The Autism Relationships Handbook: How to Thrive in Friendships, Dating, and Love

by Joe Biel

In 2017, the American Journal of Public Health reported a study that the average autistic person only lives to be 36 years old. The leading cause of death is suicide because of social isolation—nine times more likely than our allistic (not neurodiverse) peers.

Sometimes we apply for a job and have better qualifications than the job requires but they hire someone else anyway. The missing piece is that we cannot see how others see us. We cannot see the outside view of how our amalgamated choices have bad optics. In short, I look like a sloppy mess who is a bit of a loose cannon or wild card. We cannot see this because we see each of our choices as separate, individual things rather than the composite that they create. On rare occasions I ask someone what happened and they point out a series of very specific and seemingly irrelevant things that I did and said. They explain to me that these things are immature and that other people notice these patterns and make judgments about me as a result.

Interesting

It’s hard for autistic people to break goals down into actionable steps and see their actions how neurotypicals (NTs) do. Autism professionals call this “Difficulty with Executive Function.”

We tend to have very dull mirror neurons, meaning we are not great at neuroception, the brain’s ability to detect the intent of others without conscious thought.

Autistic people are born without the instinctive ability to emotionally interface with 98% of the population. This is a difficulty that can be overcome. To be social and autistic is to do more emotional labor than allistics do. For example, to prevent ourselves from upsetting someone we often need to observe and respond to facial expressions, body language, subtle remarks, coded speech, and group dynamics; things that allistics can literally do without thinking.

Fight interprets your best course of action as beat their ass before your ass gets beat. • Flight determines get the fuck out of here! This isn’t safe! • Freeze means if you don’t respond at all, maybe they will go away.

I definitely default to flight but dabble in freeze. More shutdown if anything though.

Being able to assess threats and respond appropriately is a necessary survival skill and isn’t problematic in and of itself. But when our threat system is activated continuously or activated in very extreme circumstances, it can end up staying turned on. A trauma is essentially anything that overwhelms our ability to cope, and if we don’t achieve resolution and healing from traumatic events our brains continue to respond from this trauma-activated state.

Which can lead to these survival responses being frequently misapplied to situations where we feel under attack but aren’t facing any real threat. All kinds of things can feel threatening... like a final exam or a bullshit work deadline or wordlessly walking past a stranger on the street.

or everything or being in crowds or when everyone is in my dang space.

if you have formative experiences at a young age, these can downright define how you see the world. I was physically abused from a young age so I expected that I would be treated this way for my entire life. Consequently, I put myself in situations where this could happen because it did not occur to me that I had other options. This is exactly how a tripped threat assessment system left unhealed turns into a trauma response.

There is a sneaky and mean idea in our society that you have to love yourself in order to have other people love you. That’s unfair, because we all experience times in our lives where we are unhappy with who we are. And that doesn’t make us unworthy of love.

Instead of replacing a relationship, as in standard addictive behaviors, autistic people are frequently trying to make peace with our brains.

It’s important to figure out what we value rather than what we were trained to value, or value because our families did while we were growing up. This can be challenging to define for ourselves.

The reason for this is that 85% of adult autistics have alexithymia, the difficulty identifying and describing our own and others’ emotions. Fortunately, while this behavior may not be instinctive for you, it can be learned. At the same time we feel and react to our feelings much more intensely than allistics.

You will often feel a disconnect or a betrayal between your body and your mind as values from your upbringing are instilling feelings that you don’t want to have because they aren’t consistent with how you see the world now. If you were taught that you should always respect authority figures but one routinely insults you, your feelings will tell you when your actions are not in line with your values.

In Faith’s previous book Unfuck Your Boundaries, she wrote about how allistic people take in 11 million bits of information every second of the day but can only consciously attend to about 50 bits. Because autistic people experience 400% more resting brain activity, it can be difficult to focus on the relevant details because your reactions can be confusing or overwhelming. This is the core of the autistic experience. For this reason, we need to focus on our needs and wants, to know the difference, and to make decisions accordingly.

