Aspies and Love

Q: Did you think of your first Love as your Last?

My Aspie son of 14 is in the throes of his first serious relationship with a girl. I know this, not because he has confided in me, but simply because of what I have observed. He is smitten and I fear for him. While speaking to him on the issue of his too-frequent text messages to her, I asked the loaded question . . . "It's not as if you're going to marry her" His reply - "You can't know that!" They are far too young for this to last. Will he recover once she walks away? Will he be prepared to one day form another relationship, or will this scar him for life? I fear that the end of the relationship will throw him into deep depression. Is this inevitable? What can I do to better prepare him?

Concerned Mum

A: :( This certainly strikes a chord with me. Before I relate my personal
experience, though, let me congratulate you on having an Aspie with the
emotional awareness and maturity to be in love! I've written to a lot of
parents of autistic kids who can't be sure their children will ever have a
relationship, serious or otherwise. It's great that yours isn't one of them.
That said, it's hard to know whether your son's feelings are the result of
his Asperger's or his humanity. I think most people fall very intensely in
love during their first relationship. (In an episode of Star Trek, Scotty
says of loving the Enterprise: "It's like the first time you fall in love.
You never love a woman quite that much again." I don't think I agree with
him, but he gets the point across.) Especially from an Aspie perspective, if
you thought a relationship had no chance of lasting, why on Earth would you
get into it in the first place?
I got into my first relationship at sixteen. Talk about text-messaging -- I
must've spent four or five hours a day on that computer! I couldn't get
enough of the girl in question. I put this down to a couple things. One,
first love, as I've already discussed. And two, Asperger's. Aspies tend to
perseverate on (obsess about) things that interest them, and there's not
much that's more interesting than a girlfriend! And having Asperger's often
means that you don't often feel like anyone really understands you;
believing that someone finally does is a really special feeling, believe me.
We all have this feeling to a greater or lesser degree, of course, but I
think it may be stronger for Aspies, proportional to our feeling of being
"different." So I was absolutely in love with being in love, and I cherished
my belief (illusion though it may have been) that the two of us had a chance
at succeeding in the long term. No one could ever have convinced me that we
didn't.
When we broke up after a few months, right around Christmas, I was
devastated. I felt like I had lost so many things at once. Partly because of
the Aspie traits I mentioned above and partly because of my emotional
immaturity, I had formed a kind of dependency that was hard as hell to
overcome. I cried a lot, and wrote a lot of mediocre poetry. It was months
before I could even imagine myself with another girl, and months more before
I was really over her (aside from some residual loneliness that comes of
having "tasted the fruit" of love and having it taken away). A lot of people
go through this, again to a greater or lesser degree, when their
relationships -- especially their first -- come to an end. But I gained a
lot of maturity through the relationship and its aftermath, including a lot
of heretofore-undeveloped interpersonal skills. I wouldn't trade what I
gained for not having to remember that evanescent pain.
About two years after my first relationship began, the summer before I went
to college, I met a wonderful girl at Barnes & Noble. She asked me out; we
started dating and fell deeply in love. Our relationship lasted two years,
ending several months ago (and no one can tell me we never had a chance!)
Whatever "scars" were left from my first girlfriend did not, I don't think,
affect my ability to bond with my second. And whatever scars I'm feeling now
will not, I don't think, affect my ability to bond with my third (if, God
willing, there ever is a third).
People grow through love, whether that love lasts or not. Unfortunately,
sometimes pain is the price of growth. But pain is temporary; the maturity
one gains through relationships is not. I can't tell you what's best for
your son. I can tell you that if I had been my mother during the time when I
was going out with my first girlfriend, I hope I would have done exactly
what she did: let the relationship run its course (making sure I wasn't
physically endangering myself, of course), and provide a reassuring shoulder
to cry on afterwards. This might not be what's right for you; it's a
decision you have to make yourself. But the best advice I can give you is to
recognize that your son's feelings are real and valid. It's hard to give up
some of the margin of control you maintain over your child (especially an
Aspie!) that lets you ensure he's emotionally safe; but in the long run,
learning to walk eventually requires not having your hand held. Is your son
ready for that?
--Brian
"For where is any author in the world
Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?
Learning is but an adjunct to oneself."
--William Shakespeare, *Love's Labour's Lost*

Comments

[Wiley]

Well, my personal story might not be particularly encouraging, but I
will say from the start that my mom tried the "it's not like you're
going to marry him" argument on me any number of times during the
course of it to no avail. It's not really an argument that works on
teenagers, still less on Aspies.

Basically, I fell in love with the first other Aspie I ever met.
Niether of us had heard of Asperger's at the time, I just knew that it
was the first time I had ever met a person who made sense. Eventually
I got up the courage to ask him out. (A funny side anecdote: I had
never asked anyone out before, and decided to ask my roommate for
advice. But I was nervous about even asking her, and kept revising my
question in my head. By the time I managed to say it out loud, it was
"If one wanted to ask Lui out, how would one go about it?" It took her
five minutes to stop laughing enough to answer.) We dated for the rest
of that school year, about 6 months, and then he went off to college.
I followed the next year, but by then we had drifted apart. We broke
up six months after I got to UofC, and since then we've gone back to
being good friends.

On the one hand, those six months watching the relationship fall apart
were some of the hardest of my life. On the other, those first six
months are the only time I can remember where, if I had the chance to
go back and experience them again, I would. Sure, I could have
imagined myself marrying him. Heck, it's been more than a year since
we broke up and part of me still can.

Love happens. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, but as numerous
works of literature will attest, parents trying to stop it almost
never works. There's a cliche I can't help being reminded of, "Better
to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."

Wiley