My gripes at ASpartners

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Wow, I just read a page of that forum. It is horrible.

In a way I think it's fine to have their own place to talk about their own stuff. I'm a live and let live kind of person. (I thought that was empathy but I got a bad score on the test)

Then again I find that board to be filled with hatred and prejudiced against anyone with asperger's.

It's like a rerun of school with the nts picking on you and saying you are bothering them by "being weird" when you don't know how to be any other way than the way you are.

ASPartners is just one of a whole bunch of independent forums on the delphiforums.com domain. There's a couple of others for aspies and their partners to work on their relationships, and a couple for aspies.

(I was posting on one such forum - AS and Working Relationships - until my wife became uncomfortable with a friendship I had developed with an aspie woman on that site. I don't know that my wife was in the right, but even if she isn't I'll never convince her of that so I'll take her word for it. Such is life.)

Anyway... ASPartners. I found myself reading there for a couple of years off and on, and even put a post that they eventually let through explaining why I thought my wife was aspie. I developed a bit of an obsession with it actually, trying to wring every last drop of data on what goes wrong when we try to have relationships with them. The expectations of the women posting on that site are far beyond what I at least am capable of, or at least capable of constantly performing for decades on end. (Whether those expectations are reasonable is a whole nother question, of course!)

It's certainly not a random sample of NT women, by any means.

The forum has been active since 2000. Until 2004, Aspies were allowed to post in the public section.

I find that a lot of temporarily able-bodied and neurotypical partners have unrealistic standards for relationships from their disabled partners and very little sympathy or empathy for difficulties. Everything's always on purpose and done with malign or careless intent, and if only they'd [i]completely change themselves into the ideal TAB/NT spouse, things would be great.

Frankly, quite a few of them are extremely emotionally abusive to their disabled partners.

Stupid, stupid stuff on that board. I have dated a number of men on the spectrum, and I didnt have any problems with them. If I am dating an Aspie man and he is indifferent to me, I just assume that he doesnt love me, men who love you dont ignore you.

ASPartners is very bigoted against people with AS. It's mean.

AS and Relationships that Work seemed pretty NT-biased to me, and I essentially got booted off it for not understanding some social rule that they wouldn't explain clearly, and for being 'argumentative' by saying it didn't make sense to me.

I made ASAR for people who actually want a group that's about AS and relationships but isn't for NTs to b***h about how much AS people suck, or vice-versa. It's quiet, though. I think it's pretty fair. Most of the posters are NT women married to AS men, but there's a pretty good percentage of AS people, too.

http://asdrelationships.freeforums.org/

It's an NT forum to b***h about their aspie partners or suspected ones.

That might be a great place for your hubby to moan about you.

I don't like him either and his wife sounds horrible but I just don't like his attitude. But then I was so happy about him when he decided to leave his wife because he was that miserable in his marriage.

Guys, please please don't give up on NTs just because you've seen some of the worst of them. Some of the nicest people I know are NTs. They don't use their social skills to hurt and exclude people; they use them to understand people and connect with them.

It's like NTs have discovered fire; and now they have to decide what to do with it--burn down a forest, or cook a meal for their families. And a great many NTs--the majority, in fact--are getting out their cookbooks.

That's the danger of stereotypes. We've felt it on our end; let's be careful not to form our own stereotypes in return. NTs can be evil and hateful. They can also be nice or practically saintly. Most of them are just fallible human beings who are sometimes nice and sometimes thoughtless and sometimes mean. Can we say any different about ourselves?

Yes, they're different. They're not like us. Okay. But why is that a bad thing? Different is okay; it takes all types of people to make a world. We need them, the social-savant majority, to tie the world together. They're essential.

Please don't give up on them just because you've seen some of them being horrible. Give each individual person a fair chance. "NT" is an awfully broad category, and it's nonsensical to judge any single person solely by their membership in it.

Wow...this is sad. That woman is a total b***h, and they call us heartless.
So much ignorance and stupidity flooding from that forum. I think I just lost brain cells reading posts. :I

I'm sure there will be more as I continue to read, but this right here struck me as absurd and incredibly insulting, misleading, and disrespectful...

"It must be SO heartbreaking to realize you are married to someone whose brain is wired against knowing how to truly love and care for someone."

Wow, REALLY? If you have asperger's, you don't know how to care about someone? What the hell kind of BS is that?

Okay, yeah, so I read more, and this is the most uncaring, un-understanding, ridiculous load of s**t I've ever read. "oh no, woe is me, I have a son with AS too, he'll just be a dick to women. Hopefully he'll become a huge geek and invent something." It sounds to me like they don't get it, and they never will. They keep trying the same stuff over and over again and expect different results on the 800th time when it was the same result the other 799 times they tried it... They're friggin' insane...

And supposedly we are the ones that "lack empathy".

I think that they're the ones who lack empathy, not us.

I know of NTs who are amazing to their disabled partners too, a lot of them. I would put my stepfather at the top of that list, as my mother isn't NT. They don't get along perfectly, but they support each other.

The ability to exercise empathy and sympathy and compassion (three different things here, not making them one thing) is usually a pretty conditional thing. A lot of people simply don't empathize and can't sympathize with people who aren't like them. Somehow this never gets brought up in discussions about who has empathy and who does not.