Asperger Meets Girl

Happy Endings for Asperger Boys

Jonathan Griffiths

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781846427565
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Troubles du spectre autistique

Men with Asperger's Syndrome, young and old, experience difficulty with social interaction, which can be a stumbling block when it comes to getting a girlfriend. Here is a book that demystifies the enigma of 'relationships' by explaining everything in Asperger-friendly terms (some of them mathematical, naturally).

Asperger Meets Girl provides hope for all hopeless wooers by offering a choice of three interrelated abstract models for understanding boy-girl relationships. And, to make life easier, these models are presented in graph form where possible. The book also gives valuable practical tips for maximising one's chances of successfully developing a relationship, such as how to start a conversation without scaring the other person off, avoiding the inclination to stare and understanding the concept of 'personal space'.

Serious, and seriously funny, this book will help bring happy endings to Asperger boys and make them laugh in the process.

1WHAT PROBLEM AM I TRYING TO SOLVE HERE?

Well, here you are, either with a bright shiny diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome or a murky collection of Asperger-like problems to a ‘subclinical’ degree. In either case, I hope you won’t be offended if I address you as a fellow nerd. A spade is a spade, and a nerd is a nerd.

Let’s suppose you function adequately from one day to the next (give or take, perhaps, the odd nervous breakdown). However, your life is not yet enriched by the delight and inspiration that can come from an intimate personal relationship. And you can’t get laid.

You and I were off sick from school the day they explained how to flirt. One day, we looked around, and everyone else knew how to do it. How did they know? It was a mystery.

Of course, it doesn’t really happen like that; everyone has to go through a learning process, which is usually embarrassing. But it is still different for us nerds. One difference is that it’s a much, much longer learning process. Another is that it’s hard for us even to start this process.

We could live with a bit of trial and error, if only we had some clue as to what trials we might try. The thing is, to take any kind of action, we nerds need methods, of the kind that can be communicated in words or formal symbols.

Unfortunately, the nerd-taking-advice-in-hopes-to-get-the-girl is a stock figure in comedy right back to Shakespeare, and probably beyond. We know from experience that if we rely on the methods of those people to whom it all comes naturally, then the joke is on us.

Instead, we need our own nerdy solutions to our own nerdy problems. We need a kind of romance with the logical unity and clarity of a formal software specification, or of a well-elaborated metaphysical system.

To that end, this book offers two things. One is a structured conceptual model for interpreting courtship and sexual behaviour so that it can be understood by us anoraks who have no instinct for this stuff. The other is some advice. This ‘advice’ bit leans heavily on my own experience, but I believe there are other men and boys out there with whom it will strike a chord. I hope you find it helpful. Failing that, I hope it gives you a good laugh.

2A NERD’S EYE VIEW OF HUMAN SEXUALITY

We nerds can understand abstract models of things. In this chapter there are three ideas you can use for modelling human sexual behaviour. Some might say that no abstract model could properly reflect the infinite variety of love and desire, etc. Fair enough, but if you’re the sort of person who needs to understand things at an abstract level, then an imperfect model is better than none, if only because of the confidence it gives you.

They may not capture every aspect of the subject, but I’ve found these ideas useful for turning all those nudges, winks and unspoken things that ‘everyone knows’ into something intelligible.

2.1 Idea 1: The space of possibilities

Sexuality can be considered under three headings.

One heading is about sensuality. I’m talking about the pleasures of touch, and scent and taste. (Easy, tiger!)

Another is about attention. This works two ways. It includes the pleasures of having someone’s undivided attention, and it includes the pleasures of paying attention, of gazing at someone and of knowing where they are and what they’re doing in every waking moment. ‘Intimacy’ might be the best one-word label for this heading, although some might object that intimacy is something that you only achieve after you’ve put in some ‘paying attention’ work.

The third heading is about power relations. This works two ways too. It includes the pleasure of dominating and the pleasure of being dominated. You can see its unacceptable face on prostitutes’ cards in the phone boxes of London, but it comes out in subtler ways elsewhere.

If you find it helpful, you could think of these three ‘headings’ as three axes on a Cartesian diagram: hence the term ‘space of possibilities’. If you don’t, that’s okay too; we can work around that.

(Psst: if you like Cartesian diagrams, there are some explicit illustrations of this space in the Appendix.)

2.1.1 Plotting some points in the space

Coming up next are some examples of how to use the three-heading idea to interpret situations. I’ll have to go out on a limb here because there’s never going to be a formal interpretation of the sexual content of a situation that can’t be disputed. However, the idea is just to show the sort of way that you can use the structure I’m offering, and not to be too dogmatic about any particular case.

Because this is a book, not a video, I can’t give you fly-on-the-wall examples with real-time commentary. Instead, I’ll quote some extracts from fiction and apply the three-heading idea to them. That means categorising the feelings of characters under these headings. We’ll be revisiting the same extracts later to illustrate the use of the other two ideas.

