mind, I have done various types of eye contact drills to and beyond the point at which they made me uncomfortable and even gave me headaches so as to gradually desensitize myself and also learned a number of hacks like looking at the bridge of the other persons nose or using the triangle technique (looking at one eye, then the other, then their mouth, and then repeating). I have also made efforts to drill eye contact techniques and rest hacks (for when you need to look away for a second but don't want to make a show of it) into myself to the point that I don't have to think about them and they become automatic so I do not have to focus on them while I am trying to focus on what the other person is saying. I don't know if these issues ever go away entirely but I definitely know that they can be mitigated to a high degree with the right technique and effort.

Also, I agree with you that, at a certain point, we must simply own ourselves and what we are. I typically do not mention the fact that I am autistic if it does not come up naturally but, if asked, I am not embarrassed at all about stating it and even turn it into a point of bragging to make myself even less pitiable and more interesting in a "wow, this guy was able to overcome that and I would have never even known if he had not told me" sort of way. On more than one occasion, dropping the A Bomb (telling people that I'm autistic) after they had already begun to think of me as Mr. Magnanimous has worked in my favor and increased my popularity and the amount of respect others had for me.



I am 100% behind you on that. Going out of your way to only hang around other autists makes about as much long term sense as going out of your way to only hang out with other members of your same ethnicity when your ethnic community consists of a very small number of mostly related people in a country you are all new to like British Pakistanis. In the end, everybody just winds up inbred and worse off for it.

Last edited by Scipio on 30 Oct 2018, 5:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Thanks for backing me up there. I appreciate it.

I agree with you about popular culture giving us ridiculous and unrealistic romantic expectations along with making realistic marriages and relationships in general look horribly unpleasant:

https://youtu.be/78LxbUuUdr8


I do not think though that the OP is necessarily saying that he wants a woman who would become miserable in a traditional gender role. I think he is just expressing that he wants there to be a gender role for himself and his wife and that he wants a woman who agrees with him that this is the ideal way for them to carry out their relationship. In a traditional (husband works outside the home, woman works in the home) relationship, the man is free to throw himself entirely into bringing home the bacon without worrying about how he is going to handle all the household chores and the woman is free to not worry about how her career will be effected by getting pregnant and to not worry about the fact that nearly her entire salary is being spent to pay a daycare center to raise her children for her and, in the meantime, her career is really not even that important or fulfilling (certainly not as much as watching your children grow and building them into new members of society would be) because most peoples' jobs are not so it really just another way that society encouraged women to not be near their children, especially in their most important formative years.

I am sad to say that, in my own case, there is a bond that was never establish between myself and my own mother because she was always working outside and I just never saw her because I was a daycare kid. I was really raised by the public school system and daycare more than I was raised by either of my parents. It's not that I don't like her or my dad or that we don't get along now but I have only ever really known either of them as an adult and did not bond with them much as I was growing up.

Marriage ultimately is really more for the children than it is for either of the adults (or at least that's how it was traditionally) so it makes sense for people to pursue a more old school approach if they agree that is the wisest way to ensure the best possible odds for the children that they most likely intend to have.

He could also do the mail-order bride thing if he has enough money & doesn't know how to meet a woman offline. I would of went that route if I had the money & resources or I would of taken in a girl who needed a place to stay if I had my own place.

From what I've seen having lived in one of the countries where mail order brides often come from, it is generally inadvisable to find them online and bring them to the US. It works sometimes but it doesn't work just as often. It's better to go to the country, attend a church there, meet someone in said church, marry them, stay in that country and acquire residence, and live your life there where you met her. When you pull girls out of the environments, cultures, and societies, that they are familiar with and bring them back to the US, they tend to just become Americanized within a few years and then you are right back to your original problem only now you have the looming nightmare of an impending divorce because you've signed a legal contract with this woman and the state that allows her to project all of her frustrations over not fitting in, missing her family, or whatever onto you, the dope who brought her there, and have her lawyers rip you apart for it. The good news is that, in other countries, social mistakes tend to get a pass more frequently than in the US because it is just assumed that you are a foreigner who is still learning how to conduct yourself in their society so it can be a lot easier to meet decent women in person.

Most traditional girls are highly family-oriented and as such generally prefer to remain geographically close to their families and visit them often. If a flight to the motherland every 6 months is unmanageable, I'd suggest just moving there and starting a new life.

Please don't hijack my thread make your own. Thx.

Because OrdinaryCitizen feels that this thread has been hijacked, I'll confine this reply to Scipio's and my discussion of something OrdinaryCitizen said in this thread. I'll post my replies to Scipio on other matters in other threads.

I should clarify: I don't think he deliberately wants his wife to be miserable. However, a problem with "traditional gender roles" is that they can have the EFFECT of putting the woman in a very vulnerable position. And OrdinaryCitizen did specifically say he wanted this arrangement so he could have power over his wife -- or, as he put it: "I will be head of the family, tired of having constant fighting for power inside my household with modern American women." A likely CONSEQUENCE of this -- if not the intent -- would be a wife who is afraid to speak up assertively about any problems in the relationship, and who will therefore be miserable, expressing her concerns only in a passive-aggressive manner if at all. In my opinion, the best remedy for "constant fighting for power" is not to go back to patriarchy, but for both men and women to learn conflict resolution skills.

I just now replied to you on another issue via the new thread Consequences of divorce for women and men and will probably soon be replying to you in the thread Is Being Yourself Always Enough or Is Self Improvement Good? as well.

Even in a traditional family model, that many women still happen to want, a power balance has to be rather even for a healthy relationship. Even if you end up with the final say, it would be your responsibility to respect her and her opinions, just as you would your own.

No one sided relationship is healthy. That is what it sounds like more and more as you go on, rather than simply traditional.

Back on the original topic...

Learn to dance. Find a good place to take lessons, and just have fun. You'll be able to interact with the opposite sex in a more structured environment, and get used to it, as well as have an obvious common topic for conversation.

Plus, once you've learned enough to go out and dance socially, your first interaction need only be asking for the dance, which is pretty hard to get wrong if you just go and do it. (This is actually easier for the men, since it's generally expected that the men do the asking, and the women do the waiting around until they're asked) Once you've danced (and hopefully had fun), it makes subsequent interactions easier, and less awkward.

If you get REALLY good, you might end up with women gravitating towards you on their own, just because they want to dance with someone that actually knows what they're doing and how to lead.

This is good advice. All dance lessons I attended, the majority of participants were female.