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It seems that most of the subjects on Channel 4’s The Undateables are autistic. Not sure if this is for entertainment value or whether it’s because being autistic really is a barrier to successful dating.

Honesty and Too Much Information

I think that one of the problems that I have is that I am too honest. I give too much information when it’s not needed, and this can sometimes cause problems.

I recently lost a friend because of this. She was already mad at me for something else that I had thoughtlessly done, and on the evening that we resolved that, I screwed up again. We were texting away when someone else contacted me. She was upset so I told her to call me if she wanted a listening ear. 3 hours later, when I put the phone down, my friend had left several voice clips and had gone to bed.

She sounded a little disappointed that I’d not responded, so I sent a message apologising, explaining that I’d been on the phone for 3 hours, and that I’d had a really interesting chat.

The tone of our conversation changed again the next day, and she cancelled plans to visit me. We didn’t speak again until the end of the week when she bought the phone call up, saying that I’d made her second best.

There was nothing to the phone call. I have no interest in the person I was speaking with, yet by telling my friend she feels that I do have an interest, and that I’ve made her redundant.

I didn’t need to explain to my friend why I’d not replied to her. I could even have lied and said that I had fallen asleep, but I didn’t. Instead I gave too much information. To be fair, I didn’t see and still can’t see why it would be a problem.

So if I can screw up a friendship so easily, imagine how good I am at screwing up a relationship by not telling white lies, or by giving too much information.

In my last relationship with Nathalie, she demanded 100% honesty. She said that she’d been lied to too many times in the past and whilst she might not like the truth, she’d probably get angry but then get over it.

So I was truthful with her. At the time I was going through the post breakup stage with Maria, and it wasn’t always easy. Nat would ask what was going on I would tell her. Looking back this was a mistake, but because she said that even the hint of one lie would be the end of us, I told her everything truthfully.

I guess that she couldn’t handle it. She started to make things up, based upon what I’d told her, and this would lead to frustration on my part and I’d end up putting the phone down on her.

I don’t know what the solution is though. By nature I just tell the truth, give all the information, even when it would be safe and sensible not to do so.

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I had a meltdown on Friday night, and 3 days later I’m still knocked for six, stuck in the meltdown hangover.

Since separating from Maria almost 12 months ago, I’ve been a member of several closed singles groups on Facebook. No one caught my attention until a few months ago when Jenny arrived in the group.

There was something different about Jenny. She didn’t seem to be taking the group seriously and her posts and comments went over the heads of the many guys who were drooling over her because of her stunning looks and her risqué comments. I saw something else though, a witty sarcastic intelligence. I had a gut feeling that I would meet her one day, and I did.

We had a bit of a fall out a couple of weeks ago. Our friendship is very new, just 6 weeks old, but already I know that she’s someone that I want in my life forever. We’d been chatting 19 hours daily, swapping almost 7000 messages in just 3 weeks, 1163 on one day alone (yeah, Aspie stats obsession!). I even visited her for 5 days just a few weeks after we first spoke.

She felt like a friend on steroids. We just got on, we had an affinity. We were on the same level. It’s rare for me to find someone like that. There certainly didn’t seem to be anything of a romantic nature from either side, not that I would really notice if there was.

So when we fell out my anxiety levels heightened. I didn’t want to lose this amazing new friend. We quickly resolved our issue, but then it all went wrong again within hours and I wasn’t sure why. I asked if she was still coming to visit me at the end of the week and she said it wasn’t a good idea, so rather than pick up the phone and resolve the issue, I put my head in the sand and that was the last we spoke until 4 days later.

At the end of the week I sent her flowers, to get her attention. I knew that she’d contact me; she’s too polite not to. We chatted and things seemed to be smoothed over, but then she just turned on me. For three hours we had a circular conversation that ended up with me going into a meltdown due to the futility of it.

To be told over and over that she didn’t believe what I was saying, that I was playing some kind of game, frustrated me. How do you prove that you’re not lying? I quickly got closer and closer to meltdown. It didn’t make sense to me. I surmised that she was jealous of my other friendships. Was she into me in “that” way, and I’d not realised? I’m pretty rubbish at spotting that.

Eventually I started to react to what was being said rather than act rationally. I could see the friendship slipping away and I needed a way to let her know that I wasn’t interested in others, that my only interest was her friendship. So I told her that I loved her. Yeah, I know. Dumb move because I don’t. I’ve no idea what I feel for her but it’s not that. I guess I thought saying that would prove to her that I wasn’t interested in anyone else. I was in meltdown and all cognitive ability goes out of the window.

