What do Aspies need from relationships?

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I just thought of some things that may make it a little easier for you to understand.

1) You can relate to the excitement and sense of accomplishment from figuring out something that nobody else has been able to, right? If you can't, maybe you just don't have any competitive streak at all. But there are very certainly many women who can relate to this. In fact, in some sense you have to have this to be a scientist.

2) This either requires that A) you are better at something (even if it's just thinking of a problem), B) you are lucky, or C) just that you work harder than everyone else. Those who are smart but not exceptionally so hope for B) or C), but truly exceptional scientists are those who can do A).

3) Can you at least relate to the value of sometimes having a partner in life who is strong where you are weak? And doesn't it follow that if everyone in your life is strong where you are strong, either they will be unable of compensating for your weaknesses, or they will be so strong in everything they will have no use for you?

Sorry for my long-winded explanations, but I've known my share of women whose feelings about certain things baffle me, so when the shoe is on the other foot I feel a need to do my part to clarify.

Patients is a big one for me. Acceptance, similar views, and real.

For me I dont care what someone is as long as I know it up front and am given the choice to take it or leave it. I have to be able to accept someone for what they are and not feel deceived later if they pan out differently. I couldnt imagine being with someone who wasnt patient and excepting, im my opinion its a must have.

Yes, it is true there is always going to be someone better than you at your pet thing, if not now, before long. You may hide enough to avoid ever having to see them, but that doesn't change the reality.

I've been the best in the world at things before, and I do mean that literally. I completely get the thrill. But when that happens, you have a choice about what to do with it -- enjoy it for what it is, and get on with doing fulfilling things, or spend your time and energy anxiously trying desperately to stay on top against all comers, knowing that sooner or later one is going to outstrip you and driving yourself into anxious fits about it.

The choices aren't some male/female thing. They're a maturity/immaturity thing. You're not even talking about being the best at your pet thing; you're talking about avoiding those better than you or as good as you so you can play a pretend game about being the best.



Ah, so you agree with me. It's not the conversation between equals that has anything competitive to it at all. It's only if someone insists on getting all butthurt about their pretend game being threatened that there's competition.



Of course they can, but that has nothing to do with what I said. They'd still be better yet by associating with the best in a positive way (not a preserve-my-pretentions way).



Who on earth are you talking about? The constant gifts thing is nearly always something men invent, not something women want.



Check out the superhuman expectations of what it means to be feminine drilled into girls sometime.

Growing up means identifying the flaws in this stuff for what they are and choosing a more reasoned life.



The mental reprogramming on your part is a growing-up thing, nothing more. Everyone has to do a lot of that to attain true adulthood.

Women have been trying everything they can think of for decades to yield having leadership and management in personal relationships thrust upon them. There's endless books, studies, and peer-reviewed journal articles on just that. They're not keeping you from having it.

Um, if women are supposed to help you grow in the interpersonal sphere, what are you doing to help women grow in, say, the STEM spheres?

Sure, been there, done that, more than once. It is my job, after all. And it is a high like no other.

The fact that it is so great is an excellent motivation not to poison it by doing a number on yourself trying to deny reality.



Sure. That has nothing to do with getting huffy and threatened when you realize someone is your equal at something though.



Where did the "everyone" come in? Seriously?



Yeah, I've heard this one before, and some other women and I remarked on it on another thread. Yes, I get this fear that men have. I understand it.

I also think it's a stupid relic of a bygone fantasy era (not even a bygone era that ever really existed).

More and more women out there (and in here on this board too) are wanting men in their lives only for the pleasure of their company, not to "use" them for something. Of course, that means the man's company is going to have to be a pleasure in order for such women to choose him.

Yes, I know a lot of men are terrified by that. They don't want a relationship of mutual pleasure. They want to think they can purchase their pleasure somehow and thus get around having to be a pleasure to be around themselves. I get it.

I'm also bored with the whole double-standards thing that men so often try to create in relationships, as I remarked in my first comment in this thread.

For anyone who is interested, there are quite a few lead scientists, heads of research labs, thesis advisors, and so on who wish guys would get over thinking they can make this kind of trade-off and expect people to put up with it. You may think you have the chops at your specialty to pull off skipping out on the basic people skills, but almost no one else is going to agree with you.

Sorry dudes, but the internet was your downfall. Six and a half billion people on the planet gives you at least a hundred million in the scary-smart-ultra-genius category, and the percentage of those being artificially denied access to education by in-groups trying to hoard opportunities to themselves is plummeting. People are giving away advanced educations free on the internet.

