We're Not Broken
Page 16
I often used to find myself looking for love in places where I shouldn’t. Often, if someone showed me any measure of kindness, I would mistake it for romantic affection and go all in. Or I would ask a woman out for coffee or drinks thinking it was a date without realizing that she wasn’t on the same page as me. I know now that this was not the women’s fault; it was my mine for not being clear about my intentions.
Once I did wind up going out with a woman, I found myself overwhelmed by the expectations of dating, the proper etiquette, or what to say to a woman, outside the normal rules of “just be kind” and “don’t be a jerk.” While I am trying to enjoy the date, I am also trying to pay attention to what my date says and remember things she likes. Generally, I’m trying to see if she is a compatible partner, but I also want to make sure that I am paying attention to her interests and what matters to her. And this is to say nothing about the difficulty that comes with disclosing that I am autistic. Before I started writing about autism for a wide audience, on every date I went on, I knew eventually I’d need to find a way to disclose. Then, when I started writing about it, any woman with even a slight amount of skill at Googling could find out that I was autistic.
In some ways that liberated me because I no longer had to explain, and it filtered out women for whom that was a deal-breaker. But it also made me wonder just how much of myself I could be. Everyone frets about the “just be yourself” paradox of first dates, where you have to decide which parts you want to save until the second or third dates. And for autistic people, particularly those who defy expectations, the question of how much of yourself you should reveal is even more fraught.
Because I can speak and don’t “look autistic” (whatever the hell that means), people often think my autism is negligible and doesn’t define me. But it is still part of me. As a result, I worry just how autistic I can be on dates. For example, if I get excited talking about a subject, I worry I am dumping all the information I know on my partner (and if it’s a topic on which my date is an expert, I absolutely do not want to condescend to her by overexplaining). If we are seated across from each other, I worry she will take offense at me not making eye contact. Online dating during the coronavirus pandemic had definitely sucked, but one good thing about it was that it made eye contact almost a nonissue and I could fidget with my keys or a pen as a stim.
In short, masking and blending my autism makes dating difficult. I am used to hearing people say, “You don’t seem autistic.” When I was younger, I took it as a compliment. After being teased and singled out for being strange, hearing I blended in was the highest form of praise because it meant I belonged. But now, I resent that description because it means that I don’t fit people’s stereotype of autism. Trying not to “seem autistic” is a reaction to the fear of being “caught,” and that blending means you never know when to show your partner the real you.
Even though Chris Williams said it was likely that his previous romantic partners were neurodivergent in some way, he still struggled with how much of himself to reveal to them.
“It felt like I had to mask more, even though I didn’t have that word in other social settings,” he told me. But when he was with Cori, he felt he could be himself since he received love and affection from her. “I felt like our authenticity with each other was reciprocated and was appreciated, and I certainly think that helped us just kind of settle into each other very quickly,” he said of his relationship with Cori.
Cori said that before autistic people realize they are masking, it is hard to feel accepted. She said when she was with her previous partner in England, she had to be a completely different person and reinvent herself, and as a result, she wore that mask for a long time when she started seeing Chris.
“It’s something that I think about from time to time,” she said, speaking to Chris. “Like, did you fall for my mask in some ways?” Chris responded, “Yeah. It’d be interesting to ponder that.”
Ultimately, my life and my relationships with people improved when I got serious about going to therapy and being transparent with my therapist. That led me to take a critical look at the way I had treated women in the past, how I approached both friendships and romantic partners. This in turn led me to listen and make amends to the friends and other women in my life. I stopped trying to force women into liking me. I stopped trying to smother them in the hopes they would reciprocate my affection. I became more okay with rejection when things didn’t work with someone I genuinely liked. Essentially, I worked on becoming someone I would want to call a friend or partner. Contrary to popular belief, autistic people are not unempathetic, and multiple studies have debunked that myth.
Once autistic people discover themselves, become at ease with their condition, they can find fulfilling and successful relationships, like Anlor Davin and Greg Yates, who are both autistic and live in the Bay Area, did.
Davin—who, when we met in a café in San Francisco, was wearing a black blazer with a cap evocative of her upbringing on the west coast of France—spent years trying to figure out what made her different from others. She said that her autism was overlooked because of her gender and that when she was finally diagnosed, it drove her to tears. “It was not tears of unhappiness, it was like, ‘Yes. I understand.’ And then the pieces of the puzzle started to get together,” she said.
Yates met Davin at a picnic held by the Autism Asperger Spectrum Coalition for Employment and Networking Development (AASCEND), a nonprofit that focuses on supporting autistic people in the Bay Area that Yates cofounded. Incidentally, the first thing Davin did after she was diagnosed was go to an AASCEND meeting, and she said it was “a real relief” to be around other autistic people.
