Asperger's/Autism Love Success Stories (Sticky)

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Grisha
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28 Feb 2012, 9:12 am

The_Face_of_Boo wrote:
So we conclude that male aspies are mental-sanity vampires?


I certainly seem to be.



MjrMajorMajor
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28 Feb 2012, 12:32 pm

The-Raven wrote:
Firstly, there's almost nothing on women with Aspergers and what little there is, is hopelessly pigeonholed.

This is because there is a dearth of research on aspie relationships .


I would definitely like to see more information. It's not quite a black hole anymore, but I guess it might as well be from an autistic feminine perspective.



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28 Feb 2012, 12:51 pm

Grisha wrote:
The_Face_of_Boo wrote:
So we conclude that male aspies are mental-sanity vampires?


I certainly seem to be.


To bad we dont sparkle like diamonds in the sunlight, because as Twilight has shown women would be all over us.


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blueroses
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28 Feb 2012, 5:32 pm

The-Raven wrote:
mv wrote:
I also disagree a bit with Attwood. Firstly, there's almost nothing on women with Aspergers and what little there is, is hopelessly pigeonholed. For example, I have a very healthy sex drive, even post-children. Also, I may be naive in some respects, but I'm very worldly in others.

that chapter is mostly based on maxine astons research, she is the one who invented 'cassandra affective disorder' where an aspie causes mental illness in their NT partner. http://www.maxineaston.co.uk/cassandra/
She is not a Dr and only has a psyhology degree, msc and counseling diploma and is an ex wife of an aspie. Most books on aspergers mainly reference her in their relationship chapters, giving them all a negative slant. This is because there is a dearth of research on aspie relationships and so hers is used, despite not being qualified to do research and not being peer reviewed. I think this is a great shame, and hopefully as time goes on more research will be done on aspie relationships and hers will not be the main material used for chapters anymore.

That whole chapter is horrible and says really nasty stuff about aspies as parents, which has bad implications/effects for court custody and social services (such as saying the NT is a 'natural' parenting expert and should have custody and children often hate their aspie parent).


If I recall correctly from reading Aston's book, her study used a really, really small group, too. Just looking around WP and seeing the diversity of experience on here, it's easy to see that you can't tell much from talking to only a handful of couples.



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28 Feb 2012, 6:58 pm

MjrMajorMajor wrote:
The-Raven wrote:
Firstly, there's almost nothing on women with Aspergers and what little there is, is hopelessly pigeonholed.

This is because there is a dearth of research on aspie relationships .


I would definitely like to see more information. It's not quite a black hole anymore, but I guess it might as well be from an autistic feminine perspective.

Given the stuff that Maine Aston has generated and how much Attwood loves it, maybe autistic women should be glad that there is less attention toward them on this subject.

Atwood is better than anyone else in a lot of areas, but don't love him, because in other areas he sucks. I.e. check out his views on which parent should get custody in a divorce. (Hint: it's the NT parent -- always.)



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28 Feb 2012, 9:46 pm

I couldn't find one sentence in that about the negative effects on the AS partner.
There you have it. We're all soul-destroying monsters who happily suck the life out of our neurotypical partners. :wink:


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Zinnel
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28 Feb 2012, 10:05 pm

Who_Am_I wrote:
I couldn't find one sentence in that about the negative effects on the AS partner.
There you have it. We're all soul-destroying monsters who happily suck the life out of our neurotypical partners. :wink:



So we're succubus/ incubus now? :lol: wow and here I thought I just lacked some social skills, I guess the supernatural ability to drain a human's life force is suppose to make up for that :roll:


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29 Feb 2012, 12:14 am

You better watch out, and you'll probably cry, as I'll give you Cassandra Affective Disorder quicker than you'll catch the various STDs going around, that's why.

(I'm dead serious.)



