Survey Regarding Autism and Romantic Relationships

Post Reply New Topic

If all I wanted was sex, then yes, I'd have all kinds of responses on a dating site or app. But for an actual relationship, especially one that would not involve sex, I have a hard time believing that would come easily to me, at least, on a dating site or app. I'm not going to try any time soon, though, because I'm not presently looking for a relationship and don't want anyone thinking I am.

Except you didn't do that, because doing that would require a neurotypical control group.
Autistics and neurotypicals were not the two groups you were trying to compare.

My plan is to make a survey for neurotypicals and then compare the results.

Is dating easier for neurotypicals compared to the autistic population?

My theory is that there is little difference between neurotypical and asperger women. But there will be a difference between neurotypical and asperger men. Which tells me two things.

1. If you're a woman, your dating life isn't as negatively impacted if you have an autism diagnosis. But if you're a man with autism, then your dating life will be negatively impacted.

2. Women with autism have it easier in the realm of dating compared to men with autism. This fact has already been proven if you go to my stats thread.

Why not just reuse the same survey for neurotypicals? That'd give you a like comparison.

I think it's pretty self-evident that the general population is collectively going to have an easier time achieving romantic relationships than a group of people whose neurological wiring puts them at a significant social disadvantage. You don't need to do a survey to figure that out, though a survey may help you get a sense of how stark the disparities are.

I would theorise that there'd be a minor to moderate difference between the collective dating successes of autistic women and neurotypical women, and a moderate to major difference between the collective dating successes of autistic men and neurotypical men.

It would have been better if you'd included sexual orientation in your questionnaire so you could compare the heterosexual experience to the homosexual experience, because for all you know, most of your female participants might have been homosexual while most of your male participants might have been heterosexual, which wouldn't give you a great point of comparison between heterosexual men and women.

And this may be pedantic, but I think it's always a good idea to directly say what you mean rather than accidentally exaggerating things, and with that, I'd slightly amend the conclusions you've reached from your survey (though your sample size isn't nearly big enough or selected for enough to come to reference for definitive conclusions). I'd also point out that both of your conclusions essentially say the same thing, so there's no need to repeat yourself.

1. Autistic women as an aggregate are at a lesser disadvantage than autistic men when it comes to dating and relationships.

Technically 'prove' is wrong. 'support', 'provide evidence', something like that.

I'm going to take the exact results with a grain of salt, because I do not think that WP (and perhaps the facebook group as well) is at all a random sample of autistic people.

I'm not going to argue against the result that more autistic men than women can not get a date at all. I - just like you and a lot of other people - would have expected that.

I'm pretty sure that autistic people struggle with dating is something that's supported by actual scientific studies too, even if I can't think of any that made this its main focus. I've certainly seen some about interpersonal relationships in a broader sense and one about attractiveness. And it's what pretty much anyone would expect.

I'm skeptic if your questionnaire can provide any evidence that the dating life of autistic women is not negatively impacted compared to NT women, even if your numbers - which you don't have yet - said that. I don't trust your sample to be representative for the autistic population or for type 1 autism but at best for autistic people who frequent online forums about autism.

Also:

It's 14%.
It may or may not be 12% with the newer number in the other thread.

Can you make a comparison between people who are non Autistic ND(Down Syndrome,ADHD,Cerebral Palsy Bipolar,intellectual disability,etc) to people with Autism?This makes me wonder if men with Down Syndrome,Cerebral Palsy,and intellectual disabilities have a better at dating than Aspie/Autistic men?From what I seen,if you're a Aspie man,your chance of ever dating is very,very low(unless you're actually rich).I wanna think it's not hopeless situation for Aspie men to date,but perhaps it is,and we shouldn't even bother wasting our time dating anymore and just allow everybody else(include Aspie women)to date,who actually have a chance.

A bit off topic

But if some scientists did some surveys on autism and dating, I think there would be more interesting research questions than whether autistics struggle compared to NTs. While there may be some point in gauging the extent of the struggle, it is pretty obvious that they do. There also are more interesting questions than whether men and women on the spectrum have more or less difficulties in getting dates. It is important to bear in mind if the results of a study apply to men, women or both. Therefore any properly done study with male and female participants would need to evaluate that anyway. However, the difference in difficulty with getting dates itself just seems to be something a few people on this forum have been obsessed with proving over the past years and not always for any deeper scientific reason.

Just one example of something I'd find more interesting, is which specific autism traits, comorbids, or side effects of autism traits correlate the most with dating difficulties. Because that's something that may be of some actual use in improving the situation - of course not for everyone, but maybe for a few people on an individual level, or by helping therapists understand what to work on with their patients. Autism isn't curable, but some comorbids are. Some autism traits may be improvable or possible to compensate for.

Of course that's more difficult to do than calculating some percentages and would require an actual scientific study. Some of the traits, comorbids and effects on other life areas would be correlated with each other and one would need to determine the effect of certain variables after correcting for the correlation between them. One would need a list of good candidate traits because blindly testing everything is of little use. Some of the traits would also need to be measured in a more sophisticated way than by self-evaluation.

Certainly not something anyone here could do on a whim. Just something I'd find interesting in principle.

Men with Down Syndrome probably have a very low chance of dating an NT woman. They may have a better chance of dating a woman with Downs Syndrome, though. There certainly have been relationships between two people with Downs Syndrome.




Meaning 63% have been in a relationship. That's lower than for the general population, but how is 63% very, very low?

I don't think this survey has the quality of an actual scientific study, but still. 63%. Not very, very low.

First of all only 59 men surveyed. That's even less than women on surveyed,so it's not accurate.Especially when considering that there's way more Aspie men than Aspie women. I believe it's way less than 63% of men the Asperger/Autism who have dated.I wouldn't be surprised it's more like 5-10% of men with Asperger/Autism who have dated before,which would the make chances indeed very low and hopeless,tho I hope it's no the case.

Secondly yes it's very low chance that someone with Down Syndrome will date a NT woman,however like you,there's more of a chance that a Down Syndrome man will date a Down Syndrome woman ,than a Aspie man will date a Aspie woman because their population is a lot more balanced.Our population on the other hand,has a male to female ratio around 4:1 and it doesn't even consider how many Aspie women are already in relationships with NT/other ND men or Aspie women who are aromatic/asexual. Maybe I being overly pessimistic,but Considering that almost no NT women,and also most other ND women will NOT waste their time and date aspie men.That leaving us no one left to date,thus make our dating prospects hopeless and fruitless.

Last edited by rick42 on 03 Apr 2020, 12:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don't think the survey is very meaningful either. Mainly because I don't trust the sample to be representative or the study to be conducted in a scientific way. Muse933277 has newer number in his other thread with a sample size of 73 men and 39% or 35% who never were in a relationship (depending on which question you look at, since he asked
one and the same question several times).

But it was you who asked him to do a survey with other disabilities as well. If you think the one for autism is completely useless, what makes you think the ones for other disabilities would be more useful or could be compared to the one for autism?

Losing your virginity while still underage to a man 20 years older than you because you were not equipped to deal with that kind of social situation isn't great. I wouldn't say you have proved that autistic women have an easier time just because your survey says they have had more sex.

I think perhaps at least part of why it seems like fewer men have dated than the survey indicates may be that men who are struggling to get a date are much more vocal about their situation than are men who have a girlfriend, wife, etc. So it seems like more men haven't dated because the ones who haven't are the ones you usually hear from.

I posted the survey in an autism group I was in and was getting absolutely blasted by hundreds of butt hurt feminazis and SJW's, it was kind of funny.

I think so too. This site is kinda like a support group & people who go to support groups in general tend to be the 1s who are in need of support.