What is your reason for wanting a boyfriend or girlfriend?

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Connection. Like most autistics I've spent most my life distant from others, out of place, that nothing fits and least of all me. Alienation from most people I've socially interacted with in essence. This is because most normal people get emotional satisfaction for the lives they lead but I quite simply do not. To connect with another emotionally would end that. While not the cause, a working relationship would certainly be part of the solution to said alienation.

You're an Aspie. Thus, you have no empathy. Thus, you'll never connect with anyone emotionally.

Will you stop it with the no empathy line? It's kind of annoying to be honest. The way I see it, I'm at least trying to understand and connect with the feelings of others around me, unlike the manipulative a**holes who can read the feelings of others just fine, but willfully choose to screw with said feelings... those are the people without empathy, not people like me.

if what salonfilsoof says is true i'm getting myself dediagnosed. there realy arent any criteria that makes me want a girl as my girlfriend accept for a certain spark i only get the feeling with fairly well figured girls around my age though.

The DSM says nothing about empathy.

Asperger's Syndrome and the left amygdala

The amygdala is one of the most important parts of our brain and strongly related to consciousness. The right amygdala seems to be responsible for visuospatial memory and is more active among men, whereas the left part of the amygdala is used to determine priority based on emotional triggers such as a person kissing you, someone shouting, someone entering your space, someone giving you a warning or someone telling you he or she has a problem.

The left amygdala operates something like this. When visual and other sensory experiences enter your brain, the left amygdala analyses the whole and automatically attaches a different priority on different parts of the image based on genetically determined instincts and life experience. As such, this both biological and cultural filter turns an unbiased image into a biased image and pre-filters any content based on subconscious emotional criteria. Biological and especially the cultural bias can at times make an individual unable to believe his own eyes or ears when that bias was based on a fallacy, which often leads to cognitive dissonance rather than a change in bias.

Nevertheless, the benefits of the filtering on emotional bias clearly surpass the negative aspects. This filter allows a complex image of many objects and sounds to be fragmented in numerous little parts as an automatic process and on top of that the automatic maintenance of a virtual task list based on a complex grade-based prioritising system. Basically, this filter tells you almost immediately how to respond to emotional impulses (e.g. when to be scared or when to trust someone) and it also tells you what impulses are more important than others. For example, the emotional bias filter of the left amygdala is involved in regulating which faces to recognise, which tasks are more important, who’s most likely to flirt with you, who’s most likely to get into a fight with you, when is your spouse telling you something important and what words expressed by a teacher are most important. I cannot stress enough the importance of such a filter, since it eliminates many thought processes that would often lead to similar conclusions but that require a great amount of brain power in comparison with little to nothing brainpower when using the filter.

Numerous mental conditions are directly related to deficiencies within the left and/or right amygdala, such as Schizophrenia, Klüver-Bucy syndrome, Bi-Polar disorder, Borderline Personality disorder (BPD) and Asperger’s Syndrom. With regards to deficiencies to the left amygdala in specific, BPD seems to be related to hyperactivity of the left amygdala where Asperger’s Syndrom seems to be related to reduced or nullified activity of the left amygdala. Sometimes because of a genetic impairment of the biological bias but more often because physical abuse and/or mental abuse during early childhood had a negative influence on the cultural bias applied by the left amygdala, people with BPD have an increased tendency to fear or question what to normal people appear to be neutral or positive conditions. They tend to be most comfortable when people are at a safe distance and they are often affected by mood swings and radical changes of attitude towards other people. Wikipedia gives among others the following characteristics for BPD :

