I'm more inclined to believe that a relationship between aspies is more likely to work than between an aspie and an NT. Now mind you, the sample size I am drawing from is extremely small, and certainly not a random one, indicating a major bias in my assessment. (Namely, my relationship with my ex, and my father's two unsuccessful marriages.) However, the one in my family which did work, my grandfather's marriage, which is still lasting, is primarily owing to the fact that my grandmother is a woman who is of strong character, yet despite being NT by classical definition, is exceptionally intelligent and very rational.
That case study, plus the previous relationships I have had and my father's relationships have indicated to me the following reason as to why it is more likely to work between aspies as opposed to between aspies and NTs.
There are two main obstacles I am concerned about between NTs and aspies which I believe make a relationship between them considerably less likely to work under most circumstances.
The first issue is in the difference of how autistics process emotion compared to neurotypicals. According to some recent research, the difficulty for autistics in communicating with the outside world is traced to a single type of neuron, known as a mirror neuron.
In most primates, and in NTs, this neuron will automatically fire, both when someone performs an action, and when they see someone else perform the exact same action. This is also tied into emotions. Empathy, is the mirror neuron triggering the emotion center, based on seeing a certain facial or body expression. With autistics, these neurons do not fire as strongly when someone else performs an action, as when they do it. Hence, it's not really an issue of the autistic not seeing the social cues, they simply are blocked out by the brain as they do not have the hardware on hand to interpret them. Now, because of this deficiency, a hyper efficiency in various logic centers, be they linguistic or otherwise, tend to develop as a compensation. This primarily develops from an overuse of the logical centers to learn to process both physical actions and read social cues. This is also the source of the Autistic hyper attention to detail while often missing the big picture until trained to use tangents.
Now, as opposed to a neurotypical, who already has their emotional processing and responses preprogrammed and learned quickly thanks to the mirror neuron, autistics will generally have to process emotions through a logical center in order to have proper control over them. Hence the related anxiety disorders etc. Now since a neurotypical is more likely to snap to judgments emotionally based on pre-programming, and an autistic is having to take a more methodical approach to handle their emotions, coupled with a lack of knowledge about social cues (being behind the 8 ball so to speak) this can tend to lead to a very serious form of miscommunication where the NT tends to react emotionally, and negatively, most of the time, and the aspie going into a sort of rigid gridlock owing to their seeing no form of rational explanation for what is going on.
Now, at least between aspies, granted no two aspies may process their emotions using the same programming, but the same basic of thinking rationally before emotion as the ideal, is going to be common between two aspies. So hence, if they are truly being rational, they will at least try to present their cases rationally, and understand the reasoning behind their partner's position. This way, some sort of compromise is more likely to be reached, or at worst, the parties can agree to disagree until more info is obtained (provided the right language is used, such as non-violent communication techniques) rather than blowing out completely.
Now, here's where things get interesting. Before you read the rest of this post, I advise you read this link here:
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt123855.html
to understand my reasoning about autistics, and rational people in general, being at least to some degree super human.
Because of the conclusion I've reached about rationality, I automatically look for it in my partners. My ex, unfortunately, was intelligent, but irrational (and yes, I kept documented video clips of all our arguments just so we could go over them later and learn where we went wrong.) For the first couple of years of our relationship, I tried to appeal to her on a rational level, knowing that at the very least she was smart, so she should have been able to at least reply rationally, especially when I was wrong. And for a while, it worked.
Eventually, however, she started accusing me of cheating on her, based on the body language I was giving off. Now what's interesting is that I had always been giving off this body language, and my idiosyncrasies were explained as asperger's based according to The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome by Dr. Tony Atwood, which we had both gone over some time before to make sure that we were both aware of what I needed to work on. Anyway, I brought the book back up to illustrate common knowledge we both had. My ex proceeded to take the book from me, and throw it out of the room saying, and I quote, "I bought the book, I can do what I want with it," which had no relevance whatsoever to the issue at hand. I proceeded to try to give her more attention and do more stuff to correct, what I thought she was getting at, since when I asked her to clarify what I was doing wrong, she couldn't, but things did not improve. She proceeded to fight more emotionally and irrationally, employing every fallacy from ad hominem attacks clean through to the red herring fallacy. I pointed out that we should take a moment to calm down and speak rationally and that I agreed I had done something wrong and would correct it, but I wasn't clear as to what specifically I had done wrong, so she needed to tell me clearly and succinctly. She took this as an affront. Unfortunately, by the standards I had set, I had no choice but to view her as a student that I had to correct. As a result, I brought in a third party to try to explain things and to try to get some clarity. We managed to solve the "cheating" issue for all of one day in front of the therapist, and as soon as the session was over, my ex promptly accused me of cheating on her, and of being a pedophile by my own standards. We lasted another two years, in emotional love, but she wound up taking a subservient role in the relationship because it was the only thing we could agree on. We wound up discovering that BDSM of some mild form was the only way we could keep a sort of love interest, with her becoming the submissive and me the dom. Everything was fully consensual of course, and it did wind up having the benefit that outside of sex, my ex and I managed to maintain a rational front while dealing with the issues besetting us, but because she had no way of expressing her emotions without being subservient, it didn't work out in the end. We spent the last year of our relationship long distance, during which, she lied to me, saying we were still together when we were in fact not. When she finally broke it off with me, I was hurt not because of the breakup, but because of her lying the year previous. If she'd been honest with me, I probably would have agreed to the break off and we could have gone our separate ways amicably. But because of the lies, I still hate her to this day.
Anyway, my case study is basically an example of the hypothesis I'm suggesting. Without a non-violent, rational communication system, where people can act rationally, yet recognize the emotions biasing either end, the relationship is doomed to failure. Aspies seem to be better off at recognizing emotions rationally through self talk through sheer practise since early childhood, hence why I suspect aspie-aspie relationships would work better than aspie-NT relationships. Also, the whole aspie vs NT mentality would increase the respect between partners I suspect reinforcing the relationship another way.
09 Apr 2010, 9:54 pm