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29 Feb 2012, 12:54 am

blueroses wrote:
The-Raven wrote:
mv wrote:
I also disagree a bit with Attwood. Firstly, there's almost nothing on women with Aspergers and what little there is, is hopelessly pigeonholed. For example, I have a very healthy sex drive, even post-children. Also, I may be naive in some respects, but I'm very worldly in others.

that chapter is mostly based on maxine astons research, she is the one who invented 'cassandra affective disorder' where an aspie causes mental illness in their NT partner. http://www.maxineaston.co.uk/cassandra/
She is not a Dr and only has a psyhology degree, msc and counseling diploma and is an ex wife of an aspie. Most books on aspergers mainly reference her in their relationship chapters, giving them all a negative slant. This is because there is a dearth of research on aspie relationships and so hers is used, despite not being qualified to do research and not being peer reviewed. I think this is a great shame, and hopefully as time goes on more research will be done on aspie relationships and hers will not be the main material used for chapters anymore.

That whole chapter is horrible and says really nasty stuff about aspies as parents, which has bad implications/effects for court custody and social services (such as saying the NT is a 'natural' parenting expert and should have custody and children often hate their aspie parent).


If I recall correctly from reading Aston's book, her study used a really, really small group, too. Just looking around WP and seeing the diversity of experience on here, it's easy to see that you can't tell much from talking to only a handful of couples.


^ exactly

Also:

Quote:
If I recall correctly from reading Aston's book, her study used a really, really small group, too.


Good to know. So not only is she completely biased from being an ex of a failed NT-Aspie marriage, but it sounds like she also used a really small sample of also-negative NT-Aspie relationships to base her statements on.

From what I learned about looking at "writers of self-help/pop-psychology books" and self-proclaimed "psychological experts/researchers" critically in my basic psychology classes, she sounds like exactly the kind of person who has no business writing an advice/self-help book for the masses (if all of this is true).


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Luska
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29 Feb 2012, 2:45 am

I put this topic up so that people with autism/Asperger's would know what works. Pls post successful stories or videos by people on what works. Thanks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/us/na ... wanted=all
Navigating Love and Autism
GREENFIELD, Mass. — The first night they slept entwined on his futon, Jack Robison, 19, who had since childhood thought of himself as “not like the other humans,” regarded Kirsten Lindsmith with undisguised tenderness.

She was the only girl to have ever asked questions about his obsessive interests — chemistry, libertarian politics, the small drone aircraft he was building in his kitchen — as though she actually cared to hear his answer. To Jack, who has a form of autism called Asperger syndrome, her mind was uncannily like his. She was also, he thought, beautiful.

So far they had only cuddled; Jack, who had dropped out of high school but was acing organic chemistry in continuing education classes, had hopes for something more. Yet when she smiled at him the next morning, her lips seeking his, he turned away.

“I don’t really like kissing,” he said.

Kirsten, 18, a college freshman, drew back. If he knew she was disappointed, he showed no sign.

On that fall day in 2009, Kirsten did not know that someone as intelligent and articulate as Jack might be unable to read the feelings of others, or gauge the impact of his words. And only later would she recognize that her own lifelong troubles — bullying by students, anger from teachers and emotional meltdowns that she felt unable to control — were clues that she, too, occupied a spot on what is known as the autism spectrum.

But she found comfort in Jack’s forthrightness. If he did not always say what she wanted to hear, she knew that whatever he did say, he meant. As he dropped her off on campus that morning, she replayed in her head the e-mail he had sent the other day, describing their brief courtship with characteristic precision.

“Is this what love is, Kirsten?” he had asked.

Only since the mid-1990s have a group of socially impaired young people with otherwise normal intelligence and language development been recognized as the neurological cousins of nonverbal autistic children. Because they have a hard time grasping what another is feeling — a trait sometimes described as “mindblindness” — many assumed that those with such autism spectrum disorders were incapable of, or indifferent to, intimate relationships. Parents and teachers have focused instead on helping them with school, friendship and, more recently, the workplace.

Yet as they reach adulthood, the overarching quest of many in this first generation to be identified with Asperger syndrome is the same as many of their nonautistic peers: to find someone to love who will love them back.

The recent recognition that their social missteps arise from a neurological condition has lifted their romantic prospects, they say, allowing them to explain behavior once attributed to rudeness or a failure of character — and to ask for help. So has the recent proliferation of Web sites and forums where self-described “Aspies,” or “Aspergians,” trade dating tips and sometimes find actual dates. Lessons learned with the advent of social skills classes and therapies, typically intended to help them get jobs, are now being applied to the more treacherous work of forging intimacy.

