Asperger teen dating

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So the door bell rings last night and the nice/cool neighbor girl is here with her friend ( in my sons class) and she tells ds their friend/classmate wants to "go out" with my son. Apparently that's how it works these days lol?.. So he says I'll think about it. He has never been on a date. He's 13, with anxiety, ADHD, aspergers. This girls known him since 1st grade. So we talked..I asked if he thought she was nice and if he wants to spend time with her, he said yes. I suggested they could maybe go to culvers for root beer floats or something, and he says" if I want to impress her, I need to take her somewhere fancy!" How sweet is that? Lol. So I said well since your only 13, and you've no job to pay for a fancy date, let's take the pressure off and just "hang out" instead of stressing out about dating and girlfriends, and if you like hanging out with her, you guys can be friends.
So that was the plan, he was going to approach her today and talk to her at school. He totally chickened out. Thats okay! I reassured him he didn't have to follow through but he insists that he wants to, he's just so shy.
They did say hi to each other, but since her friends were always around, he was too shy to say anything else.
I said that's totally okay, but if you don't say something to her tomorrow, she might think your not interested. He really wants to say something to her but he's worried sick. He just freezes up talking to her in front of her friends.
When he got home from school today he bolted for his room and was pacing about and finger pressing and he looked like he could just puke. All from nerves. I reassured him it's normal to be nervous about it and he really wants to get together with her but he kept saying I'm just so shy! I suggested he approach her tomorrow and request to speak with her privately at lunch so then he could ask her without all her friends right there. He's saying yes I really want to do that I'm just so nervous.

I think him forcing himself to learn this social skill far outweighs the negatives of not asking and self esteem tanking, even if he asks her and gets rejected. Still better then never trying right? I realised I'm his mom and must stay mostly removed from the situation other than our little chats, but I'm so worried, what if they sense his ultra nervousness and tease him, are the just messing with him, or she really wants to hang out? Would it be crossing the line, if I filled in his behavioral/speech teacher on the situation so she could keep her eye on it during school from afar, to see if their teasing him or if this girl just really likes ds and wants to hang? Or would I win worlds worst helicopter parent award?
Lol...I've already started pinning dating tips for teen guys with aspergers, although I might be getting ahead of ourselves here. Just in case she says yes, I want to try and prepare him manner wise as much as I can. And for social tips and stuff he might not realise. And prepare him for if just friendship comes out of this, it's still so totally worth it. So back to my main question then, would it be wrong or akward for me to ask his behavioral teacher to keep an eye on it from a distance? Or should I hang back and let him try and do it all on his own? thanks.

I don't think there's anything wrong with it. Just don't let him or his freinds know about it. He may find it embaressing.


Some boys just need extra help with that sort if thing. Now's the time for him to get used to dating. If doens't get comfortable with it now he may have a much harder time trying to learn the ropes from scratch later in life.

Once my kids hit middle school, I ended all efforts to have adults monitor things socially, outside of the services my son was getting and then when there was some potential bullying to prevent. It breaks the unwritten middle school code for an adult to be in the kids' interactions.

But I have a way out for your nervous child. I would assume he plays some on-line games. It is possible she also plays some on-line games. If he asks her to play a game with him that will be less uncomfortable, and then there will be opportunities to message without friends around.

One warning, which doesn't sound like it applies here but you will want to be aware regardless: middle school girls can play with boy's feelings, telling guys someone likes them who does not, just to see what happens when the guy tries to ask the girl out.

Cluing up a teacher is super-uncool...

...but if you trust this one to keep it ultra-discreet and on the down-low, I might do it anyway.

I clued the guidance counselor to keep an eye on my DD13 (presumed NT) because I knew my anxiety was getting out of control at the beginning of this school year, and I wanted other eyes on the situation.

Also completely uncool, but something I am totally doing: ALL "DATES" WILL BE PARENT-SUPERVISED. I will sit in the next booth/row/whatever with my book and try not to talk, but I will ABSOLUTELY be present for ALL dates that my kids go on at least until 16 and probably until 18.

Regardless of what letters go with what kid. The ONLY reasons my DD13 is going to her first dance without me tonight are that I have no babysitter and I know that one of her friends' ultra-uncool mom, who I happen to see three Thursdays a month at Cub Scouts, is a chaperone.

