I really like this girl so I want to help her. In the beginning our relationship was pretty good but I saw signs of some social skills problems. I thought she was just a little socially immature but I chalked that up to other reasons and felt maybe she could improve.
As she got more comfortable with me she actually got significantly worse. I thought she just was naturally not liking me and we weren't compatible but I soon realized she literally hit nearly all the symptoms of autism and not a little, to the max. I would bet my life on her being autistic so I'm not looking for anyone to cast doubt on my diagnosis. She's just good at hiding it as best she can and frankly, I had no prior experience with autism so I wasn't really trained to catch the signs. I don't think her parents are aware either (for various reasons) and she can't keep friends long enough for them to truly understand. I might be the only one with enough perspective to diagnose it. I asked her if she would be willing to go to a psychologist to help with her anxiety issues but she refused because she's scared of them.
Any advice on how to bring this up to her? I'm thinking maybe just tell the mom but I'm not sure the mom will believe me or do anything about it. The dad would be worse.
I was about to just call it quits on our relationship because it's def not working but I do think if she accepts she has autism and works with me it could potentially work. She's given 0 indication she thinks she has autism and she works in social work with disabled people and had training on autism so I suspect she's potentially in denial or scared of accepting it.
Looking for some advice.
Of all the potentially autistic women I know of, literally none of them have been resistant to self-diagnosing. They fricking love taking those dubious little "are you autistic?" questionnaires at least. There's also a whole genre of women who like to describe how autism in women presents differently and when they find those they've all been relieved to finally see themselves described more accurately than the diagnostics for male autists. Unfortunately they're also skew very heavily towards a delusional "women affected most" mindset, so it's also very likely to ruin a perfectly good woman with man hating if you stay hands off, because autists are also stupidly impressionable when they finally feel seen, especially the female ones.
Also, living with an autistic person is a different experience, be prepared for a lot of weird demands about food and complaints about regular moving around the house noises, if you ever reach that point.
I will also say, if you're thinking very long term, autistic women are not great mothers. The sensory sensitivity makes them terrible at handling the chaos of kids having fun, and since kids learn a lot of social skills be mimesis, you'll have to work extra hard to counteract them copying all the social faux pas and lack of eye contact from the mom. And they just don't seem to connect as well with the kids, probably the lack of eye contact again and not being able to read their body language when their communication skills are still developing. So they will probably let you down and not pull their weight in that aspect of life.
There you go.
Lol, well yes, that too. Just keeping things specific for the autists out there. 😜
Well, she also has epilepsy and I think being sick has always been a problem for her. She's always wanted to be normal I guess. Maybe she's in denial because she doesn't want to admit she's got another problem? This girl is super "strong independent woman* type who'd never play the victim. She likes to do everything herself without any help and she thinks she's right about everything so I think in her mind she's probably thinking it's everyone else who's wrong whenever there's a relationship issue.
The problem is she has destroyed pretty much all her relationships because of her autism because of the fact she always thinks she's right and she seems to lack introspection as to perhaps she's the problem.
Yet, she will complain how she has no friends, can't make any friends and the friends she does make all ditch rather quickly. In the time I've dated her, she's already lost her 3 closest friends she had at the time who were new to begin with then made some new friends and lost those within a couple months. She also got fired at her job.
She says she doesn't want kids because of the epilepsy. Interesting to know about the sensory stuff. We probably won't be having kids so no issues there.
I'd be fine with her negatives if her positives come out enough. Our biggest issue right now is communication and memory. I've always had a pretty bad memory and especially of small things. She'll tell me something and I might not remember it exactly but if I ask her to confirm it again, she'll get mad because in her mind that means I don't care about her but some of the stuff she's expecting me to remember is pretty unreasonable and ultimately shouldn't be a big deal. There's also times we'll both completely misinterpret what either of us meant and she'll get mad. She sometimes doesn't build up proper context and is too blunt so I don't pickup what she meant right away (I'm also bad with this normally anyhow). I'm a very sarcastic person with very subtle jokes. I didn't realize why this was such a problem until now.
There's more issues. We're been dating over a year and normally I can bear with most issues but she's gotten worse over the last few weeks and I've had to step back a bit. I feel like if she accepted being autistic and put effort in to work with me on things, it could work though.
There's a point in her favor, there won't be a circle of unmarried hens encouraging her to cheat.