You ain't that special. The days of a dozen people worldwide who could understand WTF Newton was getting at are gone forever. Accept and move on.

This trade-off is a spectrum. While few people might agree with a scientist having absolutely atrocious people skills being OK, there are few scientists (male or female) who will be as good with their people skills as people for whom that is their strength.

And I find it very, very weird to be told by a (supposed at least) aspie that ability in science, hell ability in ANYTHING should not be able to replace people skills.

But you are right, that the more globalized talent pool has change the face of science, to the detriment of those (such as many aspies) who would much prefer to be a lone wolf at the top than have to work in groups. Again, to hear you saying this makes you sound less like an aspie and more just like a garden variety high-powered intellectual. Either that, or you are an aspie who (possibly as a result of your gender) was forced to learn people skills, and now has a sort of reverse elitism about it. Which ironically is somewhat a demonstration of bad people (or at least emotional) skills, in that it seems that energy would better be channeled into making discoveries than ranting about colleagues' personalities.

Oh an also, while the number of scientists has increased, so has the need for expertise in these fields. So I'm not sure that it's THAT much more competitive than it always was.

But don't you agree that seeking this excitement in itself implies competition? If one person is the first to figure something out, then everyone else is (by definition) NOT the first one. It doesn't need to be gender-based competition. It doesn't even need to be individual-level competition--it can be group-against-group competition or even a scientists against "those muggles who don't even know WTF an atomic orbital is" competition.





WTF? Men don't want a relationship of mutual pleasure? I've never heard that one.

It's more like they don't want it to turn into a situation where both partners have the same strengths and the same faults and reflect them in a metaphorical mirror back at each other.

Division of labor and responsibility is often a beneficial thing. One of my best friends from high school now works at the financial department at Google. He once said to me that his company told him "your job is to support the computer people as they develop their great ideas". In other words, people like him were supposed to take care of the financial stuff so that the computer programmers and such could devote their time to making the company product great. And my friend didn't take this as an insult, like "why should I work to serve THOSE guys", he would much rather be doing that than the tech stuff. So, both groups benefit each other.

So essentially, the more one devotes himself or herself to scientific pursuits, one almost inevitably has to neglect some other areas of life. And having autism, the more severe it gets, means those areas get even more neglected. That's why a lot of us scientist guys look for women who are more drawn to the people-centered, emotional side of things. Can we be kind and friendly? Of course! But do we want to be the person in our life who is the one everyone turns to for emotional strength and natural ability? No! Those programmers at Google probably know enough to balance a financial spreadsheet, and I bet one of those financial analysts knows a bit about computer code, but that's not the point.

I get that us men have somewhat of a "pass" to rule the world without ever having to grow up. But if women who want to succeed in traditionally male-dominated fields just whine about immature men and their social cluelessness (which is probably closely seconded by their own, particularly if they're aspies), this doesn't get to the root of the issue, which is that whoever is "on top" in the sciences will probably be lacking in that area, and those who sacrifice being on top in favor of trying to be emotionally and intellectually gifted will always be to some degree be indebted both to the ruthless innovators and the natural empathizers, no matter what.

My mom read a book about something called the "double bind" that someone noticed lots of girls facing these days. Essentially, girls are being told that they are supposed to be both tough, ambitious, power-seeking, etc. and also sweet, nurturing, supportive, etc at the same time. Well, the male version is that we're supposed to always treat women as equals and never be threatened by their capability, yet also treat them as ladies who need to be cherished and protected. The fact that it's hard to be strong at everything hasn't changed, it's just that it's now looked at as more of a problem to be good at one thing at the expense of another. Before it was good enough to establish dominance in one area and look to others for the rest, now it's just an all-out war of insecurities and fault finding.

Well of course -- you're agreeing with me there. You may be assuming we're talking about politician-level people skills, but I'm not, at least. I'm talking about sufficient people skills to be competent at your job. The whole point is that there's still a ready supply of guys who think they don't even need that much. Those who employ them are pretty fed up.



You shouldn't -- it's really no mystery that no one wants to work with a jerk.



ROFL. Somebody doesn't like hearing the truth. You don't really expect a scientist to be impressed by your attempt at armchair psychology, do you?



Oh, well, your opinion is your opinion, and you're welcome to it. The facts aren't that hard to find if you want them.

Last edited by HH on 13 Nov 2009, 8:03 am, edited 1 time in total.

