Majority of autistuc men dont have a girlfriend?

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Yeah Karma eventually hits these kids who relied too much on their looks.

I suppose it's funny in a way because I feel a bit of a disconnect when I hear women talk about not understanding other women. Since, I've never really had that issue but I've met plenty of women who have mentioned this, so I sort of feel like I should understand where they're coming from but I just don't. I feel disconnected because of my lack of disconnection. Oh the irony.

I sort of feel like I'm on the outside of both and everyone's just having a debate and I'm taking notes.

"Men are confusing"

Me, notepad ready: Oh? From a sociology perspective I'm intrigued.

"Women are baffling"

Me: Interesting. Continue. I wonder how this will compare to my other notes.

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Although it should be noted that almost everyone I've clicked with has been either ND and / or LGBT in some capacity. At this point it's more surprising when they're not.

In my experience people are surprising. Gender withstanding.

I think I tend to have a harder time understanding men because they are socialized to be more guarded when it comes to expressing their emotions whereas women are often more open about that stuff. Perhaps relatedly, I also struggled to know what men’s motivations were concerning L&D at different points and to varying degrees.

With that being said, I was only speaking in general terms. I think people can be difficult to understand for any number of reasons. In person, people have trouble understanding me because I’m extremely shy and tend to have a flat affect. I don’t usually express much emotion unless I’m really comfortable with someone or it’s an extreme situation.

i suppose the same things that tend to make driving a challenge for me also make socializing a challenge for me, namely attention span, processing speed, multithreading ability or lack thereof. both of those tasks are like juggling too many balls at once for me.

I relate to juggling too many balls at once. I'm not good at joining in a group conversation. I even miss the beat when someone else has finished talking and it's okay to chime in, so I could only do it by interrupting. But in a one on one conversation I can do okay if I am laser focused, although there are still several things going on at once, like both listening and formulating something to say, making proper facial expressions etc. But sometimes if it's a good conversation with someone I know fairly well it just happens, somewhat naturally. But I'm still on my toes.

I was referring to people I don't know well, who don't express their emotions to me. The teenaged girl in famimalemon's post confuses me, and if I had witnessed her behave that way in high school I wouldn't have known what to make of it either. I've never been good with inference.

I think it's because girls and women supposedly experience a wider range of emotions than men, and they're known to be more nuanced in their thinking. I don't know if that's true but that's what I always hear. I don't understand many emotions because of Alexithymia. When I hear about strange behaviour from women it baffles me because the possibilities seem endless as to their motivation, whereas with men the choices seem to be more basic.

Overall I find everyone confusing but I guess I just feel more self-conscious about my difficulties understanding NT women.

I’ve experienced plenty of strange, one-off behavior from men I don’t know well that baffles me, but I won’t go into that here.

I think the sexes are equally complex in their emotions and motivations. I just tend to have a harder time understanding men due to socialization and primarily having female friends as I was growing up.

The current evidence we have appears to demonstrate that men and women experience a similar range of emotion, but there are different societal expectations concerning what is or isn’t acceptable for both, especially when it comes to expression, not that people always fit into established gender norms.

https://www.verywellmind.com/women-are- ... ds-5207762

Given that different emotions are deemed acceptable/unacceptable for men and women, it seems like they often present themselves as completely different emotions or are repressed altogether. In my opinion, that adds another layer of complexity to human emotions, behavior, interactions, and relationships.

Hell yeah. I'm not suggesting men can't be baffling, or that all women are a problem. Women can still be great people whether I understand them or not.

I feel more awkward around women than men, because I assume they expect me to act and think like them but I generally don't. In contrast, most men don't expect me to act like a man, so I don't feel the same type of pressure.

I'm meeting a bunch of people today and I'm much more worried about the women because I never know what to talk to women about. They're more threatening to me somehow because I always feel the disconnect like I'm a different species. I don't get that feeling with men. Chances are the women will be lovely and kind and everything will be fine, but I still worry about it quite a bit. It's likely related to my PTSD and self-shaming. I usually convince myself I'm not good enough to fit in or be one of the women.




Good point.

Come to think of it, at my current job, the employees I've been closest with through the years have been mostly female.

I am in a similar boat as you. I don't fit a lot of the gender stereotypes for my gender. So perhaps that's why I gravitate toward the opposite gender.

I don't doubt that, I would point out that there's no guarantee that even with changes to society that it would be the same set of emotions or the same expression of them.

If you have the inability to form normal friendships with people and maintaining that connection short or long term, it's probably safe to say it's infinitely harder to get and keep a romantic or sexual relationship.

Personally, i've not been looking or interested in one because I can't think of being in that situation as it just seems so alien / surreal, plus having no real friends makes it less of an issue imo, and just a couple of co-workers that I have very brief conversations with a couple of days a week.

this is a fair point. Even Nuerotypical males find it hard to strike up a conversation with other males. it's an order of magnitude harder to strike up a conversation with females and then when you advertise your intentions as romantic it becomes an exercise in humiliation.

Indeed. I, on the other hand, am the opposite. My looks were nothing special in 8th grade. Yet as I got older, I grew into my looks (Unfortunately though, my good looks haven't gotten me much. Being on the spectrum is an instant turn off for the vast majority of the population)

Well-said. Advertising our romantic intentions can be an excercise in humiliation. I remember it being said on this forum once "A man is afraid a woman he asks out will laugh at him. A woman, on the other hand, is afraid a man she goes on a date with will kill her."

While it is true us men don't really have to fear getting killed by a woman we ask out, our self-esteem can certainly get killed if we get rejected the vast majority of the time.

Even if getting our self-esteem killed isn't as severe as really getting killed, low self-esteem is still debilitating.

In fact, there have been times I was so humiliated, I would have rather been dead.

Women may also have concerns about being humiliated through rejection, misunderstandings, harassment, and even date rape just to name a few things. Many of us struggle with self-esteem issues and low confidence due to experiencing this and other stuff.