Intellectual compatibility = utimate AS hurdle in dating?

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Find a reasonably sized cross-section of AS guys from all over the World. Say 10,000?

Interview them once a month for 10 years. The interviewer should be a shrink, but they should not know what the study is about. Neither should the AS guys. As far as anyone is concerned, this is just to help them cope with their problems.

So we have our blind test.

Listen to their problems and give them solutions. See if they followed solutions at the next interview.

Then do the same with 10,000 women with AS and see if there's a difference.



Or you can accept this forum as a reasonable substitute for an accurate scientific study. WP is quite likely the best source of autism information anywhere at this time.

About 3 years ago, I met a fellow Aspie who I feel I was intellectually compatible with. She was highly educated, voted Republican, liked to travel, and was a Christian. But as I was about to make a move, I froze up on an important question. So I asked for advice on here regarding how to ask her that question without making a complete fool of myself. But she happened to see the message, and came to the assumption that I couldn't communicate, when I was only trying to get advice on how to ask her directly without messing everything up. Even today, she still holds onto the assumption. She think that people have to be open and direct from the beginning, and if they struggle at first but improve, then they are trying to alter their thinking in order to intentionally deceive her.

Also, she was about a 2-hour drive from me at the time, and to her, that was too far away. But she was about to move, and there was the possibility that she could get a job that was closer to me, so I decided to wait to see what would happen. Because I was waiting, she accused me of having a weak personality and being "affected by her actions". Yet what else was I supposed to do when everything was conditional, and she absolutely refused to compromise on anything? She cared more about everything being her way or the highway, than about the feelings of others.

Still holding on to her rules, she ended up meeting someone else and marrying him.

Last edited by Tim_Tex on 14 Sep 2010, 8:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Does. Not. Compute. Does. Not. Compute. Error! Error! Bzzzzt! Bzzzz! Crack. Sparkle. Whirrrrrrrrr.......

How does it not compute?

I have to wonder though, how much of that is just aspie guys vs. how guys are cultured to think. Seems like culture pushes guys to be overconfident even if they have nothing, and, if your realistically self-aware you get people constantly harping on you to either toughen up or telling you that your not displaying enough confidence. I think women also are more prone to, at an early age, help give a clueless girl instruction - as a guy you may luckily make those sorts of friends though it may not happen until high school or college. I consider myself incredibly lucky because I did start running into and making those types of friends around 10th grade and I've steadily had a similar caliber of guy friends ever since.

This is a very interesting topic.

Funny how well that song describes things, cheesy or not.

I do think a spark only indicates potential, and might just be of friendship, or of a limited connection, perhaps based on similar circumstances. It doesn't automatically mean a perfect relationship. I think the fact that we connect with others so rarely makes it easy to over-estimate the potential, and ignore any downsides, when we eventually do.


It seems to be a rare thing, but I'm not sure, I really think aspies do miss most of the potential connections with other people. And although it might not appear to be the same for males and females, I think it is, it's just different steps in the process where the problems show up.

Male aspies don't tend to approach women, or if they do, they appear too passive, or too full-on. Female aspies either don't get approached at all, or if they do, they don't know how to progress things. Most people that we interact with actually take their signals from us, so either they don't see any, or they misinterpret what they do see. When we do manage to make friendships or relationships, it's probably accidental.

I've been analysing past interactions, to factor in AS, and I've ended up quite annoyed at how oblivious I've been, and how many near-misses at what could have been good friendships or relationships I completely messed up.

A little about me; as far as I can ascertain I have a high IQ (but I'm not a genius), I study psychological science at university but I'm also really into literature, art, and music - I write and perform original music as a hobby and a casual job. I think the potential dating pool you refer to could be good, although I try to keep my mind 100% open as I feel like going for a particular set of criteria will only reduce my chances and not increase them. I have met a few (not many) people before who are an intellectual match, and one or two who were more intellectually advanced. I know when this occurs not because of what it "feels" like but because of the content, speed, and complexity of our conversation. I suppose you could say I "feel" intellectually stimulated and challenged, if I were to describe it in terms of feelings.

I have once tried dating an aspie, but it definitely didn't work out. However, I am open to all possibilities - AS or NT. My first (and only) boyfriend was NT, but extremely intellectual.

Same here.



Agreed.



I think this is a fantastic insight, and I have noticed this myself in my daily life. As another person mentioned, I think I may be an outlier even within the Aspergers community. Maybe we are only attracted to people who are in our “pool” and maybe the issue many of us who have responded to this topic face is that our “pool” is just too tiny.



Agreed. Without any statistically valid measures, and considering the very small size of the population sample who post here, I don’t think we can make any assumptions from observational evidence.



I agreed, and I also think the spark is essential and does have to be there in the first place for there to be potential for a relationship. Of course, like you say, this is only “potential” and not a guarantee of a perfect relationship, but perhaps because even the spark only happens so rarely for us like you said it’s easy to over-estimate things.