So now we’re not speaking again because it’s all a little weird. I miss her. I miss our daily conversations about nothing much. I’m afraid that I’ve ruined what would have been one of the best friendships of my life, and I don’t know what to do next.

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Following on from parts one, two and three, I’m giving an rough outline of the course of my life to date, not necessarily with regards Aspergers directly, but just to give the history of how I’ve got to where I am.

Socialising

At the end of part two I mentioned that I started to spend most of my weekends in Manchester with my friend Emma. She was very sociable and would have friends over for socials every weekend, so I started to learn how to socialise. I realised that I am a slow burn. It takes me a while to get to know people, but once I know them I can be very sociable, but I have to be comfortable with them. I also quickly came to learn that if Emma wasn’t there, then I would really struggle making conversation with people that I could easily talk to when she was there.

It’s the same today. I can be sociable with Maria’s friends when she is present, but if I picked them up to bring back to our house, or when taking them home, I would always feel very uncomfortable making conversation. I need the comfort blanket of knowing that there is someone there to bail me out if needed.

Moving To Manchester

At the start of 2001, Emma asked me to take her car to the local car wash. Enroute we noticed that the show house had been opened on a new Barrat Homes development, so we stopped and went for a mooch. I left an hour later having bought a new home that I didn’t realise I needed. The sales rep was clearly very good at her job. To date it’s still the biggest impulse buy of my life.

On the day that I took ownership of the house we found out that my mum had cancer for the third time in 9 years, and this time it was terminal. This kind of threw things up into the air a bit. I know that sounds a bit glib and coldhearted, but I’ll write in a later post about how I coped with that.

My mum was severely ill; she could not keep food down due to the nature of the cancer, so she was hospitalised and then moved to a hospice. She was in for 17 weeks before she eventually passed away on 22nd August 2001. So I delayed moving into my house in Manchester and stayed at the home I’d shared with my mum so that I could easily visit her, which I did every day.

As I needed to furnish my house in Manchester I asked the sales rep if she would have a key and let deliveries in for me, which she agreed to do. Her name was Maria, and she was a vision of beauty. To be honest one of the reasons why she’d managed to sell me a house that I didn’t know I was looking for was because I instantly fancied her. Over the course of the months that she was helping me out we struck up a friendship, and then one day she told me that she was moving sites. I was gutted.

I didn’t see her again until a few days after my mum passed away when I visited her new site. It was on this day that she told me that she was pregnant. It had never dawned on me to ask her if she was single, so my heart sank, but it turned out that she had been engaged, but had split up recently.

Our friendship developed slowly and I first invited her over a few weeks before her daughter was born. To this day she still points out to me that you should let the heavily pregnant woman sleep in the double bed and you take the single in the spare room, but hey I’m Aspie, and I don’t know what it’s like to be pregnant.

I finally found the courage to ask her out on a proper date in the following April. We dated but as with my previous relationships it only lasted for a few months before things went wrong. As before it seemed to be down to my behaviour, this time my anxiety rather than lack of social skills. We remained friends and they came to stay with me every weekend for the next 10 years. It was as though we were a family, but we were not in a relationship. We’d holiday together, and do all the things that couples with young kids do, but there was no romantic or sexual connection.

Then one day she told me that she had met someone. My world fell apart instantly. I’d been in love with her for years, but had never dared to tell her. I’d taken her to Paris to fly on Concorde for my 30th birthday in 2003 and told her that weekend that I loved her, and she didn’t speak to me for over a month. So I feared that if I told her again that she’d never see me again. I’d lose my weekend happy families routine, and I’d be alone.

I would constantly tell myself that I’d never find anyone else and I’d be eternally lonely. I know that is supposed to be what we Aspie’s crave, but it isn’t. It really isn’t. Every one wants to be with somebody in some capacity, it’s just that the anxieties involved in that make if very hard for someone with ASD.

As I had nothing to lose I sat down and a wrote her a letter telling her exactly how I felt, which I sent through the post. She called me and told me that she felt the same. Not one to do anything by halves, and fearing that she might change her mind, I suggested that I move in straight away, which I did.

In retrospect that was probably a mistake, but I’ll leave that for the next part.

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After I passed my A-Levels I departed for Salford University to read Geography. I hated my first year. I was in halls of residence and I didn’t make any friends. I actually went to Uni with a friend that I’d been to both primary school and high school with, and another friend who I’d been to just high school with. So I hung around with them all the time, which I realise in retrospect was an easy way to avoid having to make new friends.