The negative emotional states particularly associated with BPD have been grouped into four categories: extreme feelings in general; feelings of destructiveness or self-destructiveness; feelings of fragmentation or lack of identity; and feelings of victimization.
Individuals with BPD can be very sensitive to the way others treat them, reacting strongly to perceived criticism or hurtfulness. Their feelings about others often shift from positive to negative, generally after a disappointment or perceived threat of losing someone. Self-image can also change rapidly from extremely positive to extremely negative. Impulsive behaviors are common, including alcohol or drug abuse, unsafe sex, gambling and recklessness in general. Attachment studies suggest individuals with BPD, while being high in intimacy- or novelty-seeking, can be hyper-alert to signs of rejection or not being valued and tend toward insecure, avoidant or ambivalent, or fearfully preoccupied patterns in relationships. They tend to view the world generally as dangerous and malevolent, and themselves as powerless, vulnerable, unacceptable and unsure in self-identity.
Individuals with BPD are often described, including by some mental health professionals (and in the DSM-IV), as deliberately manipulative or difficult, but analysis and findings generally trace behaviors to inner pain and turmoil, powerlessness and defensive reactions, or limited coping and communication skills.There has been limited research on family members' understanding of borderline personality disorder and the extent of burden or negative emotion experienced or expressed by family members.
Parents of individuals with BPD have been reported to show co-existing extremes of over-involvement and under-involvement. BPD has been linked to increased levels of chronic stress and conflict in romantic relationships, decreased satisfaction of romantic partners, abuse and unwanted pregnancy. Suicidal or self-harming behavior is one of the core diagnostic criteria in DSM IV-TR, and management of and recovery from this can be complex and challenging. The suicide rate is approximately 8 to 10 percent.

For people with Asperger’s Syndrome, the emotional bias filter is not or barely active. This forces us to do all the pre-processed unconscious activity of the left amygdala consciously by means of rational processes. Although this makes certain tasks and thought processes easier or more objective when they are normally hindered by bias, the disadvantages of the lack of such a filter are clearly more significant. Because it requires complex rational processes for prioritizing, recognising social cues but also cooking, riding a bike or driving a car, a very high IQ is needed to make normal life even remotely possible but even in such cases the emotional bias filter cannot be replaced by logics alone as the sheer number of parameters required to logically analyse many social situations or certain behavioural strategies and come to a situation as reliable as or more reliable than with the emotional bias filter is at times just too large to be applicable which leaves the individual with nothing more but educated guessing where a normal person would easily have known what to do by mere instinct or intuition alone.

Also, the inability to filter leaves someone with Asperger’s Syndrome with a decreased ability to find items, to figure out when something important is said, to pay attention to someone when pre-occupied with something else and in some cases even the inability to untangle different ongoing conversations in the same room and receiving them all together as one big blurry sound.

Although people with Asperger’s Syndrome are not necessarily less emotional than normal people or even people with BPD, our lack of emotional filtering does make us blind for empathic impulses, leaving only sensory impulses to judge a situation. That makes it much harder for us to assess how to behave in different situations and it makes it harder for us to judge other people’s behaviour and attitude.

In short, having Asperger’s Syndrome basically means having elaborate plans and thought schemes for almost everything normal people do instinctively or intuitively because you simply lack that instinct or intuition. Although seemingly less affected emotionally than someone with BPD, the lack of an emotional filter often leads to increased anxiety, stress and depression because replacing instinctive behaviour with rational behaviour is extremely exhausting and the lack of situations where pre-conceived task lists can be used in order to fulfil tasks beyond a certain complexity has a significant effect on anxiety and stress levels, whereas depression is related to both the difficulty of life with Asperger’s and a decreased level or serotonin due the lack of emotional filtering.

You're an Aspie. Thus, you have no empathy. Thus, you'll never connect with anyone emotionally.

lie.

You can connect with them intellectually, spiritually or sexually. You can both feel love with one another. You just can't connect with them emotionally....

The lack of an emotional connection becomes obvious when the NT partner is feeling bad and you as an Aspie try to comfort them. As much as I tried to comfort my exes, it never really worked because they expected emotional comfort while all I could give them was rational comfort. I could help them be offering solutions to their problem, but I would simply not know how to make them actually FEEL better.

Empathy is a matter of feeling what other people feel without having to interpret it. You feel bad when someone else feels bad and you feel good because someone else is good without first logically analysing the other person's feelings. This is something Aspies simply are incapable of.

they are if they have been through the exact same situation. i mean, i wont deny it's harder for them...but it IS possible.