06-28-2007, 03:32 PM
I'm wondering if anyone knows of any good websites or books pertaining to NTs forming egalitarian, peer relationships, be they romantic, platonic, or somewhere in between - with people on the autistic spectrum.
I thought it was pretty cool to find this piece written by an autist as advice for NT's who want to be friends with AC's:
http://thiswayoflife.org/friendship.html
There are some books and stuff on Aspie-NT marriages, but I don't feel that they're very relevant. For one thing, I'm not married yet. I'm an NT in a relationship with an AC (mild Asperger traits, self-dx'ed and his AS-issues therapist agrees, but his one attempt to get an official DX wound up with him being diagnosed as a normal depressed person) that is sort of in between a platonic friendship and a romance, though to simplify things we just say we're dating. I found the website above more relevant than a lot of blurbs I've read about Aspie-NT marriages, where the Aspie isn't much like my SO and the NT isn't much like me, even though he's the guy and I'm the girl, making it the "typical" scenario in that sense.
The other problem I find is that there seems to be a lot of stuff out there, from both Curebie/Pathology and Neurodiversity/Freedom perspectives, that promotes pessimism about the very possibility of ACs and NTs forming satisfying peer relationships with one another. From the Curebie/Pathology perspective, most stuff is geared toward NTs in authoritarian or authoritative relationships with AC's - parents and teachers relating to offspring or students - and they would imply that "uncured" ACs are biologically incapable of forming peer relationships with anybody due to their "disabilities." Which is BS. Relationships involve effort from both sides, and to be honest, we NTs tend to be friggin' lazy about them, to the point that in American culture, many of us don't form very deep or fulfilling relationships with one another. Current US culture puts way too much of a premium on superficial charm and makes getting to know people in depth and over the long term more difficult or at least easier to be distracted from.
And from the Neurodiversity/Freedom perspective, the focus tends to be on ACs forming peer relationships with other ACs (Aspie dating sites, etc.), and they create the pessimistic sense that we NTs are constitutionally incapable of relating to ACs because we cannot understand the inner workings of an autistic mind and usually wouldn't even want to try to anyway. But didn't ACs, especially in more old-fashioned, close-knit, less mercenary and superficial societies often manage to at least have a circle of NT platonic friends who accepted their quirks? Surely many of them formed romantic relationships as well, otherwise there probably wouldn't be as many AC's today, because the genetic traits responsible for autism would be left to random chance mutations to develop. I think that if NTs can learn to form peer relationships with people who obviously think and feel very differently from themselves, they'd be much more capable of relating to one another as well, because perceiving, tolerating, and bridging differences are skills needed to relate to anyone, because all people are different. This kind of stuff brings out the Utopian dreamer in me, even though I concluded as a teenager that both perfect utopias and perfect dystopias are probably impossible to maintain.
So, anything that defies the pessimistic patterns mentioned above would be very much welcome. Although if I really care about this issue enough to complain about it, maybe I should quit my bitchin' and start my own website with my SO or something.
I thought it was pretty cool to find this piece written by an autist as advice for NT's who want to be friends with AC's:
http://thiswayoflife.org/friendship.html
There are some books and stuff on Aspie-NT marriages, but I don't feel that they're very relevant. For one thing, I'm not married yet. I'm an NT in a relationship with an AC (mild Asperger traits, self-dx'ed and his AS-issues therapist agrees, but his one attempt to get an official DX wound up with him being diagnosed as a normal depressed person) that is sort of in between a platonic friendship and a romance, though to simplify things we just say we're dating. I found the website above more relevant than a lot of blurbs I've read about Aspie-NT marriages, where the Aspie isn't much like my SO and the NT isn't much like me, even though he's the guy and I'm the girl, making it the "typical" scenario in that sense.
The other problem I find is that there seems to be a lot of stuff out there, from both Curebie/Pathology and Neurodiversity/Freedom perspectives, that promotes pessimism about the very possibility of ACs and NTs forming satisfying peer relationships with one another. From the Curebie/Pathology perspective, most stuff is geared toward NTs in authoritarian or authoritative relationships with AC's - parents and teachers relating to offspring or students - and they would imply that "uncured" ACs are biologically incapable of forming peer relationships with anybody due to their "disabilities." Which is BS. Relationships involve effort from both sides, and to be honest, we NTs tend to be friggin' lazy about them, to the point that in American culture, many of us don't form very deep or fulfilling relationships with one another. Current US culture puts way too much of a premium on superficial charm and makes getting to know people in depth and over the long term more difficult or at least easier to be distracted from.
And from the Neurodiversity/Freedom perspective, the focus tends to be on ACs forming peer relationships with other ACs (Aspie dating sites, etc.), and they create the pessimistic sense that we NTs are constitutionally incapable of relating to ACs because we cannot understand the inner workings of an autistic mind and usually wouldn't even want to try to anyway. But didn't ACs, especially in more old-fashioned, close-knit, less mercenary and superficial societies often manage to at least have a circle of NT platonic friends who accepted their quirks? Surely many of them formed romantic relationships as well, otherwise there probably wouldn't be as many AC's today, because the genetic traits responsible for autism would be left to random chance mutations to develop. I think that if NTs can learn to form peer relationships with people who obviously think and feel very differently from themselves, they'd be much more capable of relating to one another as well, because perceiving, tolerating, and bridging differences are skills needed to relate to anyone, because all people are different. This kind of stuff brings out the Utopian dreamer in me, even though I concluded as a teenager that both perfect utopias and perfect dystopias are probably impossible to maintain.
So, anything that defies the pessimistic patterns mentioned above would be very much welcome. Although if I really care about this issue enough to complain about it, maybe I should quit my bitchin' and start my own website with my SO or something.