The months that followed Jack and Kirsten’s first night together show how daunting it can be for the mindblind to achieve the kind of mutual understanding that so often eludes even nonautistic couples. But if the tendency to fixate on a narrow area of interest is sometimes considered a drawback, it may also explain one couple’s single-minded determination to keep trying.

A Meeting

Kirsten was first introduced to Jack in the fall of 2008 by her boyfriend at the time, who jumped up from their table at Rao’s Coffee in Amherst, Mass., to greet his friend, who was dressed uncharacteristically in a suit that hung from his lean frame.

Jack, it turned out, was on his way to court. A chemistry whiz, he had spent much of his adolescence teaching himself to make explosives and setting them off in the woods in experiments that he hoped would earn him a patent but that instead led the state police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to charge him with several counts of malicious explosion.

By the following spring, he would be cleared of all the charges and recruited by the director of the undergraduate chemistry program at the University of Massachusetts, who was impressed by a newspaper account of Jack’s home-built laboratory. Kirsten’s boyfriend, a popular Amherst High senior, had offered to serve as a character witness for his former classmate, and the three spent much time together that year.

The boyfriend told Kirsten that Jack had Asperger syndrome: his condition may have blinded him to the possibility that the explosions, which he recorded and posted on YouTube, could well be viewed by law enforcement authorities as anything other than the ambitious chemistry experiments he saw them.

But if Kirsten noticed that Jack held himself stiffly, spoke with an unusual formality and rarely made eye contact, she gave little thought to his condition, other than to note that it ran in families: his father, John Elder Robison, is the author of “Look Me in the Eye,” a best-selling 2007 memoir about his own diagnosis of Asperger’s at age 39.

After reading of the intense interests that often come with the condition — the elder Mr. Robison’s passion for Land Rovers, he had written, was the basis for his successful business servicing luxury vehicles — Kirsten and her boyfriend made light: “I have Asperger’s for McDonald’s,” she would joke. But Jack was all too familiar with the book’s more sobering stories, too: about the despair his father felt in his youth as he looked at happy couples around him and his rocky marriage to Jack’s mother, which ended in divorce.

“All these young Aspergians want to know how to succeed at dating,” John Robison told his son after his speaking engagements. And as a high school girlfriend broke up with Jack over the course of that year, Jack began to wonder more urgently about the same question.

Kirsten’s two previous boyfriends had broken up with her, too, and her current boyfriend was an unlikely match — a charismatic extrovert with soulful blue eyes who thrived on meeting new people. But when she admitted at the outset of their senior year in high school that she envied his social ease, he had embraced the role of social coach.

Years of social rejection had made her, in his view, overly eager to please. “People will take advantage of you if you act that way,” he warned. “If you don’t watch out, you’ll be a natural doormat.”

Noting her tendency to speak in a monotone, he urged her to be more expressive. He sought to quiet her hand movements, gave her personal hygiene tips (“You can’t do that,” he told her flatly when she used her fingers to scoop up food she had dropped on a table at Taco Bell and ate it) and pointed out the unspoken social cues she often missed. He elbowed her as she spoke for long minutes to an acquaintance about her interest in animal physiology. “When people look away,” he explained, “it means they’re not interested.”

And sometimes, he was plainly upset by what he perceived as her rudeness. “I can’t believe you did that,” he huffed when his mother asked Kirsten how she was and she did not reciprocate.

Much of the time, Kirsten embraced the tutoring, which he punctuated with unabashed displays of affection. “I love this girl!” the boyfriend once proclaimed, tackling her on his mother’s couch. Diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder at age 11, she never heard the word autism. They were convinced that with some effort she could become as socially adept as he was.

But she also chafed at his frequent instructions, which required constant, invisible exertion to obey. And she despaired of ever living up to his most urgent request: that she share her innermost feelings with him.

“Just don’t filter,” he said one night, lying in bed with her.

“It’s like the blue screen of death,” she said, describing her difficulty conveying her emotion with a widely used term for a Windows computer crash. “There are no words there.”

“You’re not a robot,” he insisted, intending to comfort her. “I know you can do this. You’re a human being.”

But not, she thought, the kind he wanted her to be.