Boundaries are important because letting someone do something unpleasant that you don’t want does not make them like you more. Having no boundaries does not mean that other people will let you do what you want to them in return. In fact it does the opposite: it shows them that they have power over you, and that you are likely to allow them to do what they want to you with an increasing frequency and unpleasantness. So create and hold a boundary, especially as people test it.

I definitely need to be better about "not wanting to rock the boat" and need to stand up for myself and my values.

allistics mistake their feelings for their reality; part of their disability is that the narrative created by their feelings is actually more important to them than the events that actually happened or taking the opportunity to understand them differently.

Gender can be even more complicated. Maybe you identify with the body that you were born into but just hate all of the social expectations.

This is definitely what I identify with. I see myself as male but I do not feel like I fit into what is generally thought of as "masculine".

When I was a kid, no one knew that I was autistic. Everyone—including myself—knew that I was weird and unlike my neighbors, friends, classmates, and peers. But without the label of autism, I wasn’t segregated. I went to school and was mostly placed in regular classes, where I sometimes did very well and sometimes was bored and well below average, despite being hyper intelligent. I met all kinds of kids and lived in a neighborhood where I made friends, most of whom I’m still in touch with 40 years later. These relationships could be confusing and weird. Some of my “friends” teased me for saying the wrong things, wearing the “wrong” clothes, or liking different music than they did. When I responded by teasing them about their music, clothes, or statements, they got angry and defensive with me. The same rules did not apply. If I stared at someone out of curiosity, that was rude. If someone stared at me because I was weird, that was somehow okay. I came to learn that there was a social pecking order and some people did try to be my friend because they saw me as less than and able to be dominated. Others saw me as an equal or recognized that I wasn’t going to attempt to dominate them. When I asked people out on dates, I was often laughed at but sometimes—to my delight—I was accepted. Of course, I’d still be heartbroken when my date cheated on me or otherwise hurt my feelings. The idea that autistic people don’t have feelings is pathologized and projected onto us so furiously th...

And like all relationships, friendships have to be mutual, meaning that everyone is getting something out of it, even if it’s different things. So things like manipulation and deception really inhibit relationships, especially in the long term. Part of that is considering what you want or enjoy from each relationship in your life.

Lots of times I have felt used in friendships, only talked to when someone needed something. I have cut these relationships.

One of the major disabilities of allistic people is that because they are the majority, they will expect you to want the same things that they do.

Has been a good thing for me to learn

But sooner or later you’ll need to have “the talk.” You do not suffer from allistic disability. You are different and it’s probably not going to be news to the people in your life. They have probably established that your brain works differently and have maintained the relationship. This seems counterintuitive at first, but when you leave others to guess about your diagnosis, they will assume the worst possible scenario when you have a disagreement, or they witness behavior that doesn’t make sense to them. Brains are assholes like that. Remember: emotional narratives are more important to allistics than facts.

Andres Bravo explains, “At first it was scary to tell people I was autistic. Many allistics equate autism to a mental illness or a disease. Autism is nothing to be ashamed of. This is something that makes us unique, like being born left-handed instead of right-handed. Remembering this has boosted my confidence whenever I disclose to someone new. Folks pick up on your radical self-acceptance and tend to react with an open mind.”

researchers Coralie Chevalier and Robert Schultz believe that autistic children might not feel as “rewarded” by the act of engaging with others as allistics do, making us less motivated and, over time, less able to see the internal experiences of others. But this also means that when we are motivated, we are quite capable of empathy and do it “unexpectedly” well. Why is that unexpected? Allistics have a very difficult time understanding lived experiences outside of their own. In a more recent study, autistic people were found to have an equal ability to recognize regret and relief in others as neurotypicals do.

Part of the allistic disability is that even when you tell them that you aren’t frustrated but they think your tone sounds that way, they assume that you either aren’t aware of your feelings or you are lying to them. This applies to any emotion that they take personally. They will often react to how they think you feel, rather than how you actually feel. So you are left with a difficult choice: trying to make them understand or changing your behavior to their way of doing things. In my case, I chose to revisit and change my tone to acceptable forms for allistics. This is controversial in autistic circles because if allistic people had greater acceptance for us in the way that we naturally behave, no change would be necessary for our autistic traits. But either way you choose, this fork in the road will pose a difficult struggle.