Yes, I am the uncoolest, most Duggar-esque mom EVER. And my kids are probably going to totally rebel and completely go splat the minute they get out of my house...

God. TEENAGERS. And I thought worrying about SIDS was stressful...

I'm tempted to totally blast you and tear you down, but I got I've gotten in trouble with the mods for that in the past, so...

It's posts like these that make me glad I didn't go on my first real date until the old-fart age of 18, my first year of college, and with a girl I found unattractive to boot. Although honestly, I have no idea how my parents would have reacted to me dating in high school. Of course, with me not having a car back then, they had nothing to worry about . After all, in my high school, no girl would touch carless guy with a 100-foot pole. That, combined with the very strict parenting I got, dating was a hopeless proposition for me.

But despite keeping an iron grip on my real life, my parents inadvertently gave me free reign on the internet, due to their lack of technical expertise and/or knowledge of what was really out there. I guess their uncharacteristically laissez faire approach stemmed from me being a computer geek since first grade.

So I did what any other red-blooded, pimply-faced, desperate aspie guy would do: try to meet girls online. Along with that other online thing . Mind you, it was year 1999, loooooooong before online dating was even common, let alone socially acceptable. I'm amazed how much girl-meeting utility I extracted out of the internet of its time, all without Facebook, SnapChat, and other newfangled sites we have now. I did have chat rooms (now obsolete), and Yahoo Personals (see links) by lying about my age. My parents were none the wiser, and I haven't "declassified" my online shenanigans to this day.
Link 1: https://web.archive.org/web/19990417170750/http://personals.yahoo.com/
Link 2: https://web.archive.org/web/19990421102313/http://classifieds.yahoo.com/advanced/personals.html

Man oh man, I wasted SO MUCH time. Most of my efforts led to months-long chatting and e-mailing, with only a faint possibility of ever meeting in real life. Even the ones that did show interest, lived so far, that getting there required taking a train, two buses, and at least 30 minutes of walking. Which, in my desperation, I was willing to do. Remember: I didn't have a car. (It somehow didn't occur to me to ask the girl to take a bus herself to a convenient mall or something; I was under the naive impression that the guy must do all the work.) All in all, it caused me a lot of false hope, and led to a permanent loss of my ability to get infatuated/fall in love.

Meh... maybe it was for the best. Imagine if I actually traveled to meet one of my "lady friends". Who knows what could have happened! I might not realize that she lives in a run-down area, and take a bus right to the underbelly of it (Google Streetview, great for scouting out neighborhoods, didn't exist in 1999). I might discover that she is really a he, and equally desperate, if you catch my drift. I might get asked to buy her an exorbitantly expensive meal. I might get asked to do something dangerous, illegal, or both. Or for a milder example, I might get stood up, effectively wasting 2 hours of travel time each way.

Well, I guess if you can't beat them, join them. So having had a fun trip down the memory lane, I'll help you out with a one-liner. Moral of my post: Lock down the internet access for your kids . Lock it tight!

I have a 13 year old, too...and it SUCKS!

Last year, in 7th grade, the phone rang and when I answered it, it was a GIRL and she was asking for my son. It was so unexpected that it was almost like I didn't understand what she was saying to me! LOL! I handed my son the phone and she invited herself over LOL! So, I asked my son about her and he said that some kids had told him she had a crush on him. He tried to play it cool, but the day she was supposed to come over, I heard him upstairs, pleading with his sister to clean up her room "I like this girl and I want to make a good impression!" To be truthful, it is the cleanest his room has ever been on his own accord.

I looked at her picture in the yearbook and she was really pretty. Being an unpopular kid myself, I immediately became fearful that she was a mean girl who was making fun of him. He said she wasn't, but he often misreads these things.

She came over and within 15 minutes, all mysteries were clear: she was on the spectrum herself! They were so cute. Played Minecraft, watched some youtube videos. Then sat next to each other on the couch with the outside edges of their hands barely touching.

It was short lived. He said that when they were "dating" they couldn't talk to each other. They just sat by each other in nervous silence. So they went back to "being friends" and now they talk all the time.

This year, a bunch of kids in his class told him that this one particular girl wanted to date him. He said "everyone" was telling him this. I, again, got nervous and he got nervous, but he said he could handle it.
We talked about how it could either be true, or it could be a joke. Part of me wanted to tell his guidance counselor.

