Oh, how I love this "dating game" baloney

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Interesting, didn't know that before.

I said "many women", not "all women" or "most women". I'm referring to the kind of women me and my friends have experience with as a love interest and it should be obvious that this was not a reference to "all women" or "most women" as I would have said "all women" or "most women instead. I would love it is my next girlfriend would not inhibit that feature but unfortunately that hasn't occured yet.



If only one of my exes would have figured that out, we would probably have still been an item....



I've tried that in every relationship I've been in but unless she is being just as honest, just as open and just as straightforward you will inevitable end up with a lot of frustrations and stress on both sides. My last relationship just blew up a week ago because for a month my girlfriend simply refused to talk about her feelings. I have to add she was BPD, though, which definitely makes such behavior more likely.

Maybe I just attract the wrong type of women?

Aaaaaaand it's apparent I've already offended someone by putting the word "crap" in the subject line. Noted for future reference.

Thing is, I'm not even sure if any way I could put that would be inoffensive to her. I don't even know yet who "her" would be anyway, but...

"Honey, I want to let you know that if you're ever having a problem, we're going to have to talk it out and be open and honest with each other."
"If I'm ever having a problem? A-are you saying I'm emotional and high-maintenance?! Are you saying I'm the problem in this relationship?!"

Okay, heh, so I couldn't make it more obvious that I don't have any relationship experience, and maybe I'm always worrying about these things from a worst-case scenario point of view, but you never know.
I guess.

Your scenario does remind me of my previous relationships, so I'd say you're definitely not entirely off here.

I don't believe this is true. Certainly many AS people feel empathy - the breakdown is in expressing it in real time. It's the delivery.

With Mr. Rath, what I can tell you is: It sounds simple to say "Oh, just tell him what you need!", but it's very hard to DO IT. And if you met me in real life, you'd experience a very outgoing, straightforward, funny, but pragmatic/no nonsense girl. If something bothers me in my life, I'll say it. I'm not the quiet, silent-treatment type!

Still, sometimes with my aspie husband, the things he "missed" are so self-evident to me. "Shockingly obvious" they feel to me. I describe it in terms of culture because my background is in anthropology. It is as if he's from a completely different culture. And yet, I have a whole lifetime of dealing with men in THIS culture, MY culture. They may be clueless about the female of the species sometimes because: men. But they still "get" most of it. With Mr. Rath sometimes - he really misses the cue completely. If an "average" guy did that - it would be deliberate, and callous. So - even though that meaning doesn't exist for Mr. Rath, the conditioning on my end still creates the hurt feeling which I have to sit with, and examine for validity. I'm getting much better at saying "OK. I know how this feels. But he clearly doesn't mean what you think he means."

So - then I have the hurt feeling. In my culture, the cue is important and even a really dense guy will understand my feelings are hurt. But with Mr. Rath? He doesn't understand it. So, in the midst of my hurt feelings, it's now upon my shoulders to stop, and explain it to him. That's hard to do. Finally, what is required on his part is the most difficult for him to deliver on: expressing empathy.

That's my 2c.

Also, I'd take Spock over James Bond any day of the week. James Bond - blech. Too high maintenance in every regard, unpredictable and a womanizer. Plus, I don't need anyone who uses more hair products than I do.

That's not empathy. That's an attempt to bypass the lack of empathy with logic. Sometimes this is sufficient but often it is not.



They FEEL obvious to you. Thing is : as a neurotypical woman, you have a very active "emotional filter". Every image you see and every sound you hear passes a subconscious filter in which an emotion is attributed to every part of that image depending on the importance and nature of that particular part (including human faces and posture) and at the same time a task list is automatically assembled to provide the proper responses to these emotional impulses. With people who have AS this filter is very inactive. As such, they have to do all this filtering rationally, which demands an enormous amount of brainpower and therefore your husband is likely to miss out on many things that come naturally to you. Basically, besides empathy your husband also lacks intuition or instinct.



If he can't see the logic behind something, he can't understand it. It seems like neurotypical men can have somewhat of an emotional understanding with a woman, but due to the lack of empathy men with AS can only come to a logical understanding. You can be joyfol together, horny together or angry together but he will never feel your emotions like an empathic person does. He can only try to interpret them like Spock.

Salonfilosoof, kenisu3000: I can only give you my perspective, as an imperfect NT woman. If I were dating an Aspie and he said something like, "Look, I really care about you and I never want to hurt your feelings. That said, I know I'm going to hurt your feelings, because I have a hard time understanding the right thing to say at the right time. Sometimes I'm going to feel so tense about trying to say the right thing that I might not be able to say anything to you. So, is it okay with you if I ask you what you need - even if you're upset at the time? Are you willing to coach me about how to give you what you need? Because even when you think what you need is obvious to anyone with a brain and pulse, it's not going to be obvious to me. I promise I'll listen to what you say, and I'll ask questions when I don't understand you, and I'll work hard to meet you half-way."

Gentleman, if I liked you (thought you had character, good values, were a decent sort of fellow, had a few things going for you, etc.) and you said that to me....I'd purr like a kitten....a cute, soft, sexy lil kitten.

That said, I agree - it takes two. You have to be with an NT woman who is willing to accept you, to understand the differences between limitations and personality, and who is willing to communicate in a direct (but hopefully loving) manner. And you have to hold up your end - you have to listen to what the lady says.