I’ve begun doing a similar sort of analytic process myself, and it’s made me realize that I have also missed opportunities in the past, I think many times due to being undersensitive to body language signals, and not understanding or registering my own emotional reactions.

Whew! Long response. There were so many good and interesting points raised unfortunately I wasn't able to get to them all..

From what I can surmise so far by reading the responses, I think that this problem does appear to be shared by others. Several theories expounded here stand out to me;

1. that we are outliers and our potential dating and attraction pool is simply really small.
2. that one of the symptoms of AS itself is the inability to "connect" to other people, and logically this would apply in a relationship context.
3. We tend to feel emotions only in extremes - so either we feel nothing at all, which occurs most of the time and thus no "spark", or we feel something very very strongly, so we tend to go overboard with our attachment to that person, a.k.a. "bushfire". I certainly relate to this regarding the very small number of people I have been attracted to in the past.
4. We do actually feel that initial connection with other people to the same extent as NT's, but due to our inability to read body language or recognize our own emotions, we actually don't even realize it's there. This hypothesis would be good if it were true, as it would be easier to try and do something about it via social training.

Have I missed anything?

Thank you. I will refrain from messing up your thread any further sunshower.



These pretty much all apply to me to varying degrees. A good list.

"Intellectual compatibility" is somewhat ambiguous in the context of emotional relationships. If you are referring to intellectual parity, that isn't necessarily an issue for me - IQ and EQ are interchangeable as far as I'm concerned, so I believe I could be quite happy with a woman of average intelligence if she were especially sweet and forward with herself.

On the other hand, I've known women who were quite cerebral, but seemed to have no substance to them - passionless creatures who lived in drafty mental corridors of dry word-splicing and ideological minutiae.

As long as a woman is curious and can appreciate the world around her, it doesn't really matter to me if her technical understanding is shallow or profound. I might enjoy a deep argument, but the enjoyment would only come from the spirit of adventure and curiosity animating it - there would be no pleasure if it was purely a matter of punctilio.

So parity is far less important than character.

I just wanted to come back and mention that this is a really good point. Then again my take is that 'intelligence' is relative to what kind of information that its holding. I've met girls who had likely 120-130 IQs who were twits, I've met girls around the 100 range who I could talk to about almost anything and who had their heads on straighter than most people I knew. This is one of those things that I've realized needed to come down from my list, its one of those areas where paper and reality just weren't meeting. I think the key thing - most of us really want someone who has wisdom, while we're used to thinking that it more often comes with high IQ it doesn't necessarily need to.

Right, for most Aspie men it would be hard finding a hot woman who is also a junior high dropout...

I probably should have been clearer regarding what I referred to when I talked about "intellectual connection". I wasn't solely referring to IQ, I was referring to having a 'mental' connection as a whole (and sometimes a matching IQ can be a part of the whole, sometimes not). I think it got muddled up along the way.

When I discussed 'intellectual connection', I was talking about the connection you feel when you feel as though you're on the same plane mentally speaking, almost like you seem the same 'mental language' if you will...

Yes, I have met some men like that, they seem to be the ones who view an intelligent woman as either a threat, an impossibility, or an intriguing toy. I think of intelligence as having both a wide and a deep view of the world, and an awareness that there are always things to learn. An intellect doesn't guarantee an open mind, or a good character.


Good words - passion and curiosity.

I don't think intellectual compatibility is about IQ, and definitely not technical understanding. It's about being able to exchange passion and curiosity on a wide range of subjects, regardless of the topic; about someone whose interest and views on life add to your experience, and vice versa. It's about being able to see and share similarities, and about being able to see and share differences, and it's about wanting to share them.

Whether it's intellectual, emotional, spiritual, perhaps it's about comfort and enjoyment in the similarities, and challenge and interest, rather than threat or disinterest, in the differences.

It could also be about humour, less about whether you see a funny side to life, and more about whether you see the same funny side. I have definitely found that compatible humour lights a spark.

Yeah, I got from your OP that you simply meant people who are on the same wavelength. I thought Sacrip had a good point though, or at least a good segway into another point. I didn't say it above but I should probably clarify myself; for a while I thought that, since I tend to be a nerd, that I should be looking for a nerd. The trouble there, nerds/braniacs, even with the same interests, there's a lot of potential dissonance over other things and I'm finding that I'd almost rather perhaps be with someone who's...say...more NT'ish but with the same values. Its not to say that I couldn't end up with or be happy with a nerd, just that I notice a tendency toward rigidity or having some really strong/unusual viewpoints, even its stuff that I can overlook at first I know that people's beliefs weave through their entire reality and eventually it'll make its presence known in the relationship.

I would just like to agree with this.


We may be good at being superficially socially adaptive.
I wonder whether aspie men who do acquire social adaptations might do so based on genuine understanding and therefore be more successful at it.

It probably varies from person to person, and might relate to whether that person had a sympathetic female role model. I certainly didn't - most of my social adaptations are based on the way men interact with each other, and with women, in the work environment. It's only recently that I've realised how little social aptitude I have in other situations.