In contrast to her boyfriend’s emotional probing, Jack’s enthusiasm for facts — like how far his green laser pointer could reach across the University of Massachusetts campus in Amherst — came as a relief. So, too, did his apparent lack of concern for fitting in. A supporter of President Obama, she found herself admiring Jack’s anti-Obama bumper sticker, which almost invariably elicited angry honks in left-leaning Amherst but once got him out of a ticket.

If Jack had trouble reading Kirsten’s expressions and body language, he also noticed that she had what he considered a perfect smile. On his laptop, he showed her bootleg episodes of his favorite TV show, “Breaking Bad,” about a chemistry teacher turned methamphetamine producer. And on the evenings when he argued libertarian positions with Kirsten’s boyfriend, a liberal Democrat, he often found himself disappointed when she went to bed early.

One afternoon in the fall of 2009 he asked if she was free to meet between classes at UMass, where she was enrolled as a freshman and he was studying chemistry for an associate’s degree. They talked about their childhoods in Amherst, both social outcasts even among their geeky classmates, offspring of academics. Jack’s poor grades reflected the hours he spent reading chemistry Web sites rather than doing homework; one teacher had suggested to Kirsten’s mother, an administrator at UMass, that she would be “a perfect candidate for home-schooling.”

Kirsten told Jack, at some length, of her desire to be a medical examiner. He replied, at even greater length, about chemistry, his interest having shifted from explosives to designing new compounds for medical use. Sometimes, as they circled the campus, she broke in with questions “What’s that?” she wanted to know when his descriptions grew technical, or “Why?” Accustomed to being treated with something more akin to polite fascination when he held forth on his favorite subjects — he often felt, he said, like a zoo animal — he checked to be sure her interest was genuine before providing detailed answers.

Jack, Kirsten noticed, bit his lips, a habit he told her came from not knowing how he was supposed to arrange his face to show his emotions. Kirsten, Jack noticed, cracked her knuckles, which she later told him was her public version of the hand-flapping she reserved for when she was alone, a common autistic behavior thought to ease stress.

Their difficulty discerning unspoken cues might have made it harder to know if the attraction was mutual. Kirsten stalked Jack on Facebook, she later told him, but he rarely posted. In one phone conversation, Jack wondered, “Is she flirting with me?” But he could not be sure.

But Jack, who had never known how to hide his feelings, wrote Kirsten an e-mail laying them out. And when Kirsten’s boyfriend pleaded with her to tell him what was wrong, she did, sobbing. She could not explain, she said. She knew only that she felt as if she had found her soulmate.

Road Bumps

From the beginning, their physical relationship was governed by the peculiar ways their respective brains processed sensory messages. Like many people with autism, each had uncomfortable sensitivities to types of touch or texture, and they came in different combinations.

Jack recoiled when Kirsten tried to give him a back massage, pushing deeply with her palms.

“Pet me,” he said, showing her, his fingers grazing her skin. But Kirsten, who had always hated the feeling of light touch, shrank from his caress.

“Only deep pressure,” she showed him, hugging herself.

He tried to kiss her, but it was hard for her to enjoy it, so obvious was his aversion. To him, kissing felt like what it was, he told her: mashing your face against someone else’s. Neither did he like the sweaty feeling of hand-holding, a sensation that seemed to dominate all others whenever they tried it.

“I’m sorry,” he said helplessly.

They found ways to negotiate sex, none of them perfect. They kept trying.

What mattered more to Kirsten was how comfortable she felt for the first time in a relationship. Even if she did something wrong, she believed, Jack would not leave her. When he remarked on her obliviousness after she chattered on one day about vertebrate anatomy to their neighbor — “Matson was totally bored,” he informed her — there was no judgment, only pride that he had managed to notice. “Is that why he was yawning?” she asked, laughing with him.
========================================================================
EDIT:
With respect to hyperlexian, I will just leave it up to here. I'll just end it up to this part where the main moral is to look for someone who is comforable with your autistic traits. Unfortunately that means a huge chunk of the opposite sex find autistic traits a major turn off.



Last edited by Luska on 01 Mar 2012, 7:41 am, edited 2 times in total.

