Oh, how I love this "dating game" baloney

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Okay, first off, let me apologize in advance if this offends the ladies here. I'm pretty sure it shouldn't, but for obvious reasons, I never know what's going to offend people and what isn't.

There is something that just digs under my skin, and it keeps cropping up in a relationship between two people I'm close to.

The guy is a good pal of mine... okay, he's a great pal. He doesn't belittle me for having Asperger's - in fact, we hang out a whole heck of a lot and he's very selfless about picking me up from my house all the time so we can watch movies and stuff.
His fiancée is a wonderful person too, but she's a bit on the high-maintenance side. Not in the way most people think of high-maintenance women, i.e. not "expensive gifts" h-m, but "gets angry really easily and is constantly pulling the 'silent treatment' mind games on her fiancé" h-m.
I may be able to relate to the concept of wishing that everybody knew why I was upset without me having to tell them, but the reality is it's just not the way humans work. If there's a problem, and the guy can't figure out what the problem is, why can't his girlfriend just tell him? Or, speaking from experience, is it something that's just really difficult to put into words, and "If you don't know why I'm mad at you, I'm certainly not going to tell you" is just an easy way of getting out of trying to verbalize conflicting emotions?

I'm not asking what my pal can do to keep his relationship from falling apart - they seem to manage to patch things up eventually every time something like this happens anyway - rather, I'm simply venting, terrified that if by some miracle I finally manage to get into a relationship after a whole life of this horrendous loneliness, that I'll offend my girl through another one of my patented social faux pas. Given that I'm an Aspie, it's sure to happen somewhere down the road. I'm just worried to death that saying the wrong thing once will only lead to me saying the wrong thing again in trying to patch it up, and then -poof- there goes a girlfriend it took me my whole life to get.

I mean, these girls' NT boyfriends have enough trouble trying to figure out what the junk they're referring to. NT!
It seems to me an Aspie wouldn't have a chance in hell!

There are, admittedly, way too many things in this world that I let get to me, but what real-l-ly cooks my goose are things that cause me the kind of anxiety that keeps me from initiating a conversation with a girl. Yes, I know my lack of courage is my own malfunction, but it certainly doesn't need extra fuel. To me, any concept that feeds this "dating game" crap is -next to- unforgivable.

Last edited by kenisu3000 on 21 Dec 2009, 4:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The problem with many women is that they're unable to translate their emotions into logic. The only option we have is trying to do it in their place while at the same time abandoning logic and giving them emotional support in our communication towards them. I'm still training my skills in that area but without training you'll never get there....

Some people are just crap at communicating no matter who they are but a lot of people aren't. You just have to be as open as you can with someone and hope to heck that it encourages them to do the same which I find it does more often than not.

Opening up to others definitely helps social interaction, however in matters of romance it may have the oposite effect if you are too open. You need some mystery around you for most women to stay interested...

Well I'm a woman (at least biologically) and I personally prefer openess to mystery becaue the more I know about my partner, the more comfortable I am with them and the more I want to be with them. I dunno if American girls are different.

I'm Belgian so I can't judge American women either.

In my experience NT women prefer men who are mysterious and showing only little emotions to men who are open and emotional.

Yes, this is not a good way to be, but NT women shoudn't be singled out as the only gender that does this.

Men are possibly even worse at just bottling up and keeping quiet about something that upsets them. Hey, for men it is *so* common it is regarded as normal! A trait to be cultivated. We're brought up to believe it's more repulsive for a man to show emotion that would be regarded as nornal for a woman. But I'm not upset about it at all. Honest. I don't feel anything, really, I'm not bothered, just a bit tired, that's all. Why doesn't anyone believe me?

On the contrary, the stereotypical Latin/Mediteranean man, expressive and overly emotional (to our north european view) is very desirable to many NT women. Do you really think most NT women would prefer Mr Spock?

I guess that's why many women tend to perceive emotional men as whimps.



Maybe if they're also empathic. In my case (I am quite expressive and emotional but not empathic) it seems to be rather a turn-off.



No. They go for James Bond.

No they don't.

My first girlfriend did this, whenever there was something wrong she never told me. I knew she was upset about something but never knew what.

