Love-shyness

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Has anyone read that?

I recommend it if you haven't.

Have you posted the link, i don't see anything

I think I'm not allowed to post any links as of now.

http://www.love-shy.com/Gilmartin/toc.html

There it is.


Anyways, this study was done in the 80s. Gilmartin, who conducted the study, had the conclusion that many of the subjects had Asperger's. I hope there will be another study to evaluate love shyness in the internet age.

I've read it, and it's one of the first things that made me realise I might have an ASD. For that I am grateful to Gilmartin. From the wikipedia description of asperger's/autism I really didn't think I could have it (this was before I stumbled upon WP).

At first I thought it was an outrage that his research was discarded so easily, since this is a big problem for men like us. Later I realised that his book is full of pseudoscientific BS (for example, he thought love-shyness might be caused by nasal polyps. WTF?!) and does not deserve the respect of the scientific community.

However, it would still be interesting to see more research into love-shyness in people on the spectrum since the problem itself is definitely there. I would also like to see the term "love-shyness" rescued from obscurity because I think it's a very useful and descriptive term.

Based on the SHI inventory test I'm definitely not love-shy, by their definitions. If I have personality issues it may be more to do with being an awkward conversationalist than being shy.

Agreed here... Gilmartin was full of crap...

As an alternative look up Avoidant Personality Disorder. It's basically love-shyness but actually conducted scientifically... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidant_p ... y_disorder

Here is a Gilmartin interview.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecYpk2Mb_kM


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65XVyVm1Wq0

I fit the description 100%

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_shyness

When I read this book it was how I, too, found out about AS. I knew I was definitely love-shy. I hadn't heard of Asperger's and didn't know what it was, but soon did.

The book was absolutely intriguing for me, but... yeah... the way Gilmartin wrote doesn't earn a lot of respect.

Apart from the pseudoscience stuff, he is really derogatory and abrasive at times in his book.

Tough love.

It's too bad he brought in the Pseudoscience, because in other ways he is clearly describing a real-world psychological phenomena.

Is it too much to suggest that Gilmartin might be an idiot and still be mostly right?

I certainly fit that description but I think it's kind of stupid to make it sound like some kind of separate condition. They are better off just putting that 90% of those with aspergers fit that description.

I agree that some of the main traits seem to apply to many aspies here in the Love and Dating forum, but this does not hold for all Aspies by any means (even just all male aspies), and there are significant numbers of aspies who do not have love shyness.

Some things that poke out at me from the Wiki on Love Shyness:

--Most of the love-shy men (and only few of the non-shy men) reported that their mothers had often said that they had been quiet babies

That definitely wasn't me.

--Even as grown men, the love-shy men's parents expressed that they were disappointed to have them as sons and still belittled them for their current situations. Most were upset that their sons never married and had no grandchildren to leave their heirlooms to. It was also stated that they seldom or even never visited their sons. Ironically, though most of the love-shy men disliked or even hated their parents, they visited them constantly, because they were the only people they could interact with and also to receive financial support despite also receiving heavy hazing.


And most significantly --

In his recruited samples, Gilmartin had found only 14% of the self-confident university-age non-shy men had no sister around while growing up, as opposed to 59% of the university-aged love-shy men, with 71% of the 35-50 year-old love-shy men never having had a sister. In the same groups, over half of the self-confident non-love-shy young group had grown up with at least two sisters, compared to only 6% of the younger and 3% of the older love-shy men. Gilmartin also noted that none of the older love-shy men and very few of the younger love-shy men had any adults to rely on for emotional support growing up. Also it is noted that very few of the love-shy men had a large network of cousins, 90% of them have only 1 or no cousins, while the 10% only had 2 or 3, while none of them had more than 3. Some of the men expressed that their siblings achieved intimacy with relationships and were preferred by their parents much more than themselves.

To me, this is what separates it from just being an Aspie. It may very well be the case that all of the love shy men in his studies were Aspies, but there were other circumstances involved that pushed them in that direction. In this case, we can separate out their experiences as something different from the norm of Aspie-ness.

It wasn't scientifically conducted, so I can't consider what Gilmartin did to be "science"...

I don't know much about his methods, but his statistics, even if they were on a relatively small sample size, about men with female siblings seems to be significant. It could be that lack of exposure to same or similar age female relatives leaves a gulf in the ability of Aspie men to cope with girls/women in the real world. As such, it seems to create an issue that doesn't fall exclusively or consistently under the Aspie label.

I have a sister but she's also a love-shy , what does that mean? lol