As it turned out, she was a popular girl and it was all a joke. I was about to be really pi$$ed and march to the school (to do what, I don't know), but she pulled him aside and said it was a joke and told him she was really sorry and she didn't think it was funny. He said her face was really sad. He then decided she was one of the kids who are not really a bully, but who go along with the crowd because of their own insecurities. He told her that it was OK and that he understood. She has since been nice to him when the rest of her friends are not around.

The truth is, the mother bear part of me wishes I would have alerted the guidance counselor as she probably would have automatically known there was no way this girl was interested in my son. And this same part wishes I would have marched up to the school to report what happened.

But the end result is that if I would have done either of those things, what eventually happened would have never happened, and I am really proud of how he handled it. I am proud he was able to keep his dignity. I am proud he was able to see her for who she truly is. I am proud he was able to show her compassion, even though she didn't deserve it.

And he definitely has more confidence, because one of his worst fears happened, and he lived through it, and a day later, no one else even remembered it. It was yesterday's news. And we were able to discuss how if he would have blown up or started crying, people would have been talking about it for days, but because he played it cool, they got bored and forgot about it.

That's a good plan. The sooner you make your kids rebel, the better it will for them.

None of my business. But kids need to learn to relate to each other in relationships. Thus won't occur with the parents around.

Thank you! I'm glad somebody understands the importance of letting teens experience independent dating situations---and come on, just how dangerous can an ice cream date on a busy Saturday afternoon be?---as opposed to inadvertently pushing them into situations I experienced. Do parents really want their kids to resort to online dating at 16 (impossible today, since dating sites require a credit card, but just saying), or have no clue at 18 about what dates are supposed to be like?

First, consider my stint with online dating as a teen. I wished I didn't have to do that; I was well aware how looked down upon it was in 1999. Not to mention the fact that I had to lie about my age to put up a profile. (Then again, so did the girls I contacted.) It'd be a whole lot better if my parents just let me have a car, so I could simply invite girls in my high school classes to a movie theater 8 blocks over, rather than wasting my time chatting and e-mailing with online girls for months, then traveling for 2 hours if one of them actually does want to meet me. And that if she doesn't stand me up or put me in harm's way at the end of it all. I somehow knew better than to contact girls with profiles too good to be true (e.g. promising sex on the first date), who were probably escorts or scammers.

Second, consider the effect my lack of dating experience had when I actually got to go on my first real date,---at age 18, mind you---only because she showed interest in me. (I've said before that I wasn't attracted to her, and found her kind of boring as a person.) While on that date with her, I must have acted like a damn 12-year-old. I was a nervous wreck the whole time, not knowing when, how, or what to say or do; all because the concept of "dating" was inflated in my mind like a Goodyear blimp. (I'll give her credit for being nice enough to take it in stride; or maybe she had little dating experience herself.) All while most 18-year-old guys already know the ropes of dating, and see it as a fun opportunity to get to know new girls, rather than settling for someone they're not attracted to.

Oh, and merry Christmas.

I don't think that parents need to supervise their kids dating. In this case, the most important is present: The guy talks about what happens to his parents so they can help him with advice and keep him out of trouble if necessary. It's a lot more problematic if parents know nothing, which would be the consequence of being too restrictive and protective.

In addition to that, I don't think neurodiverse kids need to force learn traditional dating. Just let them explore their preferred ways to contact the opposite gender instead. Some will end up with novel approaches that might work while others will want to do typical dating. It's up to them to decide and experiment, not parents.

Personally, I've never done any traditional dating, and my daughter just asks guys she likes if they want a relationship. Both approaches works.

I'm not sure I agree with this. In fact, I don't. At least not as an absolute.

My son as a problem with interpreting social nuances, figurative language, body language, etc. I honestly worry that he will one day do or say something from a completely innocent place and find himself in heaps of trouble because his understanding of a situation was very different than the other person's understanding. He has already used sexual innuendos without understanding that he was doing it, which was reported to me by the girl's parents.

This (unsupervised interactions) is risky, even with simple friendships. The problem is, that when it comes down to "dating" you add the complexities related to hormones, uncharted territory, boundaries, and a whole bunch of other things that are really new to someone when they first start dating.

So, honestly, I would want to get a feel for the girl (at least in the foreseeable future) before letting him spend time alone with her. Much the same as I like to meet his friends before he starts hanging out with them outside of school. He has social deficits. He is still a minor. It is my responsibility to be aware of potential issues and mediate them to the extent that I can. He has good judgement...the problem is, he doesn't always accurately perceive the situation, so if his perception is off, so is his judgement.

