Love with autism: how it can work

He doesn't understand gestures and facial expressions. He can't flirt. But he wants to fall in love. Our author is autistic and describes how he found great love with a clear mind.

His view of things.

Peter Schmidt, 54, has known for a long time that he emotionally evaluates situations differently than most people. He only got the diagnosis 13 years ago: Autism with Asperger's Syndrome.

Martina asked me on a walk on Eckernförde Strand. What a question, I thought. Simple but difficult to answer. And it came so suddenly. Without warning. Spontaneously answering, that is impossible for me! And banal things like "love is cycling together. Love is laughing together ", my girlfriend didn't really expect that.

head against heart

My brain hurriedly convened an internal parliamentary session. The faction of the rationales debated with intuition, the gut feeling. Unfortunately without a decision. I froze inside and said nothing to Martina. Love has to mature, has something to do with the level of confidentiality of a friendship, I thought so. But how should I explain that to her?

Finally I took a stick and drew a coordinate system in the sand. With three functions that describe the process from first getting to know love. As the development of the intensity of a relationship over time. I lectured: "At the beginning there is the fire, the intensive sniffing. Then there is the mutual testing and finally the growing of confidentiality. This is represented by a steadily increasing function that, starting from the origin, approaches a saturation line, the love asymptote, over time ! " I concluded: "Love is given exactly when this curve has snuggled up enough to the asymptote!"

Shared experiences

I had no idea whether she understood it, found it good or bad, because for me facial expressions are a book with seven seals. So we continued walking, talking about this and that. We spent a lot of time together. I studied love films like "Up there where the Alps glow", "Birds of Thorns", "Gone with the wind" and then staged the romance exactly according to my script. Numerous trips into the great outdoors, mostly by bike, enriched our shared experience and gave us many memories.

My first Christmas with my girlfriend followed. As a gift, I received a calendar from her, a self-made picture for each month, based on the experiences of the past months. For me a special love radiated a cycling heart. I knew then: my strategy was working!

At university I discovered dancing for myself. At some point I brought Martina with me and from then on we danced together, never missing an opportunity. We even danced on the volcano. In the truest sense of the word: Cha-Cha-Cha. That was on Etna. Easter 1992. A volcano tour to test whether we can get along while traveling. We came and so we continued to dance through life. But sometimes the love sky clouded when there were communicative misunderstandings or conflicts in the assessment of situations. "You dance hard today," I said objectively.

Components of love

One day Martina gave me a pretty, colorful booklet: "Normally this is nobody's business, but I talk to my diary a lot. You can read it so that you understand what is going on in me. Maybe it will help if you know how I think how I feel. "

For me, essential components of love are trust, openness and honesty. That there are no taboo subjects. That you can talk about everything. I saw Martina's offer as an opportunity, read her feelings and thoughts, which incidentally also revealed an unprecedented outside view of my behavior: "He doesn't notice when I'm angry!" or "What you say to him through the flower, he doesn't check! He always needs plain text!", I read about myself. And it was true: Non-verbal communication is difficult for me to read. The associated expectations of others regarding my social behavior can remain unfulfilled. Only true words full of facts help, even if they hurt. But no senseless small talk. Classic flirting is almost impossible for me. This also showed our getting to know each other. Looking for a woman, I got down to business from the start. Martina wrote in her booklet: "There was a guy like that at the dentist the other day, nobody has ever grinned at me so stupidly. Does he have a secondary school leaving certificate?" That was in the summer of 1991, during my doctoral studies. My landlord at the time obviously took part in my attempts to find the woman for life. She told me about flirting: I have to leave the church in the village, although I never wanted to change a church. Instead, I should just smile.

And I smiled. At the dentist of all places. Whenever I saw Martina. But nothing happened. I was looking forward to going back to the dentist soon. And again nothing happened.

"You must have noticed whether she flirted back!", My landlady stated in an advisory capacity. "Did she play with you?" – "No!" I replied, "what should she have played with me? Rummy? Mau-Mau?"

Days later my landlord said: "I called the dentist for you and described your problem. Here you have the number of the young woman, you are welcome to call!" If there is a bridge over the raging river that you want to cross over, take it, who knows if and when the next one will come! So I bridged myself on the first date.

"My mind as a jammer"

In her diary I also found the love diagram that I drew on the beach sand. She found it fascinating and strange at the same time that one could explain something emotional like love mathematically. And I read about my first kiss: he was "beginner". We were sitting on a park bench. Wildly romantic backdrop like in one of the kitschy home films. The final sunset was not missing – the sign for the very first kiss! Or? I tried in vain to find out if she was ready. I couldn't interpret her body language. And it was difficult for me to get out of myself freely. No commitment by autopilot. Instead, my mind as a jammer. Only when I made myself clear that my future wife should love me as I am, did I stop the inhibiting dismemberment and acted.

To this day, it has been and remains exhausting for me to give feelings. As a token of my love, I once gave Martina a cactus for Valentine's Day. For one thing, I don't like cut flowers, because you can only see them when you die in a vase. On the other hand, the gift should also be a statement about me. Even as a child, I compared myself to a cactus when it came to enforcing my own needs as an exception to existing rules. The cactus represents my differentness. It needs more sun and a lot less water than other plants, which I equated with a lot of retreat and little company. In terms of love, competing desires determine my feelings. I wanted to be alone but not lonely. Like a candelabra cactus in Arizona. It is solitary and yet among its peers.

Tropical suitability

In order not to waste senseless time in the development of a relationship, the failure of which is reasonably foreseeable, I created a checklist "Wife" years ago. Because one's own needs, which conflict with those of women, would probably erode love over time. This list included things like musical taste, non-smokers, but also flight and tropical suitability. Because for me it was and is about being able to spend as much time as possible, finding happiness together and experiencing it twice. Finding the suitability for the tropics was the most complex. But when the sun sank above the sea in South East Asia exactly as planned, I told her that she had just passed the last important test.

We finally got married on a day that contains all the color-relevant digits, which for me are 1, 3, 4, 7 and 9. And statistically mostly good garden and barbecue weather can be expected.

Today, after more than 28 years of relationship, I know that true love is not to be found in the flames, it is rather like the glow of the open fire: if you don't add wood, it goes out. "Sometimes you tip a bucket of water over it," said Martina recently. Yes, but embers survive!

Dr. Peter Schmidt is an author and speaker on autism. Oh, and full time IT expert.

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BARBARA 05/2020