Hi Anne,
please keep in mind that being on the spectrum means having a somewhat random selection of characteristics from a grab-bag of things that identify people as being autistic. There is no characteristic that we all have, and many of us reply to this sort of thread by putting ourselves in the other person's shoes and taking it for granted that you realize that we're really saying 'given that we share the relevant characteristics, it's possible that this same mechanism applies...'. Perhaps the only acceptable blanket statement is that no blanket statements apply (obvious problem with that though, ha ha).
I'm okay with flirting and being in an established relationship (although limited experience with the latter), but have a lot of trouble with the stage where we're feeling each other out and attempting to determine where we stand with each other. I'm just confused all the time. Others (compared to me, and I suppose compared to many on the spectrum) will not make definitive statements regarding this, but will use hints and body language to convey much of their meaning, and interpreting the words without reference to this non-verbal meaning is hazardous at best. I've been told to not worry about this and just be myself, but this misses the point. Being myself with a woman I'm attracted to but who doesn't want me to rip her clothes off means acting differently from myself with a woman who does want that. If I cannot tell the difference, then I cannot very well 'just act like myself' and expect the situation to work out well. This does not just apply to ripping clothes off, but also to any level of affection or intimacy of conversation, what is appropriate? To fail to approach what is acceptable is often to be interpreted as having no interest in advancement in that area of a relationship and without the other party even mentioning it, so I am navigating a minefield. If I were not blind in the way that I am life would be much less lonely. I'm sure that my blindness could be, and has often been, interpreted as being hot and cold, as being unsure of what I want, as being less interested than I am. As having little empathy, when really I have more empathy than most, but I'm blind to some things so don't experince it when it would be appropriate for others who see the relevant things, or it's expressed in an unusual way when I do express it.
I have failed to answer questions adequately, most definitely. I'm often not aware of the meaning of important questions as they're often not expressed directly. I've fairly recently come to realize, months too late, the meaning of the question 'what do you want from me?' which was repeated several times over months. The question had a much more specific meaning, but I didn't have a clue at the time. I guess that NT's try to somehow protect themselves from emotional hurt by expressing questions of emotional concern indirectly, and the more they are worried about being hurt by the answer the more indirectly they tend to ask the question. I really wish I'd known what she was asking, however I simply answered in kind, a very general question gets very general answers. You may think that you've asked things rather directly and recieved unsatisfactory answers, I might tentatively suggest that a reassessment of this could potentially help.
I've read many of ksheehan88's posts and hung out with her in the chat room, and rather like her and what she has to say, however I feel that I must most respectfully disagree with the following;
Based on what you say here, I would say do not pursue this relationship. You now want to pursue a man who you would have not thought twice about had you not discovered he may be autistic.
Knowing that doesn't mean things will be different or that because you know the cause you can change it. You can't. He will be this way til the end of his days, give or take little bits and bobs he picks up by himself.
It's true that you can't hope to change the way he's wired, he's maybe even less able to change in these specific ways than you might expect from most people, however that's not the only consequence of this new knowledge. Particularly after understanding other posts in this thread and the above points I've made the previous experience can be interpreted differently, and new possibilities for his feelings and motivations can be posited. New approaches can be taken, therefore previously seemingly impossible barriers may be circumvented or even removed.
I don't know enough to tell you what to do, none of us do, but hopefully we can give you tools and materials with which you may better devise your own approach. My own experience seems to show that there is a great deal of misinterpretation and therefore new information often calls for reassessment of previous events and conversations, and you must be careful not to attach too much meaning to things that may yet turn out to be misinterpretations and be open minded where possible different interpretations of things are concerned. A misinterpretation that goes unnoticed by either party or by both can easily lead to more misinterpretations and very quickly become disastrous, a whole chain of events can leave each person with vastly different ideas of what happened due to a small difference of interpretation at the beginning.
Imagine that someone is complaining in the forum that her husband doesn't mow the lawn. He doesn't rake the leaves, or wash the car. He doesn't go for walks with her, won't play sports with her, just wants to sit around almost all the time. We might have a lot of negative things to say about him at this point. But we really don't have enough information. Consider that we don't know if he has legs or not. If he has no legs or is paraplegic this casts a very different light on things. Much of what negatively affects people with Asperger's I'll call social blindness. In some situations it's like having no legs, if only you realized that the person was missing this ability it would look a lot different. But being on the spectrum is different, because you'll never see direct evidence the way that you might see that a person has no legs or is in a wheelchair. In fact you'll never know for sure what they may or may not pick up on socially speaking in some areas with some of us on the spectrum. We can't even tell you that we missed something because of the blindness, since we don't know that we've missed something.
Hope this helps. No words were tortured (knowingly) during the making of this post.
