Do you "feel felt" by your partner?

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I'm trying to make sense of my own needs. I read so much about those on the spectrum being distant and detached. I feel that way about everyone except my partner and a small handful of current friends.

Can I be on the spectrum if I long to connect and feel felt by a partner? Wouldn't I not care if that connection was damaged if I truely am autistic?

Feeling felt definition:. The sense that your mind is being accurately represented in another person's mind.

I wonder the very same thing.
I really long to connect but it's often frustrating and stressful and I end up feeling my best version of myself alone.
I long to have a partner who understands me but I need to learn how to be a supportive partner aswell

Sure you can. Many of us do.


No. Many of us long for connections; we're just not very good at forming them, especially with NT's.


That's going to be possible only with someone who (regardless of their own neurotype) knows you very well. For many of us, that would be easiest with another autistic person with a sufficiently similar kind of autism (and by "similar kind" I mean similar sensory issues, similar attention issues, similar cognitive profile, etc.).

In general it is easiest to empathize with people who are similar to oneself in as many ways as possible. NT's easily empathize with each other (well, not with all other NT's, but with those of similar cultural background, economic status, etc.) simply because they are so similar to each other. Autistic people differ from each other -- as well as from NT's -- in many ways, much more so than NT's differ from each other. That, in my opinion, is the main thing that makes cognitive empathy hard for autistic people (and also makes it hard for NT's to empathize with autistic people) -- quite apart from any intrinsic empathy-related difficulties some of us may also have, such as alexithymia.

That's an interesting line of thinking. I tend to view neurodiverse peeps as having more unique connections in the brain due to spending more time doing their thing due to having been alienated or simply because they like to play au solitaire + reinforcement through alienation = inevitably you build a more diverse and eccentric way of communication and seeing the patterns around you that other people may not notice. Moreover, I think the more adjusted you are to society the less thinking and analysing you have to do because everything comes natural to you - therefore, often NT will say things without questioning or accept general wisdom because it seems natural and it is reinforced among common society. Of course, people are not robots (not in the mechanical sense anyway) so there is always a degree of difference but it is not surprising to me that NT have a wider relationship pool / experiences because finding like minded individuals is not a struggle. It is also as if our genes are playing match making by creating a puzzle of convergence. The more unique the puzzle, the harder it is to achieve convergence.

Do you mean recognition?