Some of these extracts look at the situation from a man’s point of view and some from a woman’s. Before we go any further, you may be wondering why I’m quoting things which are really about men’s feelings about women, whereas the mystery you need explained is that of women’s feelings about men.

Well, at the level of this three-heading idea, those two things are not so different. I don’t hold with the idea that ‘women are from Venus’ or any other extraterrestrial location. On the contrary my experience, such as it is, has taught me that you can find parallels between your sexuality and her sexuality, and when you find them they can bring the two of you together in very satisfactory ways, of which more later.

Anyway, on with the extracts.

2.1.2 Old-fashioned romance

Here’s a passage from Tolstoy’s nineteenth-century classic Anna Karenina, in which an earnest gentleman called Levin is having a disagreement with an adulterous friend:

Well, you must excuse me there. You know I separate women into two categories at least, no it would be truer to say: there are women and there are… I have never seen, nor ever shall see, a fallen woman who was exquisite. (Tolstoy 1878)

Here’s another passage in which the ‘fallen woman’ that the novel is all about meets her future lover Vronsky:

As he looked round, she too turned her head. Her brilliant grey eyes, shadowed by thick lashes, gave him a friendly, attentive look, as though she were recognising him, and then turned to the approaching crowd as if in search of someone. In that brief glance Vronsky had time to notice the suppressed animation which played over her face and flitted between her sparkling eyes and the slight smile curving her red lips. It was as though her nature were so brimming over with something that against her will it expressed itself now in a radiant look, now in a smile. (Tolstoy 1878)

So, what’s going on in these two passages?

1.Sensuality: this being the nineteenth century, the closest we get to sensuality in either passage is an explicit reference to eyelashes.

2.Intimacy: the second passage (the description of Anna) is big on attention, as suggested by eye contact. We’ve got ‘brilliant grey eyes’, ‘a friendly, attentive look’, ‘sparkling eyes’ and ‘a radiant look’.

3.Power: in the same passage we’ve also got suggestions of power – ‘suppressed animation’ and ‘nature brimming over’. You might argue that, if Anna were really sexually powerful, then the animation wouldn’t be suppressed. Well, the plot of the novel is driven largely by the breakdown of that suppression, as Anna embarks on her affair and takes the consequences.

What about the first passage? What can we say about Levin’s view? Let’s say that a ‘fallen woman’ is any woman who is conscious of her sexuality and doesn’t confine it to one private relationship. I suppose Levin is uncomfortable with the power of conscious sexuality in a woman. The conventional feminist reading of this is that some men just don’t like women to have any power at all, but I think a more specific explanation is possible in this case. You see, Levin himself is a bit of a nerd. He’s awkward. He is handicapped by weak social skills. He makes great efforts to understand how the world works, and to do the right thing in it, but a sexually confident woman would confront him with a world that makes no sense to him. He just couldn’t read her. He wouldn’t know what to do for the best.

Anyway, what about this ‘exquisite’ that a ‘fallen woman’ can never be? Unfortunately ‘exquisite’ is the sort of word that can be applied to collectibles. That’s a bit hard on Levin personally, but it’s fair to say that if you love to look at ‘exquisite’ things, they’re the kind of things that don’t stare back at you. So he wants someone to lavish attention on. If he dares to think at all about a sensual relationship or a power relationship with a woman, these thoughts aren’t colouring his vocabulary.

To summarise, we’ve got one character, Anna, who likes giving attention and exerting power, and another character, Levin, who also likes giving attention.

2.1.3 Swinging

This one’s from the 1960s, in a novel by Peter De Vries about a famous (fictional) poet called Gowan McGland:

In a spasm of rage and despair he remembered he would be toothless by forty. There was only and always one cure for this now: reach out for any woman his widening vogue made available to him and clasp her like a poultice to his abscessed heart. It was what his henceforth Gargantuan philandering amounted to – slaking in as many arms as possible the thirst for reassurance in the race with Time.

He had seen the girl in the blue wool dress note his arrival at the party…and when she said, ‘Aren’t you Gowan McGland?’ he knew only too well what she meant. She meant, ‘My God, are you Gowan McGland?’…‘Guilty,’ he said, taking in her not very shapely but probably cozy body. She was a foot too short and round as a cheese, but he was no prize either.

After the first compliments about his latest group, as well as some elucidations by the girl of meanings in them McGland had not suspected, they fell silent, watching the growing jam of guests.

[There’s a professional rival of McGland’s at the party, and the girl claims that he, the rival, is homosexual, and that his poetry is no good.]

They left for his flat shortly after midnight.

‘I particularly like the one that goes, “The Lord my God has widgeons in his hair,”’ she said as she peeled a stocking from a fat thigh. McGland nodded from the pillow. The sensation was beginning to come over him that he experienced when having something demonstrated to h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Of Related Interest
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword By Hugh Jones
• Preface
• 1. What Problem Am I Trying to Solve Here?
• 2. A Nerd’s Eye View of Human Sexuality
• 3. Things to Try
• 4. Afterword
• 5. Appendix: Some Supplementary Thoughts
• References