Dillogic
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29 Feb 2012, 2:46 am

O, and Who_Am_I,

You can get from Attwood's words how the "AS side" will experience negatives. She'll feel like a failure when she can't give what the normal person wants (if she cares), and the normal person will most likely point out how little the person with AS does (just as the AS person will point out difficulty/thinking they do enough). That's easily as bad as the social and emotional feelings of distance the normal person feels.

I think a highly introverted normal person might be ok with how the person with AS is though, especially an understanding one.



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29 Feb 2012, 10:59 am

Let's see what we have here is a shrink that had one bad relationship with one aspie which is then influencing the choice of couples to interview and surveys done. Which in turn proves the point the first experience provided. Which has then not been proven nor peer reviewed. Doh!

This is then used as source material for public advice to NTs that are vulnerable to take expert titles with the assumption they are authority on their subject. The "expert" says so, thus it must be so in combination with lack of critical thinking.

And..
* Verbal expression is not the only way to communicate affection
* Straight communication goes both ways, want to improve? talk clearly about the matter!
* Is something done the wrong way?, then show how you want it done. And be prepared there's more than one perspective.
* Talk about something rather than using voice for emotion without content.
* People have different skills.
* There's always reason for why things happens, deal with them.
* Most professional "help" is from the perception of NTs.



hyperlexian
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29 Feb 2012, 12:32 pm

Luska, it's a copyright violation to post entire articles. you are going to want to go back and edit your posts so that you just quote parts of them, and link to the rest. thank you!


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Luska
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01 Mar 2012, 7:33 am

hyperlexian wrote:
Luska, it's a copyright violation to post entire articles. you are going to want to go back and edit your posts so that you just quote parts of them, and link to the rest. thank you!


Oh Im sorry I didnt know that. But just curious, I always thought the NYTimes was fine with sharing? I could be wrong.



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01 Mar 2012, 9:37 am

Link:: http://www.journeyswithautism.com/2011/ ... ct-answer/

The Perfect Answer

Excerpt:

And then, there is a stereotype at work here, an assumption that people with Asperger’s are all alike, and that we make relationships difficult simply by virtue of being autistic. Somehow, when one partner has Asperger’s, generalizations replace specifics, and the idea that relationships are a two-way street, in which each party can be a challenge to the other, gets lost.

While I was still reeling from having heard the question, only one answer came to mind, and it was the answer I was hoping my husband had given:

Because I love her.

It’s not the one he gave. I was disappointed at first. When someone implies something negative about me, I immediately go to the place of wanting my husband to profess his love for me, in a very loud and declamatory voice, from the nearest rooftop.

But now I’m glad he didn’t give that answer. Simply saying that he loves me runs the risk of implying that he stays in the marriage not because of what I bring, but out of something akin to heroism. It ignores the ways in which I ground his life, in which I nourish his heart, in which I support him in all of his struggles. It has the potential to reinforce the notion that, because of my disability, I am a burden that he carries with saintly patience. And it suggests that he should have to profess his love for me, rather it simply being a given, as it should be for any husband and wife.

So he didn’t say he loved me. Instead, this is what he said:

Because it works for me.

It’s a brilliant answer. It really is. It takes the entire conversation out of the realm of disability and into the realm of why anyone stays in a marriage. You stay because it works for you. It may be hard work sometimes, and it may be a rocky road sometimes, but that’s marriage. Certainly, you also stay because you love the other person, but that’s not enough to keep a marriage going. Lots of people who love each other break up because the marriage stops working for one or both of them, and because there is nothing that anyone can do to fix it.

So yes, my husband is married to me because it works for him. And I am married to him because it works for me. Each of us can be a trial to the other at times, but the same is true for any two married people. We are not married despite the challenges each of us puts in the path of the other, but because of them. They help us to grow, to love, and to understand life in ways that we could never begin to do without the other.

© 2011 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg



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01 Mar 2012, 2:10 pm

Luska wrote:
hyperlexian wrote:
Luska, it's a copyright violation to post entire articles. you are going to want to go back and edit your posts so that you just quote parts of them, and link to the rest. thank you!


Oh Im sorry I didnt know that. But just curious, I always thought the NYTimes was fine with sharing? I could be wrong.

sharing means posting the link, not copying the whole article.


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