Dating a woman with autism
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I want answers, but sometimes, there is no clear-cut line between friends and more. She met my appearance, saying I looked sharp. They think I don't care, and I'm bewildered. Five minutes later, my friend introduced me to the same attractive person as his new lover, putting me a highly-embarrassing situation. A NT spouse feels empty, unheard and frustrated. No one can keep up an act solo. I know the wavering self-esteem autistic often comes with autism. Was this a date?.
She was the only girl to have ever asked questions about his obsessive interests — chemistry, libertarian politics, the small drone aircraft he was building in his kitchen — as though she actually cared to hear his answer. To Jack, who has a form of autism called Asperger syndrome, her mind was uncannily like his. She was also, he thought, beautiful. So far they had only cuddled; Jack, who had dropped out of high school but was acing organic chemistry in continuing education classes, had hopes for something more. Yet when she smiled at him the next morning, her lips seeking his, he turned away. Kirsten, 18, a college freshman, drew back. If he knew she was disappointed, he showed no sign. Advertisement On that fall day in 2009, Kirsten did not know that someone as intelligent and articulate as Jack might be unable to read the feelings of others, or gauge the impact of his words. And only later would she recognize that her own lifelong troubles — bullying by students, anger from teachers and emotional meltdowns that she felt unable to control — were clues that she, too, occupied a spot on what is known as the autism spectrum. If he did not always say what she wanted to hear, she knew that whatever he did say, he meant. As he dropped her off on campus that morning, she replayed in her head the e-mail he had sent the other day, describing their brief courtship with characteristic precision. Only since the mid-1990s have a group of socially impaired young people with otherwise normal intelligence and language development been recognized as the neurological cousins of nonverbal autistic children. Parents and teachers have focused instead on helping them with school, friendship and, more recently, the workplace. Yet as they reach adulthood, the overarching quest of many in this first generation to be identified with Asperger syndrome is the same as many of their nonautistic peers: The recent recognition that their social missteps arise from a neurological condition has lifted their romantic prospects, they say, allowing them to explain behavior once attributed to rudeness or a failure of character — and to ask for help. Jack, it turned out, was on his way to court. A chemistry whiz, he had spent much of his adolescence teaching himself to make explosives and setting them off in the woods in experiments that he hoped would earn him a patent but that instead led the state police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to charge him with several counts of malicious explosion. The boyfriend told Kirsten that Jack had Asperger syndrome: his condition may have blinded him to the possibility that the explosions, which he recorded and posted on YouTube, could well be viewed by law enforcement authorities as anything other than the ambitious chemistry experiments he saw them. After reading of the intense interests that often come with the condition — the elder Mr. And as a high school girlfriend broke up with Jack over the course of that year, Jack began to wonder more urgently about the same question. But when she admitted at the outset of their senior year in high school that she envied his social ease, he had embraced the role of social coach. Photo Jack and Kirsten have trouble reading emotions and gauging social cues that others take for granted. Much of the time, Kirsten embraced the tutoring, which he punctuated with unabashed displays of affection. Diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder at age 11, she never heard the word autism. They were convinced that with some effort she could become as socially adept as he was. But she also chafed at his frequent instructions, which required constant, invisible exertion to obey. And she despaired of ever living up to his most urgent request: that she share her innermost feelings with him. So, too, did his apparent lack of concern for fitting in. They talked about their childhoods in Amherst, both social outcasts even among their geeky classmates, offspring of academics. He replied, at even greater length, about chemistry, his interest having shifted from explosives to designing new compounds for medical use. Jack, Kirsten noticed, bit his lips, a habit he told her came from not knowing how he was supposed to arrange his face to show his emotions. Kirsten, Jack noticed, cracked her knuckles, which she later told him was her public version of the hand-flapping she reserved for when she was alone, a common autistic behavior thought to ease stress. Their difficulty discerning unspoken cues might have made it harder to know if the attraction was mutual. Kirsten stalked Jack on Facebook, she later told him, but he rarely posted. But Jack, who had never known how to hide his feelings, wrote Kirsten an e-mail laying them out. She could not explain, she said. She knew only that she felt as if she had found her soulmate. Road Bumps From the beginning, their physical relationship was governed by the peculiar ways their respective brains processed sensory messages. Like many people with autism, each had uncomfortable sensitivities to types of touch or texture, and they came in different combinations. Jack recoiled when Kirsten tried to give him a back massage, pushing deeply with her palms. But Kirsten, who had always hated the feeling of light touch, shrank from his caress. He tried to kiss her, but it was hard for her to enjoy it, so obvious was his aversion. Neither did he like the sweaty feeling of hand-holding, a sensation that seemed to dominate all others whenever they tried it. They found ways to negotiate sex, none of them perfect. Even if she did something wrong, she believed, Jack would not leave her. Advertisement She moved out of her dorm and into his apartment that fall. Despite his distaste for her habit of scavenging, he did not complain when she decorated his bare living room with a plastic orange, magnetic trains and a Wolverine action figure rescued from the sidewalk. And when he rejected her suggestion that a cat would make the apartment cozier, she did not push it. She liked his large hands, with their long, tapered fingers and wide knuckles, and thought he was the most interesting person she had ever met. For his part, Jack rejoiced to find that Kirsten did not hold certain social expectations that had caused him anxiety with a high school girlfriend. He apologized, for instance, that he failed to get her a Christmas present because he had not been able to think of what she would like. When he explained that his lack of expression did not mean a lack of warmth for her — he often simply forgot — she devised a straightforward