I'm sorry about your break-up, Salonfilosoof....I can tell you that even when you find an NT woman like the one I've described, it isn't necessarily enough.

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Right, that was my point. Clearly they're not obvious to him, being my point again.

The way it sounded in my head was more or less the same, but I'm afraid I don't always manage to let things come out exactly the way I intend them to. She knows I love her (I still do) and I'm pretty sure she still loves me too, but the last month we had an argument pretty much every weekend we were together because I felt her slipping away and she seemed to have closed herself off completely to me (and course with every argument things only got worse). I've rarely felt so entirely powerless as I felt the last month of our relationship.



I'm starting to wonder if I've ever had a girlfriend that was entirely NT . I'm pretty sure my last one was borderline, the previous one seemed to have a peculiar form of ADHD and I'm not so sure about the other three, however my first girlfriend was quite a weirdo as well.

As strange as it may sound, to me NT women are even more complicated than borderline/ADHD/bi-polar type of women. I rarely get along with NT women at all. In many ways NT women seem entirely alien to me, whereas in a woman with BPD or ADHD I at least see some faint sign of resemblence... and for some reason I seem to attract them...



As I said, I've never gotten along with NT women. I guess I'll just have to accept having unstable relationships with unstable partners because somehow that's always how I end up....

I'm a former member of Mensa, so I'd say that counts as high-functioning. Yet, I can't say I'm empathic. I am very emotional (no less than any NT or even someone with BPD) and I can sense somewhat whether a person is comfortable or not but this is based on logical reason following the analysis of detailed body movements and voice shifts rather than because of the instinctive/intuitive emotion that is empathy. You literally feel whether someone is comfortable or not. We can only conclude it based on an analysis of the parameters involved.

The difference between high-functioning and low-functioning autism is not not a matter of different symptoms but rather of a different ability to use logics as a replacement for empathy and intuition. The higher the IQ, the less obvious the symptoms because logic can more easily circumvent them but the actual symptoms are pretty much the same as for low functioning autists. They just don't have the logical skills to bypass their inabilities while individuals like myself or "Mr. Rath" do.



My point : he's not empathic. He can only logically conclude whether it is obvious but he cannot feel it.

He can feel happy, he can feel sad, he can feel horny and he can feel in love. He just can't feel a situation or a person like you do.

I could put it like this... Compare empathy with the ability to see color... In that case :

-- A woman with BPD would see colors so bright and clear they often hurt the eye.
-- An NT woman just sees colors the way they are.
-- An NT man is green-red color blind. He mixes up green and red but all the other colors are fine.
-- An Aspie man is color blind.

Now, the color blind man may not realise he is color blind unless others realise his ability to experience color is different from someone who's not color blind. Similarly, the man with Asperger's does not realise he's not empathic unless unless others realise his ability to experience empathy is different from someone who does not have Asperger's. Just like a person who's colorblind has only an incomplete idea of what a color really is, so do people with Asperger's have an incomplete idea of what an emotion really is.

You could say emotions are one-sided for people with Asperger's. We don't feel your emotions but only our own. To understand your emotions we must first analyse them.

I don't know if you are "high functioning" because I don't know you. So, definitely not speaking of you specifically when I say: I disagree that high IQ = = high functioning. Some of the most brilliant people Mr. Rath and I know, and we know many, have spent years at home in their moms basement eating mac & cheese out of a pan in their underwear. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) This is not exactly highly functional.

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You are using two words interchangeably: empathetic and empathic. I do not agree they mean the same thing.

Having said that, I submit there is much evidence that people who have Aspergers can and do feel empathy. If you disagree with that basic premise, I think we just have to agree to disagree. Also, I don't know why I can't get these tags fixed, I guess I just suck at it!

I guess high functionality implies high IQ but high IQ doesn't qualify as high functionality per se. You have to do something with your IQ if you want to avoid living in moms basement eating mac & cheese out of a pan in your underwear. I could have been there too had it not been for some lucky events in my life and a lot of life experience that helped me on my way. And although I live on my own, I have a job that pays decent and a good social life I can't say I'm that far away from such a scenario as the mental upkeep it takes to maintain such a life is extremely high even for people with high functional IQ. I wouldn't be able to imagine where I'd been today if I hadn't had the ability to use my IQ to bypass my lack of empathy and instinct, but I think that basement life you speak of might actually resemble it.



I meant to say "empathic" where I said "empathetic". I guess this is some sort of dyslectic glitch I have.



I'm sure there's a lot of evidence that people with Asperger's can attribute basic emotional states to people based on logical analysis of their face, their posture and the tone of their voice as they learned while growing up. I also had to learn all this from experience and I can say I've become fairly adept at judging people's emotional states, but I still quite often miss what for neurotypical people are clear cues because I don't have any empathy and I can only use logic to replace it.

Huhh, well, I have Asperger's and I know I can feel empathy. I've felt it before, more than once.
Just because it almost never happens doesn't mean it -never- never happens.

Just because you happen to feel the same thing as another person at the same time or just because you can correctly assess how another person is feeling, that doesn't make you empathic. Empathy is some sort of emotional instinct that we all lack. Unless when on empathogenic drugs (like MDMA) we can only imagine how it feels.

They can express their feelings.