37 years old and (involuntarily) never had a girlfriend.

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Not all foreign women want to necessarily date any American/Western guy.

Guys who can get girlfriends anywhere, tend to end up with nice, normal 'foreign' women if they go abroad. Guys who have trouble with relationships at home tend to find women with issues or who are not into it for the guy himself.

At least that's what I've seen a lot.

And that's if they can get them at all.

Actually, much more than just education is needed. The main thing we need is for the autistic community (and/or the larger neurodivergent community) to become several orders of magnitude better organized than it is now. See below.


Until very recently, there was certainly no "desire among the general population to actually want to learn and to understand" LGBTQ+ people either. Ditto for most marginalized ethnic groups. Even today, there are many relatively privileged folks who feel very put-upon and "persecuted" by the idea that they, or their children, should spend any time at all learning about the perspectives of marginalized minorities.


Most though not all gays used to be in the closet. In places like the Bible Belt, many still are very closeted -- with varying degrees of success at being closeted, depending on how well they conform to gender norms.

People can be closeted about all sorts of other things too, such as membership in a nonmainstream religion (unless the religion requires adherents to wear distinctive articles of clothing), or even membership in an unpopular ethnic group (many people of various Middle Eastern nationalities can easily pass for white Europeans).

Anyhow, autism is now known to be common enough, in all ethnic groups, that almost everyone knows someone who knows someone who has an autistic child. So, in the long run, it will probably be easier to get mainstream people to care about the situation of autistic people than to care about the situation of various other marginalized groups. Of course, there are quite a few hurdles before we can reach that point.


Frankly, not nearly as uncomfortable as a lot of people used to be around gays. I remember those days. Homosexual acts are still illegal in about 70 countries, and punishable by death in about 11 countries.

On the other hand, at least in the business world, a lot of things could work better if everyone would learn to communicate more clearly, rather than relying on subtle hints. NT's get into misunderstandings with each other too. We autistic people are just the canaries in the coal mine. In much the same way that curb cuts benefit everyone, not just wheelchair users, so too universal accommodations that improve things for autistic people could also improve things for most people in general, not just autistic people. Everyone would have better-functioning workplaces and healthier relationships.


If some of these behaviors (like certain kinds of stimming) could be made more acceptable for everyone, then many people in general would be less stressed out. Many NT's stim too, just not as often or as blatantly as many autistic people do.


Good for you! Thank you for your work!

What kind of nonprofit? For example, is it part of a large grassroots membership organization, or is it a small working charity funded mainly by foundation grants? (Organizations of both these types, and other types too, can all play valuable roles in a marginalized community, but I consider grassroots membership organizations to have an especially important longterm political role.)


That's par for the course in social change movements of all kinds, not just the disability rights movement. Progress is glacially slow most of the time -- BUT there are, also, occasional tipping points when rapid breakthroughs finally happen on some particular issue. As I see it, you just haven't been around long enough to see any tipping points.


This is indeed a big problem.


No, it requires us to form a variety of professional associations of autistic people (or perhaps neurodivergent people more generally) who either work or want to work in particular professions / occupations / jobs. The first such organization I know of is the U.K.-based Association of Neurodivergent Therapists, founded in spring 2021. We need someone to create a similar org here in the U.S.A, and we need similar orgs for many other professions/occupations. See Autistic Workers Project.

As I see it, the biggest weakness of the autistic rights movement, and of the neurodiversity movement more generally, is that we are vastly under-organized. Activist/advocacy groups like ASAN have an important role, but they are far from enough. On the other hand, the great strength of the LGBTQ+ rights movement, and of many ethnic minority rights movements and minority religions, is that they represent communities with a lot of grassroots community organizations, both small and large.

In any case, thank you for the work you've been doing. I'm sorry to hear that you've gotten so discouraged. I think reading up on the history of other social movements might help you realize that there are more commonalities than you now believe, and might help you feel more hopeful.

And LGBTQ+ women seem to greatly outnumber straight women in autism rights activism.

I have a distant family member, he's my grandpa's brother's son to be exact, who was in 40s and was completely terrible with women. He's suspected to be on the spectrum as well but was never diagnosed due to growing up in a time where high functioning autism wasn't that well known.

