Inability to love?

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Perhaps this misconception arises out of the fact that people with ASDs can appear "cold"; they may have trouble defining emotions and then putting them to words, a lack of emotional reciprocity, and etcetera.

I have this lovely "autistic disorder" label, and I feel this emotion as it's defined above; I also have my own definition of such that transcends a simple summary.

i can love

I've never been around anyone autistic or not that wasn't capable of great love!

There is one thing that disturbs me a lot in the first post. It seems the TS is convinced that love is absent in Aspies basically because there is an egocentrical aspect involved. I believe it is certainly true that Aspies might look at a relationship from their own point of view and do prefer the other person to be good to them.

Now the big misconception: how is this any different in NTs??? There is no such thing as totally altruistic love in a relationship, relationships aren't about altruism! I never heard an NT girl say things about their partner who just walked away from them 'oh, it's so great he found the other girl, she is sooo good to him'. Can you even imagine that? No.

Ofcourse problems in relationships can come from autism, but an autistic guy is no more selfish than an average NT and some are even less so. Is our love not real because it is not perfect love? Well maybe, but truly no love is perfect. I am also wondering about your example on not showing up. So basically you are saying you don't mind if someone you want to be with does not come? To me that is a weird form of love. The only thing true about that is that the aspie might not be able to show the frustration in an acceptable way. If you cannot live with that, don't be with an aspie, fine, but don't think it's because there is no love possible.

my love doesnt seem to matter.

i think my heart is calloussed after hearing myself being so susinctly described by those whom i have loved... and though i consider myself to have been different in everyone of those relationships... they all came to the same conclusions about me.

sometimes i think those relationships only lasted as long as they did because the person KNEW i loved them, despite themselves not knowing what they wanted.

(sorry, spell checker is off and i'm runnin round work)

I too have been told I'm cold, but also industrious. They call me "Iron Mac" because I never miss class (1100+ straight days of perfect attendance, including all of grades 6 - 12), always am doing work, and don't display any public affection outside of business-like handshakes and high fives.

I've got my small circle of close friends, mostly males but also some females, and they really don't care that I'm like that. They just think that's the way I am and that it probably had to do with my upbringing as a child (no father figure, an only child, not too many neighbors/family members to play with). They don't know of a diagnosis or anything...if they do they would have had to diagnose me themselves.

There has really only been one individual who I have been known to share warm feelings with. She's a friend from high school and seems to know how to read me--something even my close friends aren't able to do all the time. We have never gone on a date and probably never will although we have just hung out together. She's sort of a clone of me--works all the time, same personality quirks--but is a bit more outgoing and doesn't rub off as cold. (No idea if she has AS or not, if she does she's the same as me and is twice-exceptional: gifted and AS. I doubt she has it though since she's more social than me.) Also, she's one of these people like me who doesn't want a relationship because studies are most important to her.

I thank you all for your responses and input on this matter.

I too thought my counselor was stereotyping them in a very negative way and this shocked me since I respect her so much. Then again, she may have been stretching the truth to make me get over the past relationship.

Well, I decided to meet him again and he got straight to the point not even a moment after I arrived -"Do you want to get back together?"

I didn't know, and that was my response for the time being. His friend was with him too and we all went back to my ex's house. His parents told me later in the evening that I really broke his heart. He was crying and he got rid of everything that reminded him of me (like his Nintendo DS and some of his DVDs I think). I felt really guilty but thenI wondered - is he crying because his FEELINGS were hurt and he MISSES me, or his EGO was bruised?

I decided later in the night that I'd try it again, but today I'm feeling nervous over it. Of course, it's not like I'm married to him and I could drop him anytime I wanted, yet I'm too damn nice and would be afraid of making him cry again.
And one thing that bugs me is whenever I asked him if he really wanted to get back together (he earlier claimed his parents pressured him into doing it since he was happier when he was with me). I asked if he was only doing this because of his parents, or that HE wants to get back together. His response was frustrating "Doesn't matter to me." That's not an answer that is at all suitable to that question. Either you really want to get back together, or you don't. If it doesn't matter, then I feel as though I am not valued enough to get back together with him.
But whenever I said yes (through texting on our phones), he instantly started texting me like mad and wanted me to come over again soon. So that makes me believe maybe he did want it but was being too prideful? I don't know.