No, of course not. Look, I understand that you subscribe to a dominance-based view of human interaction. You've described that pretty clearly several times. I understand that you're trying to get me to understand what that's like. I already do. I know the ways it hurts you. I also know there are other ways to live.

That dominance-based view winds up wasting a lot of time and mental energy. When you talk about taking pride and having confidence in your abilities, I'm all for it. There's plenty there to value. But the dominance model tells you the lie that you shouldn't value your actual capabilities, but the pretense that you are "best" at something even when you aren't. Which of course means you have to worry about others seeing through the pretense, and so on. Placing real value on your real capabilities, whatever they are, can save you a whole lot of fuss and worry, and other people will respect it more, not less.



You haven't been paying attention much then. Look around -- just a quick scan of the internet even will show you an endless supply of men trying to figure out how to get what they want without having to actually be nice to women. They're always looking to make tradeoffs -- if I buy her dinner, I don't actually have to be nice to her. If I bring home a good paycheck (even though she does too), I don't actually have to be pleasant to be around. You brought up one yourself -- men shove presents at women who don't want them in the hopes that can buy them out of actually being fun to have around.

There are plenty of books on the topic.



Who are you even talking about? Nice strawman. Don't you even know the basic logical fallacies?



No, it's only that if you don't grasp that there are more models of human interaction than those based on dominance. You've gone off the deep end of silly here.

I worry that I might be uncompromising, or that I could become uncompromising if I ever do eventually come out of living alone. I have what I call a "short list", a list of things that I am not willing to compromise on. Out of fairness and necessity the list is/will be short. Things not on the list are the many obvious things which are standard for any relationship, and which are taken as givens. Some of the things on this list are dogs and smoking.

I have given a lot of thought to what attracts me, and the reasons for why I have felt attracted in the handful of instances for which this has occurred. I have felt attraction in response to women who obviously takes good care of themselves. This includes being clean, dressing nice and smelling nice or having no smell. Assertiveness and a little bit of selfishness is good too. I don't respond well to the self-made martyrs.

Smoking is bad. After being exposed to the 1% or so of what a smoker gets, secondhand, I am very uncomfortable, which leads me to believe that this must be harder than hell on a person. A woman I used to have cut my hair went from "yeah, I'd do her" to "eh, maybe not" in about a decade because she smokes and this made her haggard looking, and every time I saw her she would be sick with some kind of pneumonia. When people enter relationships they must remember that the other person has to live with whatever they do to themselves, and it's disgusting. If she doesn't give a rat's @$$ about herself, how can I expect her to care about me or any children we may eventually have?

I don't like dogs and this is something I would be very resistant to compromising on unless we had separate residences and she puts on fresh clothes before coming over. There's a reason apartments generally forbid keeping dogs and cats, and this is because the apartments' owners don't want the floors destroyed by poop and pee. Even if a dog is trained perfectly, there's slobber, body odor and hair that gets all over, and poop residue that they'll track in from the yard. I like the freedom of being able to walk around in my own yard without stepping in something, too. The idea of walking, sitting and sleeping in small amounts of poop, hair and dog body fluid residue or having it possibly on a wife's clothes is a huge turnoff for me. I dunno, some people might be into this sort of thing, whatever floats their boats, but it's not for me.

I need companionship. I need someone to talk to and share my feelings with. I need someone to hug. I need someone who I can trust who won't let me down. I need someone who values me for who I am.

Someone to cover me when I'm reloading

I would like her to be easy to talk to, but not talk all the time, but who can start conversations and keep conversations going. I like her to have a good sence of humour, and laughs at the same things as me, like slapstick, and some sarcasm. Someone who likes some of the same TV programmes and films as me. I like, fantasy, sci fi, action, adventure. Someone who likes dancing to dance, pop, house, rock sort of music. I would like her to be kind and honest.

This stuff might just apply to me personally, but I think I've found that the most important things are as follows:

1. Someone who won't expect to interrupt my schedule. I *need* to do certain things every day, and someone who wants me to skip things or change things just for him would really frustrate me.

2. Someone that can understand that just because I might not want to be touched or cuddled constantly doesn't mean I don't like him.

3. Someone who either shares or respects my interests.

4. Someone who won't try to "fix me" by making me go out to social places like parties, crowded restaurants or bars.

5. Someone who isn't loud. Someone who talks a lot is okay, as long as he has a quiet tone. Loud voices are just... really uncomfortable(?).