Anyways, he was like you, getting older and was desperate to find a partner. So what he did was he went to an international dating agency, paid a couple thousand dollars, and started talking to women from The Philippines. He met a woman from there, they talked for maybe 6 months to a year, he flew down to see her, and then they eventually got married. 20+ years later, they're still together and live in America.

Maybe that's something you should consider.

^ This method is so….arranged, yuck.

Hmm, I haven't gotten the impression that LGBTQ+ women "greatly outnumber" hetero women, but I agree that there are lots of highly visible LGBTQ+ women in autistic rights activism.

That's probably because our knowledge about the LGBTQ+ community has given us high hopes for the future of the autistic community as well.

(I'm bisexual and gender-nonconforming.)

For the vast majority of people, traveling to a third world country to look for love is useless and impractical. Do you really think someone who has no problems meeting romantic partners needs to go to The Philippines to find someone? Of course not.

OP isn't like most people though. He's 37 years old and (involuntarily) never had a girlfriend, and likely doesn't have a lot of sexual experience either. He's not exactly desirable from a mating perspective because if he was, he wouldn't be so romantically and sexually inexperienced as a 30 something year old man.

If OP wants to escape his "romantic poverty" then he has no choice but to try something out of the box because that may be his only opportunity to find someone given his circumstances.

Some good points here. Believe it or not but there's plenty of NT men in your shoes who pull their hair out (to make matters worse for their situation) at why they can't get a date either. They are good people, with good wholesome values, polite courteous and pleasant, But women don't give them a chance.

Some think that if they fix society then women will see their error in their ways and embrace their hidden beauty. Alas it never happens.

However, being an active member of a large, predominantly-female group of people who want to "fix society" in some way might provide opportunities for such a man to meet compatible women.

(Of course, various kinds of self-improvement might be needed too. And a man shouldn't get involved in an org just to meet women.)

Given the OP's experience as a disability rights professional, he would be in an excellent position to help launch grassroots orgs of various kinds. He just needs reasons to see such orgs as part of a coherent strategy that could do a lot more good, for autistic and other ND people generally, than the currently-existing orgs (including both ASAN and his own org) can do all by themselves.

Agreed. This kind of "strategy" is very much looked down where I come from, and rightly, because it is exploitative, tbh. Doesn't stop people from trying, though, and succeeding (at least from the man's perspective).

Arranged marriages have been a thing for hundreds of years, though. My in-laws' marriage was arranged, although both were of the same nationality. The wife wanted to divorce when the husband retired, but she realised she wouldn't have had enough money to live on her own, had she proceeded. 10 years later and they're quite happy with each other, from what I've seen when they visit us.

My own parents marriage wasn't arranged but has had so many ups and downs to I'm so glad to be out of their drama. They're still together, too. Human relationships are complicated.

Oh a lot of young men join clubs, societies and religious church groups because it improves their chances of meeting women. Even if it's not their primary reason it's somewhere in the back of their mind.

It's fairly typical for collective cultures to arrange marriages. In the Asian and middle eastern region it's the norm.

It reminds me of the time that I joined a church group specifically for the intention of meeting women, not because I was religious. Unfortunately I was never successful in meeting a girl from that avenue.

What I discovered was that college church girls tend to be traditional but that oftentimes translates to having traditional ideas of what's considered attractive in a man. What I discovered was that the majority of girls there wouldn't even consider dating you unless you were white, good looking, and at least average height.

The reason I know this is because I met many church girls and their boyfriends tended to fit a similar physical profile, which was being tall, good looking, and white. These Vietnamese sisters who I knew that were both around 5 ft tall, had boyfriends that were at least 6 ft 2.


Ideally, you should find someone who is a bit more "open minded" when it comes to considering different types attractive. I don't think you'll necessarily find this with church girls who tend to be more traditional with their physical preferences and usually prefer to date someone within their own race too.

Probably not a good idea unless you actually are religious too.


.... and unless you were genuinely, sincerely, their kind of Christian too, I would think.

It's still seen in India and the Middle East, but it's very unusual in contemporary East Asia. Most young women in Taiwan or Japan would be horrified at the idea.