But they eventually got themselves girlfriends and I would just sit in my room in the halls of residence, playing games on my PC. It was rather a lonely existence, but it was easier than trying to break into social groups that were now well developed.

I also only spent one weekend in Manchester over the entire education year. Because I was still heavily involved in the Air Cadets I would go home at weekends to fly, glide and shoot. This was another act of avoidance. So I left university after 5 years having not socialised once.

Another reason for coming home each weekend is that I’d somehow managed to get myself my first girlfriend, who was also in the Air Cadets. I didn’t ask her out, I didn’t have the guts, but fortunately one night during a game of spin the bottle, she revealed to the room that she fancied me. That only lasted for a few months though, and the relationship developed into friendship. She’s still my best friend to this day.

I was fortunate enough to be sponsored by Siemens whilst at Uni and walked straight into a job with them after university in the IT department of their factory in Cheshire as a software developer. It was a small team of 5 people, and the work clearly suited the logical mind of an Aspie. I really enjoyed the work and would put in 12 hours days, 7 days weekly. I still do 12 hour days, but not on weekends!

Whilst working there I did start to learn to socialise because lots of social events were organised by the social committee, and most of the people there were also rather geeky being electronic engineers, so I was on the same wavelength and found that I had interests in common.

The work was quite autonomous and I started to play around with web development without my boss knowing. I knocked up a web site on my lunch breaks, just for the sake of self learning, that would allow our customers to query our databases to find out where in the world their orders were. The boss was impressed.

At this point in my life I decided that I wanted a girlfriend but hadn’t a clue about how to find one. It was 1998 and the World Wide Web was in its infancy; there was no Plenty of Fish, or Match.com back then.

So I went around the factory jokingly asking colleagues if they had any buxom blonde single friends (completely not my type so I don’t know why I asked that) and evantually one said that yes he did. I was set up on a blind date with Emma, and after a 6 hour (she likes to talk!) conversation somehow found the confidence to meet her a few days later. This was completely out of my comfortzone, but I knew that I had to push myself.

The date was a little out of the ordinary; we were joined by a pole dancer and one of the Manchester Mafia for a few minutes, but we hit it off and started to date. However, after a few months she got a few of her friends and her mum over to meet me, and that’s when the wheels came off. I sat at the table like a fish out of water. I barely spoke that night, and that was off-putting to Emma. She’s very sociable.

We remained friends though, and I’d stay with her most weekends and over time became comfortable with her friends and started to develop social skills. Emma told me the secret to doing that is to talk about them and not yourself. This flies completely in the face of what comes naturally to an Aspie, but it’s something that I do try to remember, but often fail with, to this day.

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When you hear the phrase “problem solving” you probably assume that there is something wrong that needs a resolution. Whilst that is certainly a correct assumption, the phrase means much more than that. We all problem solve at different levels throughout our daily lives. From deciding what to wear, to what to eat, we all make decisions in our day so routinely that we don’t even consider them to be problem solving. For people with ASD these simple task can be quite a challenge.

I have no dress sense, so I own about 30 black t-shirts, because that’s easy. I buy the same shoes over and over because it’s easier than deciding if a new style suits. I’m not even sure the style that I have suits! I buy the same socks and underwear in bulk too. Basically I dress all in black!

There is one particular thing that I do which really wound Maria up and was the cause of more than one argument, and that is how I unload the washing machine and arrange the clothes on the clothes maiden.

Maria has the ability to just pull items out of the washing machine and place them in random places on the maiden, as though solving a Krypton Factor puzzle, and have the task complete within a few minutes. It would take me at least 15 minutes to do.

First I have to get all of the items out of the machine and categorise them into socks, underwear, trousers, tops along the work surface in the utility room. I then put the socks at the bottom of the maiden, underwear next, then tops and finally trousers. There is just no way that I can randomly pull items out and place them in the correct order on the maiden. If I start at the top, or place things randomly, then the items get in the way of placing the lower ones.

This would really frustrate and annoy Maria because no matter how many times she tried to “train” me to do it her way, I just couldn’t get it. She would think that I was wilfully doing it my way to annoy her, but I wasn’t. There is just no way that I can complete this task in any way other than how I do.

Consequently this leads to an increase in anxiety, because you start to think that you are stupid for not being able to do something that is so simple for others.