Ok for starters, good news, it's likely not autism actually. Epilepsy can create a pragmatic disorder that resembles autism in many ways and is often confused for it, but it isn't autism. It can cause a sort of pseudo-autism that doesn't have one clear label (yet) but if you look up 'epilepsy+induced+pragmatic+disorder+social+communication' or something you'll find what I mean. While on the surface they look very similar, the epileptics are far easier to work with usually, with better outcomes and more of a calmer general helplessness needing regular encouragement. Not about absolutely everything of course, they can believe they are right about stuff (with no insight) and be insistent sure, but there's a generally less confrontational style to them, as compared to a true autist. You also get better masked word-finding difficulties, more severe than the mild autist's, but remarkably well masked. And a range of other language and social/pragmatic issues too...
I'll stop there. Go see a professional in your area if she wants to. Could be either/or neither, or both, that's always possible. But given the other possibilities I'd just ease up on trying to give her that first diagnosis for now, particularly given how stigmatised it is, and given that you might be barking up the entirely wrong tree, there is this big other thing that epilepsy causes and is worth investigating for anyone with those concerns that people are often far more willing to consider and investigate. What you wanna do though, is make sure the speech pathologist is aware of that epilepsy-induced possibility, if she wants to work on her language and communication, rather than them barking up that autism tree too, which a new speech path or just one without much experience with epilepsy might do.
Might wanna be more careful in future with that.
Nah, that's fine. I just wanted to avoid turning the topic into 50 people arguing about what her true condition is unless someone truly knew. I mainly wanted to know the best steps to take to best get her some help in a way she'd be ok with. I'll look into the pragmatic disorder.
Edit - I looked into it and I don't think this is it. Autism still seems more likely than this. Of course, I'm not an expert and there are some things that have merit in this and others that don't. In any case she's got some form of brain damage likely tied at least in part to the epilepsy that's showing as autism causing negative impacts in her day-to-day life and isn't fully aware of it or its extent of the way it's impacting things in her life.
Well if that's what you want to try, then yeah maybe focus on the developing area of male/female differences in autism presentation and see if that resonates better with her.
But it feels important to give a bit of well traveled older guy advice. You can't fix her. We always think we can but it's just a pipe dream.
You can give her support to temporarily overcome the problems, but she won't be fixed. Her default state will always be what she is without your support, and the problems will arise again every time you stop holding her up, and you'll have to fix them again and again until you can't or won't anymore. If you're not determined for kids and forced to pick the least bad option, then I would not bother signing up for that thankless and endless task. Have some fun, recoup your debts, and move on until you can find one who can handle her own mental problems herself.
Autism or not, this right here is your problem. In my experience in relationships, if your woman doesn't humble herself and say, "I'll do whatever you want babe. Whatever you think is right.", then it's just going to go downhill over time. If she gets mad at you over not remembering something or a miscommunication, you need to make sure she understands that her expectations are unreasonable. Don't ever apologize for something that's not your fault. The communication problems that you brought up will probably be a lot easier to tolerate if you can just get her to admit that she's wrong or made a mistake.
Personally I'm skeptical that counseling in itself has real benefits, especially since autism has no known cure. Many psych professionals have a tendency to lean feminist too, so definitely do not let her talk to a therapist about relationship problems.
I think the definition and symptomology for autism has been expanded to an almost absurd level in the last decade or two.
And there's nothing even resembling a coherent and measurable definition or explanation of what's going on with the brain afaik.
Analysis is almost purely centered on observable behavior, with only a hodge podge of convoluted and inconsistent neural-physical evidence.
Not that I'm saying it doesn't exist. But I've seen time and time again people refer to just about every possible quirk or problem as autistic now. And I think it's pretty damned absurd.
Yep, pretty much every disorder that is diagnosed based on behavior suffers from the same problem. Except in severe cases, which are easily recognized in childhood, I think people would be better off if they just stopped trying to diagnose everything as a disorder.
Yeah, I'm well aware of this. I don't really think the relationship is going to work but I still care enough about her to want to help her if possible even if she can't be relationship material. The "being right about everything" is also a young person thing that tends to drop off a little with age as people start to realize it's bad for socializing and doesn't matter but an autistic person might never change in this way. Not sure.
My geriatric mother is still like this. She'll bring up shit I did as a teenager to "win" arguments.
If you think women will just age out of their solipsism, then you're going to have a bad time.
Autists do have a reputation for being very arrogant, but they don't have to be. She could change, but a meaningful change would probably require some emotional event, something that really slaps her in the face and makes her realize, "I need to change myself or else nobody will want to be around me."
If you ever want to have a family, and you should if you are White and healthy, you are wasting your precious time.
I'm confident I've already missed the opportunity for a family and that what I'd want from a woman to decide to have children with her is nearly impossible so I'm not too concerned about this.