I have run across a few of these in my reading, but most are things I think I might be seeing in my circle and am curious if any of you have experience with these symptoms. I apologise for the lack of pattern. I've been collecting this list over the last few weeks one at a time and I am simply putting them down here. I also don't know what my pronouns are, here (hahaha). Should I say "they" or "we?"
In some cases there is research on these things, but usually not.
They tend toward systematising professions and hobbies. We think first in terms of STEM, and I know plenty of those, but one was a history and studio art major (trying to throw me off the scent there) who took her graduate degrees as a Cartographer, specialising in choropleth maps. My wife is a librarian. Even the main aspie social worker I knew gravitated toward the forms we had to fill out and making sure that policy reflected what she thought were the proper answers that went in each box. She was always on those committees. ("No, their legal address should go on this line, while the address we are discharging them to should go on that line.")
They have extremes of response to parents when they reach adulthood - either complete rejection early or difficulty separating. I have known some who only developed a serious romantic relationship late, when their father had just died or was dying. This is often accompanied by distance from childhood home, unsurprisingly. Most people put distance or reduce distance with parents/childhood if they have a stronger-than-average response, not just Aspies. So that may be a downstream effect of attachment. Those at either extreme were among the least likely to have children of their own.
They are more likely to have an age gap with their spouse, but this can go in either direction. It makes a sort of intuitive sense, that among those with many choices in dating partners, they will attend to more similarities, but those who do not see general compatibility with that many others are more likely to have a wide variance. They see someone as "their sort of person," and more usual characteristics of choice become less important. I think this holds for outside interests as well. Aspies may not share as many interests with spouses as other couples. My limited sample does not reveal a stronger pattern for having similar IQ, at least not to my eyes.
Handwriting. I saw some research about fine-motor coordination. But boy are some of my aspies talented pianists, so I have to wonder what the numbers are on this. Their intensity and focus is actually quite an advantage, I think. Preference for nonfiction, which is definitely me but not the other ASD's I am thinking of, male and female. I saw Auditory processing disorder mentioned, but it includes so many things that I don't know what to make of it. I was looking specifically for impaired immediate-term word storage, so that they cannot repeat back what they said only a moment before, or immediately transmute what is said to them into another form. (My favorite example of this is "What is the high temperature supposed to be tomorrow?" "I think it's supposed to rain.")
Oh dear. Pathological Demand Avoidance, which I have linked to before. (You will have to adjust for adult examples yourself on this page.) I had never heard of it until a few weeks ago but recognised it immediately in at least four of my personal examples. All female, though that may be accidental. This is not just negative subjects, but anything with high emotion or controversy. There is a sort of over-delicacy that we used to associate with maiden aunts. I know one woman with two sisters who was (still is) quite reserved in many ways. When she was pregnant with her first child at around age 40, her mother and sister would giggle behind her back "This is the first time I've ever heard Amy say the word breast!" It came back to bite her when she had cancer symptoms that were somewhat embarrassing and did not tell anyone until it had become quite serious. These are men and women who have trouble saying "I love you," or even "I am very fond of you," or acknowledging that they have a girlfriend. Even after a couple of years. It has the schoolgirl feel of "Well I don't love you but I like you." Even by 10th grades that should be fading. Say what you mean. Yet they can't, or not easily. Adults don't usually try the evasions listed for the children "I can't hear you because I have my fingers in my ears la la la..." But trust me, they can be just as evasive in clever, adult ways. "I'm old enough to know that I don't have to respond to everything," or "I think that men who want to talk about wanting children are trying to showcase their virility and fertility, like those Babylonian statues..." or "I don't like talking about sex because I was a courtesan in a previous life and was executed by the Lady of the Manor."
The stereotype is that it is men who don't want to commit and just disappear - "ghosting" in common parlance - and I think they do get away with it with impunity more often than women. Interestingly, I think it is other women who police each other that "Nicole, you can't just say nothing. You have to tell the poor boy why you are breaking up with him." But aspies who restrict their friend groups have fewer women who will call them out, and starting quite young, seek out friends who are similarly evasive. Men - stereotype but I think true - don't comment either way.
I am wondering where Jane Studdock in That Hideous Strength fits into this. Even Peter Kreeft was dismissive of Lewis's delineation of her as "cartoonish, quite unfair," but I shake my head. I dated two (return edit: y'know, it might be more than two. Lewis wasn't wrong) Jane Studdocks, thank you very much, and the fiction character would actually be a wild improvement on both. Leading to...
On the feminism continuum between reflexive/hard-edged to "Really, I don't see what these other women are complaining about," they tend to the extremes. Yet it usually includes "I had to fight back against a lot of real difficulty/prejudice/oppression," ending with either "so these younger women should just stand up for themselves and stop bothering the rest of us" or "I became very sensitive to injustice and call it out whenever I see it." Two sides, same coin. Non-aspie feminsits will give you a lot more "One the one hand, on the other hand..."
This is already long and I am not halfway through my ever-growing list. Solution: Retitle this to include "Part One" with some mild apology.
Done.
3 comments:
I don’t know from “Aspie,” but I read these posts to try to understand others better than I do. I do agree that other minds work surprisingly differently from each other, and that a lot of human dispute comes down to unrecognized differences in thought on the other side. I think a lot of male/female issues come down to this, sometimes because the experiences giving rise to thoughts aren’t shared (or are experienced from fundamentally different perspectives), but also because the brains don’t work exactly the same way. I used to spend a lot of time trying to understand that.
"I do agree that other minds work surprisingly differently from each other, and that a lot of human dispute comes down to unrecognized differences in thought on the other side"....an outside speaker at a company management class I attended once emphasized this point. He said you will always be tempted to hire people who think in the same way you do...and that you should resist this temptation, because otherwise you will all have the same blind spots and happily all walk off the cliff together.
bsking convince me that this was the use of the Myers-Briggs. Not its accuracy (though I did write grudgingly that it is probably better than I credited), but because it is an easy framework that opens people's minds up to the idea that there are different ways to think, and that it self is of enormous use in many fields.
I am learning that this site is highly populated with people who have some autistic traits. Not shocking.
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