After we broke up we got talking again and I asked why she did that, and she just said "you should have asked more"... And the funny thing is, she got all angry with me over not fixing the problems... Expecting me to, like, read her mind and know exactly what's wrong.

Also, during the time we were going out, I asked a friend for help on this, and she said I should have asked "what have I done wrong?" instead of "what's wrong?"... Don't see why...

Another stupid social thing that makes no sense at all.

It's called empathy. Most NT men have at least some degree of empathy. Us AS people don't.



The less you expect women to make sense, the more likely you'll get a hang of it

I don't think the empathy thing was the problem though, because I could tell she was upset because of her body language, how she talked, etc, but there is no way of knowing the exact problem without actually being told is there? Ergo, I'd say that was more her fault than mine.

My last girlfriend just broke up with me a week ago for precisely the same reason. I noticed that something was wrong by the way she behaved, but I couldn't pinpoint exactly what was going on and when I asked her what was wrong she kept saying that everything was OK... Yet, she kept getting more and more distant nevertheless. So I begged her to talk, but the more I begged to talk the less she was actually willing to talk. It went on like this for a month and pretty much every weekend we saw each other there was a fight because we kept growing further apart even though she still didn't want to talk and I kept pushing her to talk nevertheless precisely because I felt her slowly slipping away from me... When we both were near a nervous breakdown, she eventually made an end to our relationship and I picked up my stuff at her appartment a few days ago.

Now, after discussing this with some female friends of mine I came to realise that what I SHOULD have done was ignore her when she got more distant and let her crawl inside her shell until she feels all lonely there and she'll come talking with me spontaneously. Apparently that would have let the steam out of everything and an empathic person would have felt how to act in this situation instinctively, whereas I just did what made most sense logically at the time...

Simple emotions are easy to overcome by logic. Complex emotions are much harder to grasp without any empathy.

Wow now THAT is confusing! I still don't see why she didn't just say what was wrong, though, TBH.

It's because she felt that something was wrong but she couldn't place her emotion well enough to put it into words. Imagine you're putting something you've never tasted before in your mouth and the taste doesn't resemble anything you've felt before. If people ask you what it tastes like, you say you don't know. You do know whether you like the taste or not, but you don't know what it tastes like.

Especially women sometimes experience the same thing emotionally : they experience a whole array of complex feelings and they can't really comprehend which feeling has which origin. They just feel a lot of good and bad feelings all mixed up. Because such a situation is terribly confusing, someone who's already a bit uncomfortable with sharing emotions (like my girlfriend was) has the tendency to lock her up inside herself and let her emotional situation stabilise until it is easier to understand where which feeling comes from. If she's strong-willed and proud, she will avoid speaking about her feelings until she's figured them out sufficiently herself to share them with you. Now, if you interrupt that process and start whining that she has to talk because you're getting a nervous breakdown from her behaviour, she only gets more emotional. As such, you end up in a vicuous circle where she stresses you out because she doesn't want to talk and you stress her out because she doesn't want to talk.... meanwhile, she can't calm down, she can't allow her emotions to stabilise and you have the recipe for a bomb to explode.....

That's pretty much my experience with women when they feel bad.... and of course, I always have the impulse to do exactly that which I'm not supposed to do : whine.

You do not know most of the women I know - clearly, you don't know me. Let me translate for you: it pisses me off when men make pejorative statements about women, and those statements only further misunderstandings between the genders.

OP, I have never been a fan of the old, "if you don't know, I'm not going to tell you," approach. It's immature, it's destructive....and it only perpetuates problems instead of aiding in their resolution. My advice to you is that when you do become involved with a woman, be sure to tell her (from the beginning) about the Aspie traits you have that might impair your ability to communicate with her in a sensitive or intuitive way. Then ask for her help (being honest when she's upset), and her understanding. Tell her you want to be able to give her what she needs as far as communication goes, but she's going to have to help, and be patient as you learn what she needs. And listen - take the advice that she gives you. If more people - of all genders and abilities - adopted that approach, I think there would be fewer misunderstandings and hurt feelings. Good luck.