strategy to help him. One night as Kirsten cooked dinner, he peered into the pan where she was sautéing vegetables to comment on the way she had cut the cauliflower. He needed to be apart, to cool down. Once, he had tried to do as she requested, stiffly wrapping his arms around her, against all that seemed natural to him. But when it only seemed to elicit more tears, he did not try again. Instead, he hovered near her. But as she read about the manifestations of the condition, she recognized them — and not only in Jack. And then there was the characteristic of autism — focusing on a detail rather than the whole — that seemed to define daily, even hourly, it sometimes seemed. There was the one, for example, when they were trying to recount something that had happened at a particular hotel, but could not advance past the semantics of its size. But the cumulative effect was exhausting. No prescription would come with a diagnosis, Kirsten knew. The only drugs for autism treated side effects, like depression or anxiety; she already had medication for A. It might help her get more time for assignments at school, where the constant effort of social interaction sometimes left her drained and struggling even with tasks that should be easy for her. But mostly, she wanted to know if there was an explanation for the awkwardness that had plagued her for so long. Her answer came in the fall of 2010, the result of a six-hour battery of questionnaires and puzzles and a visit with a psychologist. Her ex-boyfriend, she suspected, felt similarly about her own diagnosis when she reported the news. Advertisement But Kirsten took heart in the official acknowledgment and the community it made her a part of. She changed her account setting at WrongPlanet. Kirsten, too, had always thought in pictures. People with autism, Dr. Grandin suggested, can more easily put themselves in the shoes of an animal than in those of another person because of their sensory-oriented and visual thought process. Suddenly, Kirsten yearned for the kind of uncomplicated comfort and affection that came with a small furry animal. She would talk to Jack again about a cat, she thought, closing the book. Robison put his arms around the woman he had been dating and would soon marry. That, she thought with a pang, was more than Jack would do unprompted even if there was no one around. Advertisement Yet when the opportunity arose to date other people, they did not take it. This past spring, a male student sitting next to Kirsten in anthropology class passed her a tic-tac-toe board he had drawn during a lecture. Nor did Jack, asked to lunch by his female lab partner, show any interest. But at Fox Lane Middle School in Bedford, N. Photo Jack with his father, John Elder Robison, who has written about his experiences with Asperger syndrome, including the despair he used to feel in his youth as he looked at happy couples around him. Credit Marcus Yam for The New York Times The talk about the cat, when she raised the issue again last spring, was not much of a talk. He was allergic, Jack told her. And the apartment already felt too small. It was obvious to him that it made no sense. Yet he had grown up with a cat, Kirsten pointed out. His allergies were not so bad. She could keep him supplied with Zyrtec. It was obvious to her, too. They could both see the meltdown coming. This time, as she huddled, sobbing, in a chair in the living room, he stretched out next to her on the couch. Exploring Therapies Jack and Kirsten considered autism a part of who they are, and fundamental to what drew them to each other. Advertisement But for a time this past summer, Jack became captivated by the idea of designing an empathy drug. On the nights when he was not manipulating the virtual economy of the computer game Eve Online, which he often played late into the night after Kirsten had gone to bed, he read all he could find on the hormone oxytocin, which has been linked to trust and social interaction. A small study suggesting that some of the social difficulties associated with Asperger syndrome could be relieved temporarily by inhaling an oxytocin nasal spray had generated media interest the year before. But to Jack, the more interesting possibility was a drug that worked on the same principle as the popular antidepressants called S. But they had noticed no such effect on themselves. And Kirsten had been working hard with her own therapist to develop strategies for soothing herself. A cat, she thought, would help more. In recent weeks, she had been showing him irresistibly cute pictures of kittens from a forum on Reddit. Instead, she asked if he would come to bed with her rather than staying up to play Eve. Giving Ground Around Thanksgiving, Jack began to think that he should let Kirsten get a cat. Maybe he would keep the idea a secret, he thought, and make it a Christmas gift. But Kirsten, taking matters into her own hands, stopped by the animal shelter one day to see if it was possible to get a hypoallergenic cat. There is no such thing, she told him on arriving home, but females, the shelter staff had told her, are less allergenic — so perhaps that was an option. He had not meant it as a final word. But Kirsten, feeling tears welling up, employed one of the new strategies she had discussed in therapy: going out for a drive, rather than wallowing. Photo Alex Plank, left, the founder of WrongPlanet. Jack called on her cellphone almost as soon as she pulled out of their street. In the apartment alone, he paced, the phone to his ear. One of the teenagers hummed the Wedding March. Kirsten gazed around the room. A few other adults had crowded in. In fact, they would have just enough time to reach the shelter before it closed after getting breakfast and buying a laser pointer with a lower-intensity red beam than his green one to test the prospective adoptees. Do you want to stop at the 7-Eleven? Kirsten: How can you not get stressed when that thing is blinking? Kirsten: You know what I mean, you get anxious about everything. Jack: I know we have at least 20 miles of gas. Kirsten: We have to drive seven miles there, and then seven back. Jack: No, we have three miles back. Kirsten: Should we just stop at 7-Eleven? Both of them breathed a sigh of relief when the only female kitten at the shelter pounced without hesitation on the red laser beam Jack shined into her cage. At home, however, she ran straight under the old-fashioned bathtub. Jack bent down and scooped up the kitten, holding her up to the mirror above the sink. Lindsmith said she visualized to cheer herself up. It is Twilight Sparkle, the nerdy intellectual, not Fluttershy, the kind animal lover. AUTISM, GROWN UP: Articles in this series are chronicling the coming of age of a generation of autistic youths. If you are a person with autism or a relative, neighbor, romantic interest or co-worker of someone who is, you can help inform this series. Share your story at nytimes. A version of this article appears in print on December 26, 2011, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Navigating Love and Autism.
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