How did I pick up on what *they* didn't?

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So it's been about half a year almost from my breakup, and while many things about my experience with her irk me considerably, one thing above all else leaves me absolutely baffled:

I met her at a previous job, and every one of our co-workers kept insisting to me that she was so into me, it wasn't even funny.

Every last co-worker insisted she was hot for me...and I just didn't see it. I told them "she's in a relationship, and I get very conflicting signals from her on top of that".


Well, 5 years later apparently I was right.

My intuition that something was a little off beat out everyone else's body language skills.

How....does that happen?

Anyone care to offer any thoughts?

I mean I'm sure they wanted me to be happy, but good lord....

Maybe the others believed what they wanted to believe instead of attending to the ackshul signals. They glommed onto a theory early on, then focused on the signals that fit the theory and ignored the ones that didn't.

Sure. I’ve got two of ‘em:

You have a basic sense of decency. If she’s in a relationship and still looking to fool around,
she’s not worth having. That’s how I’d see it. For me, it would not have been about instinct
at all. Not everyone shares that value system. Your coworkers apparently didn’t.

On the other hand, it lasted over three years. That’s probably more than most relationships.

Aspies are much more perceptive about the world around them than are NTs, whose brains filter out most of what their minds perceive (with their jaws flapping the whole time). I personally believe that this is more at the root of autism than all of the various effects that the so-called (non)experts spend their time studying. If you want to know what its like to be a fish, you don't ask a bird. We simply take in so much more information than NTs do that it is humanly impossible for our brains to process it all in realtime. This produces the cognitive delays and overload conditions that result in all the other traits. See link below for a good example:

> http://life-with-aspergers.blogspot.com ... nd-nt.html

That's my take on it. You might have looked at the facts, plainly, instead of bothering with that social stuff, and concluded: "If she were really attracted to me, she wouldn't be dating someone else. Any attraction she has for me is irrelevant, and it would be wrong of me to try to break up her current relationship."

Sometimes I think we'd be much better off if we were more sensible about love, however Spockish and unromantic it might be.

Wizard's First Rule:
People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People's heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool.

We might lack some of NT's instincts, but oh boy, do we make it up in the intuitive department.