“I mean, we understand one another even if we’re different, all of us. We still have some similarities including main things, like the sensory stuff,” Davin said. Davin said it was an anxious time for her and she was also grateful she was not diagnosed in her native France, a country whose treatment of autistic people has been denounced by the United Nations and where parents are often pressured to send their children to institutions.
But just because two people are autistic does not mean that they will gel, the same way that dating within one’s own race, class, or religion doesn’t guarantee success. Yates says one thing that helps with their relationship is the fact that they are very different people.
“Our autisms are not the same but there is some overlap,” he said. “And so one of the things that keeps us together is the fact that we’re both autistic and we recognize how much of the challenge of autism can be hidden.”
Before Yates met Davin, he was married to a neurotypical woman with whom he had two children. He’d always wanted to have a relationship and figured that since he was smart (he has a degree in biophysics from Berkeley and was briefly in a PhD program at MIT), he could synthesize social behavior with his intellect. “Like a little hamster on a wheel, I worked hard to keep that illusion up,” he said of this relationship. Once he began to meditate, however, something shifted, and Yates felt he no longer had to hide his autism from his first wife.
Meditation plays a big role in Davin and Yates’s relationship. Davin practices a style called Soto Zen, and the two lead a meditation group called Autsit. Davin agrees with Yates that meditation plays a major role in their relationship. She also says that one benefit is they understand how each other’s brains work. “Well, for me, there’s a respect of the other person in terms of their sensory stuff or their giving facts all the time,” she told me.
Throughout the discussion, Davin and Yates occasionally huddled and discussed things between themselves and made sure they were on the same page. Plenty of times, they finished each other’s sentences or helped clarify a detail, like the exact time they met. At one point, Yates mentioned that they recognized that their challenges could be hidden and tried to be sensitive to the other person’s needs, and Davin told me that at times Yates slammed doors, which was hard for her sensory processing.
“Human Touch”
The belief that autistic people are incapable of having relationships means that autistic people are often not taught about consent and bodily autonomy. Humorous portrayals of autistic men navigating romantic relationships as in Atypical overlook the severe consequences that autistic people can face in the real world. The Sun, a newsletter for Autism Delaware, explained some of the many reasons for misunderstanding around autism and sexuality in its Summer 2017 issue.
“Fears and stereotypes often impede individuals with disabilities,” the newsletter said. “Stereotypes include the belief that people with ASD are childlike, nonsexual, over-sexual, unable to understand, unable to give consent, uninterested in sexual relationships, unable to develop or maintain a sexual or romantic relationship, or not able to get married or have children.”
These misperceptions make it all the more difficult for people on the spectrum. If autistic people are all childlike or nonsexual, then there is no reason to teach them about consent, because there is an assumption that they will never experience sex. If they are over-sexual, then teaching them about sex may ignite their overactive libidos. If they are unable to give consent, then teaching them harms their safety. All of these misperceptions are rooted in the idea that autistic people need protection from neurotypical people. Caretakers must either protect autistic people from an overly sexualized world that can prey on them or defend the world from a hypersexual autistic person. As a result, when men like Sam in Atypical break the law or violate a woman’s privacy, society often gives them a pass.
Amy Gravino, the autistic relationship coach at Rutgers University, said of Sam’s indiscretions on the show: “[For] this young man, there are no consequences. But that’s not reality. If you commit a crime, a sexual crime, you will go to jail.”
Autistic people have been fighting the stereotype that they don’t understand consent for years. Before the 1970s, autistic people were mostly thought incapable of having relationships. And to this day, little (if any) attention is paid to autistic people’s sexuality. Research confirms that parents underestimate their autistic kids’ sexual experience. A survey of forty-three parents and their autistic sons in Belgium and the Netherlands in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders found that half of the parents surveyed said they did not know that their children had masturbated or experienced an orgasm. Conversely, very few parents overestimated their neurotypical sons’ experiences. Gravino emphasized that one problem with teaching consent is that autistic people are often infantilized, so they typically don’t receive proper sex education.
“So, when you’re always seeing someone as a child, you’re thinking that they’re innocent; you’re not seeing them as a fully realized adult with the same desires and needs as other neurotypical adults,” she said. “And so parents will say, ‘Well, no, if I tell my child about sex, they’re going to be thinking about sex and want to have sex.’ And it’s like, ‘I can guarantee you they are already thinking about it.’ They’re not going to suddenly put ideas in their head.”