In a world where kindergartners are taken out of school for "sexual harassment" I think parents need to be mindful when sending naive kids into potentially treacherous waters. It would be negligent of me, IMHO, to disregard the fact that he has social deficits.

That's not a big deal. These kind of things happens, and they happen even if the people involved are not autistic.



You can't keep this up forever. He will need to learn to handle this all by himself, and the best you can do is to keep yourself informed and giving him advice.



If I were your son you would not stand a chance to keep this up. In fact, my parents still do not even have a faintest idea of which girls I liked and flirted with in school. I'm sure I was just as clueless as your son is, but I eventually learned all by myself. I'm really glad that my parents couldn't force me into the dating culture that I still really despise.



That's just crazy. Just because some people are crazy doesn't mean we need to become like them. I know my daughter have been involved in sexual things that she didn't understand, but I would never report it as she didn't think it was bad herself.

Who said I planned to keep it up forever? I used to help him shower, but I don't anymore. Sheesh.

The kids we type about have a wide and varied range of social skills. My family was on the older side, and older fashioned, still, and had values in the dating area that were way different from my more modern ones. I was also an undiagnosed teen on the spectrum, and I am sure if I had a diagnosis, my parents would have been even more overprotective than they were. On the plus side (from my point of view, not my parents') I learned how to get past my aspie aversion to rule-breaking to have something more like the dating life I wanted (for an unpopular person) than what my parents would have liked. Could I have gotten myself into some dangerous situations? Yep, but I didn't. I therefore don't regret it, and I think it was helpful for me in growing up.

I am presuming the posters posting about their own issues with overprotective parents were also had certain minimum social skills that either their parents underestimated or whose values stood as an obstacle.

That said, I don't think it is hypocritical to say that I would be more cautious with my son than I would have been on myself. He is very low-functioning when it comes to social situations, and I have no idea what he will understand, socially, when puberty hits. He can't handle regular friendship, and right now I can't even imagine how he would navigate dating.

It doesn't mean we are all a bunch of pearl-clutching crazies. It means that we have kids who have trouble navigating social principles like boundaries. We have kids who have been told (by authority figures, constantly, in the schools, even when you point out the long-term pitfalls b/c they only care about what is easiest now.) to comply with what is asked of you, whether you want to do a thing or not. These are scary things in the dating world. I wish it were more socially acceptable to scaffold this, like we can scaffold some other things. Yes, eventually, they are going to have to learn the skills, but they have to have some semblance of social skills first.

Edited for clarity:

But you don't need social skills to flirt with girls or get into relationships. I started flirting with girls long before I had any reasonable level of social skills, and they often reciprocated in a positive way. That's the big problem with the current knowledge about autism. The problems (and preferences) in the relationship area are very specific and do not benefit from socialization skills. You need social skills to navigate in the social world, but you want a partner that you can get along with at least partly naturally as you don't want to play social games in a relationship. Those are completely different things. As a parent I think the best thing I can do is to be able to see which people are compatible with my children and help them to learn whom they can get along with. That will give them the best tool: To be able to select reasonable targets for a possible relationship.

I see your point, but I am not talking about my son flirting--or even with him hanging out with her at lunch at school. I am talking about unsupervised dating. He and she being alone somewhere without anyone to monitor. That is what is unnerving...not the idea that my son might be flirting with someone at school. I suppose he may be already, though I'm not even sure if he would know how to do that, other than to try to make her laugh. He is sometimes charming without knowing it, though, and his ability to accept everyone no matter what and to try to make people feel good about themselves might be seen as flirting by some middle school girls.

To get back to the OP's original question, whether or not to intervene in an unobtrusive way, or to back off and let things proceed naturally...I really think it depends upon the kid. Not all kids with autism have the same strengths and not all have the same deficits. For some kids, mediating the self-esteem fall out if things don't go well might be the biggest issue. For my son, he has pretty good self-esteem and tends to take things in stride, so that isn't his issue. For him, it is his sometimes utter cluelessness regarding what is and is not appropriate or acceptable. He is the kind of kid who would fall for something like a "cool kid" telling him "You know what girls really want you to say/do? XYZ. That is what I always say/do and it works." Where XYZ is something very inappropriate.