Okay, I am done. I'm just confusing myself. I'm probably confusing all of you, too.

....reading this sort of stuff makes me a little angry and freaked out. it just really irks me when so-called professionals have no insight whatsoever, and can dole out their mangled opinions behind a veil of 'authority'.

i can love. i can feel love. i can empathize. i think i am over-empathetic. but i have great difficulty in expressing my emotions, especially if they are intense. people experience and express love differently. many of the 'normal' and accepted ways of expressing love are built upon hundreds of years of societal convention. i guess other people readily adopt these ways of expressing love but for me it seems unnatural and sometimes insincere.

i guess what i am trying to say is that we shouldn't assume that there's a singular way to understand/experience things, and i'm a peeved that some counselors/psychiatrists do make this assumption.

okay. AAARGGH! now that's off my chest...

Let me put it this way...


You know those times when you're talking to someone and you suddenly realize that you forgot the word for something even though its RIGHT THERE in the tip of your tongue and no matter how hard you try to get the word to come out your mind just draws a blank?


That's how it is. I can have the deepest affection and respect for someone but when it comes to showing that my feelings come out blank. Or I can see someone get hurt or be in distress and want to help / comfort them but at that precise instant the feelings come out blank. I feel them but they dont come out.

It is only much, much later..after thinking about it.. that I can react in the way I would have wanted to. But of course, by then its too late. Same as when someone is an ass to you and its only that night that you're in your bed thinking 'man, I should have said THIS to that $#@ then' kind of thing.


So no, it is not inability to love. its inability to express that love at the appropriate time.


I tend to overcompensate this problem by doing special things for those I care about .. its just the timing aint always right. Like out of the blue offering someone a special gift or a trip or a compliment. I get a lot of shocked reactions out of that and for a split second.. its like the roles are reversed. They dont know how to react in the proper way to ME when I show affection. HAH.

the universe does have a sense of humor. We're proof of it

Remarkable.

DazzleKitty, do not trust a single word this so-called "counselor" says. She may have a license but she is obviously NOT professional. I sincerely hope this kind of ignorance is rare. Request a refund asap! lol

It strikes me that all the responses here have been a little too quick and defensive. There is a real underlying question and a implicit assumption that when we use the word love we are all talking about the same thing. This is not the case at all. What is love after all? There is no easy answer to that question. The fact of the matter is that people with AS do not experience love in the same manner as would be expected of a "normal" person, and they certainly do not express it in a typical fashion. That being said that does not at all mean that something that can be called love is not felt by them. And lets not forget a moment that the AS designation actually fits a whole range of different people. To flat out express that someone with AS does not feel love is misleading at best and flat out wrong at worst. But, and this is a huge but, expectations of what it means for a person with AS to love may be far of the mark.
Love is not everything people expect it to be. Although love by almost anyones definition is a "selfless" feeling, the reality is that the feeling, like all feelings which we possess is ultimately selfish. We love because we desire to love. Ultimately we can never truly know another individual, and so our feeling for them are truthfully for our own benefit. Just as a NT will have expectations that may not be accurate of a AS persons feelings of love, the converse is also true. We learn to use this word love to describe a feeling we know that we have had all of our lives. But we are not all talking about the same thing.
Regardless of the question, there is something there, a feeling, that we all have learned to call love. This is not the same as with some psychological disorders where there is in truth no feelings of connections to other human beings.

Silkboy brings up a lot of important points, ones that I have thought about many times before.

One is that people mean different things when they talk about love, and express it in different ways. This in fact goes for any emotion to some degree, but I would say that ones having an obvious "trigger" like anger are much more likely to be universally understood, unlike ones that have to do with a person's overall assessment of another person or situation.