Much of the fear around teaching autistic people about sex and consent assumes that they don’t have the same sexual desires as nonautistic people or are completely asexual. It is also due to the fear that they could either get hurt or make bad decisions. But while some autistic people are indeed asexual (just like some neurotypical people are asexual), the decision to have a sex life should not be made for them any more than it should be made for nonautistic people. But much like the right to live independently, autistic people’s right to have control of their own sexuality means they have the right to make poor decisions, get their hearts broken, and fail as much as neurotypical people. (To be clear, when I say “bad decisions,” I do not mean sexual assault. If an autistic person inflicts harm on someone, I believe they should face the consequences of their actions as any person should. “I’m autistic” is not an excuse.) Autistic people have the right to make mistakes as much as their neurotypical counterparts.
That said, some believe that there needs to be a sex education course designed with autistic people specifically in mind. “Because we tend to learn differently, the sexual education curriculum programs that are geared towards neurotypical individuals may not really work for us in terms of being able to effectively learn things like consent and boundaries and so forth,” Lindsey Nebeker, a development specialist at the Autism Society of America who is autistic herself, told me. “And for me, I know, learning about boundaries and consent was something that I didn’t pick up on.”
Nebeker and her husband, Dave Hamrick, are perhaps one of the most prominent autistic couples in this country. Since the two met in 2005, they have been featured on Good Morning America and were the subjects of a documentary called Autism in Love. When I visited Nebeker and Hamrick in 2016 for an article I was writing for the Washington Post on sex and consent, they were in their first year of marriage but had been living together after two years of dating.
One of the problems when it comes to autism and consent is that for most people, autistic or not, their understanding of sex—and therefore consent—is shaped by their surroundings and environment. In Nebeker’s case, her parents didn’t necessarily relay in-depth information about sex to her (growing up in a devout Pentecostal family where I had only one “talk” with my dad while attending strict Christian high schools that taught abstinence over biology, I can relate).
“We didn’t have a lot of those conversations and that’s why, as I was growing up, I would have issues with knowing what consent actually meant,” Nebeker told me.
Like a disproportionally high number of autistic people, Nebeker is a survivor of sexual abuse, which took place at the hands of a high-school teacher while she was in boarding school.
“That was probably the greatest example of my life of being taken advantage of,” she told me. Nebeker said it was a confusing relationship and she still questions if her teacher knew what he was doing. “I think even throughout that and being hurt by what happened, there’s a little part of me that still loves him.” Many survivors of abuse can feel conflicted emotions about their abusers and Nebeker is no different.
Nebeker said one of the reasons she might have been a vulnerable target is that, like many autistic people, she had difficulty finding acceptance as a child, so she craved validation and affirmation. “I think that gets forgotten with our autistic population,” she told me. “I think one of the reasons I had fallen into being taken advantage of is because I didn’t feel I was worthy of being loved.”
As a result, when Nebeker is intimate with Hamrick, they have to navigate her trauma with caution. “He always, every time before we get sexually intimate, he always asks me first,” Nebeker said. Hamrick echoed this. “It’s like, when I go into her intimate space, it’s nice to have the consent to do it,” Hamrick told me. I find this to be one of the most romantic things any partner could do; love is simply wanting what is in another person’s best interest. Nebeker and Hamrick show how respectful autistic people can be when it comes to sex, a contradiction to the idea that autistic people don’t understand sensitive subjects like consent.
“Could You Be Loved”
The media’s single-minded focus on autistic men has often excluded LGBTQ people, who make up a sizable portion of the autistic community.
One study from Autism Research from 2018 surveyed 309 autistic individuals and 310 typically developing individuals and found that while 30.9 percent of the typically developing group reported being nonheterosexual, 69.7 percent of the autistic group reported being nonheterosexual, with higher rates of bisexuality, homosexuality, and asexuality. The monolithic portrayal o
f autistic people’s sexuality prevents LGBTQ autistic people from navigating their dual identities.
Gravino said this exclusion erases queer people from discussions of autism, dating, and sex.
“Imagine you’re on the spectrum and you want to be accepted as being a sexual being and an adult, and then you’re LGBTQ on top of that. That’s a whole other kind of barrier and challenge that a lot of folks end up facing,” she said.
Indeed, plenty of autistic people interviewed in this book identify as LGBTQ. Jessica Benham, the autistic state legislator, is bisexual and married to a man. Julia Bascom, the executive director at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, is a lesbian. John Marble, the former Obama administration official now dedicated to helping autistic people find work, is openly gay and worked for the national Stonewall Democrats organization, which promotes LGBTQ rights.