9 Guidelines For Dating With Asperger's

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"Don’t define yourself by Asperger’s. Because if you do, you’re going to be an empty freaking hole that no one wants to talk to. Ever."

That's extremely defeatist and basically hiding your condition to get something. I find that very disingenuous, to say the least. And you don't offer a real solution to the situation, either.

"They hate women because women won’t have sex with them, and women won’t have sex with them because they don’t have anything to offer. You do not deserve sex for existing."

But the 94% of neurotypical men do because they can "properly" hit on women (often with lies and nonsense) or because they have material things, money, etc. ? I say, "Nonsense!" I *do* deserve sex; I'm not a friggin' rock....

Dating has been hell for me all my life. I’ve always attracted abusive men. Im leaving a five year relationship now where I was constantly called the r- word and put down over my lack of social skills. I was suicidal at one point but finally found it in me to leave. I have never met a genuine man who doesn’t cheat or isn’t abusive. I’ve been told I’m attractive but I’m very quiet and I think because of that it’s been harder to find a man who values me for who I am. The ex I’m leaving now told me I don’t know how to hold a conversation and that he was only with me because he felt sorry for me. It was just hell listening to the things that man said to me especially knowing he was insulting symptoms of a condition I never asked or wanted to be born with. I never understood why he chose to be with me if he looked down on me so much. He was very social and most people like him-he never had trouble socially so we were complete opposites. I’m scared to ever open up to a man again because I’m scared once he gets to know me I’ll be attacked and insulted again.

Great article on a super tough & complex topic, thank you @gwenkansen !
So many great advices, I wish I had read that when I was much younger

Another thing I have learned here, incidentally: as late self-diagnosed, I was hesitating about looking for more interactions with other people on the spectrum. I realized by reading the comments on this article (a random, hence probably more representative than other "curated" content) that "we ASD" are a tough crowd to satisfy/talk to... And I know I sound as naive as when I was trying to figure out dating "strategies", but the conclusion is the same: for dating AND socializing, even though being ASD makes me "special", this is probably not something to display forward about myself, nor look for in other potential "matches". That is not what defines me (if "me" can/must be defined), and it will not be what matters the most in the person I am meeting/talking with. This article explained that too, thanks again.

As an autistic man, I refuse to call myself after that Nazi war criminal, Dr. Hans Asperger, I don't care if he also discovered hamburgers, I am autistic, damn it. Wait, what was I saying? Oh yeah, I was talking about relationships.

Okay, as an autistic man who has been married and divorced, I want to add my two cents. I did not have my first sexual experience until I was 30 years old. I then ended up marrying and having a child with the very first woman I had sex with, and this was probably a mistake. Like the writer of this article said, you don't want to be with someone who is gonna want to change you, to try to make you stop acting like an autistic person, and my ex-wife, thought she could if she was just mean and stubborn enough.

Now some of her stubbornness was helpful. She pushed me to try to develop myself professionally, and I had some small amount of success in that regard that I otherwise would not have had, but it wasn't sustainable. I was miserable, depressed, and the person I was becoming was someone I did not want to be.

After the marriage ended, I found myself in a few other relationships. I wouldn't say that any of those relationships were bad, nor was I miserable in any of them, but I wasn't compatible with any of my partners the way I needed to be and a good part of that was because of my disability. That said, I learned from each and every one of my relationships, and I think each one of them made me a little better at being in relationships, but the biggest lesson I learned is that for a relationship to work, it has to be with someone who is compatible with you. You can both be really good people and not be good for each other. On the flip side, you can both be complete narcissists, and be the perfect couple, like Bonnie and Clyde. Now I am not saying you should go find someone to go rob banks with, but if bank robbery was your thing...well there is a reason Clyde and Bonnie got so well along together. You have to find your own thing, your own set of values, and find someone who is a good match for you. Neither of you has to be perfect, you just have to fit, but you don't find out if you fit or not, until you try.

I do take one issue with what gwenkassen said, sorry Gwen, but I don't think people on the spectrum are incapable of empathy. In fact, I have met very few autistic people who were narcists. I empathize all the time with people all the time when their problems are communicated to me in a medium that I understan. They don't even have to be people that I know, or even have to actually exist for me to care deeply about them, and I think this is largely true of most autistic people, just talk to any of us after a natural disaster, and how we process the horrors of the event. Autistic people, I find, are often deeply empathetic, under the right circumstances, it is why we are not out robbing banks. Sorry Gwen, though I suspect you didn't actually mean that autistic people don't feel empathy, but that it is often hard for us to show empathy, which is also true.

A few small pieces of advice. Find something that is truly special about yourself, and find ways to showcase it, and you will have more success with dating. My father once told me that guys think women all like men who like sports, but this wasn't actually true of most women. Guys just think that because most guys like sports, so the guys we tend to like tend to be guys who are really good at sports, and so we mistakenly think that girls all want to date guys who are good at sports. In reality, he would say, most girls like guys who can make music, and in my experience working on a college campus, generally the student athletes have one or two girls pining after them, but the guy who sits out on the quad and plays guitar, that guy has a lot of girls interested in him.

If you are not good at music, be the guy who makes them laugh. If you can't make them laugh or play an instrument...find something else. If you are an autistic girl looking for a guy, you don't have to be the prettiest girl on campus, you just have to be someone who is fun to hang out with, and by fun I don't mean sexually easy, though if that is your thing, that is fine too, just be careful.

These are just my observations, sorry I wrote an article in response to an article. Keeping things simple is not my strong point.

All very good points, I think for me I’m trying my best not to overshare too much especially on social media cause I’ve found with other people (myself included) that if someone you’re talking to views your social media accounts they can prejudge you before even getting to know you lol. Dating is definitely a lot tougher now a days, but this article was very helpful in terms of what to be mindful of next time I meet someone new, thank you very much.