As stated many times before on here, I wonder whether I will ever experience the desire to have a permanent life partner, i.e. a marriage, family, or the equivalent. I certainly experience purely physical attraction, a sex drive, and also sometimes intense attraction to members of the opposite sex based on significantly more than just their physical appearance. I can easily see myself being obsessed with someone for a decent period of time, but after some period I see myself anxious to get away, be single, and get started with someone else. I do wish to have friendships, and many of these develop over long periods of time, but at this point I would not want to combine a best friend and sex partner/lover into the same person. I am amazed at how many people I meet are essentially sure that they want to get married someday, and those who don't feel this way seem 99% of the time to have a kind of trivial "I don't care" attitude about everything.

Getting back to Silkboy's comments, there is no excuse for a psychiatrist or therapist to disregard anyone's feeling because of an assumption that he/she "could not be feeling that" based on his or her diagnosis. It also is not constructive to label someone else's emotions as "primitive" or "basic" just because the person cannot (or seems not to) feel a particular emotion that is a main driving force in one's own life. It is possible, if not likely, that this other person experiences emotions that the person making the judgment of "primitive" does not experience either, or experiences much less.

Well, I'm not sure our love is the same as their love.

I feel like I can't love sometimes. Even my parents, who are loving and compassionate, generate no emotions from me and I don't know why. I know I'm lonely and I want female affection, but I'm scared that I will never be able to feel or show my feelings the way everyone else does.

I am the same regarding my parents. They are very supportive, and sometimes quite understanding (to the degree that they can understand, which seems like less and less these days), yet I do not feel any strong emotions toward them. I don't say NO emotions, since I feel some degree of emotion to anyone who is familiar and/or I know I can trust very well, and they are far and away the most like this of anyone I know.

As for you not feeling like everyone else toward women, is that a bad thing? To me it is bad only to the extent that a woman may not accept me unless I show the kind of feelings she expects from me. I should have no problem hugging, kissing, or otherwise being physically intimate in a satisfactory way, especially if I treat her reactions as a learning experience. I also can feel quite passionate, and I at least hope it will show. The problem will be with more social-type interaction, and with whatever feelings I do NOT feel toward others that the average guy does.

If people accept me regardless, I LIKE not feeling the same as everyone else.

As I'm sure you know, people with A.S. look at the world extremely differently, and don't read signals that others see as obvious. I don't think there is an inability to love. I think the ability is there. It is not as if ppl w/ AS are robots, or inhuman. But because of the way information is processed, including information about other people's emotions, and the lack of ability to grasp the concept of the 'other,' it's harder for them to understand.

There was an exercise that a therapist did for a child w/ AS where the therapist first asked the child if he could share the child's toys. The kid said no, and showed no sympathy where he could have possibly hurt the therapist's feelings. Then the therapist spoke in a really exaggerated tone, emphasizing his words to the kid and said, "That makes me *sad* that you don't want to share with me. I'm *lonely* now. Are you sure you can't share with me?" Immediately, the child w/AS acted completely different, changed his expression and seemed to understand and sympathize with the therapist and invited him right away to join in the game.

That's a good example that shows: If ppl w/ AS could see the clues that others think are obvious to most anybody, then they would react like anyone else. The potential for love is definately there. That is what makes it so devastating. For ppl w/ AS it's like this big, extreme, misunderstanding is shaping everything in their lives, and shaping it in a way they don't probably mean for it to go.

It can be very hare for someone w/ AS to *show* love. And others who are in relationships deserve to be shown love. The person w/ AS could be a jerk, or a wonderful person, but it can sometimes be absolutely impossible for others to tell the difference. Because what a person with AS communicates to others, and what they would mean to communicate to others, if they had all the information and the capabilities they could ever want, are such different things. I think, though, that *love* goes beyond being able to *express love*. And I think true love can circumvent any obstacle. Even a neurological obstacle. But, the problem is that there is a huge misunderstanding in communication when someone w/ AS is involved. Learning and practice helps. It is truly a devastating problem.