why don't mild aspie call themselves nt

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that brings up the question of what cognitive gifts separate the mateable aspies from the non-mateable ones.

None of those automatically mean mild Asperger's. Who you know matters more than how severe you are.

Make friends - well, right now I have a quirky, possibly-disabled woman coming by every so often to ask for computer help. She always seems to get into a long and enjoyable conversation with me, usually about cats. We might easily become friends, without either of us acting particularly NT.

Get married - no way you can make a marriage work by faking anything about you, so ability to fake NT has nothing to do with marital success. (Dating is helped by faking NT, but dating success isn't strongly linked to success at long-term relationship.) Finding a partner who's fine with AS does. Many AS people marry other AS people. Others marry NTs who are understanding, kind and accepting of differences. Both can make for a happy marriage, whether you're able to fake NT or not.

Raise a family - this often follows from getting married, if you're heterosexual. And kids aren't going to care if their parent acts weird, as long as he/she is nice to them (and AS does not make you mean to kids). Social skills have nothing to do with parenting. Executive functions do, but most people don't judge severity of AS by executive dysfunction.

Have a good paying job - that all depends on the job. Some jobs are aspie-friendly, and as long as you are competent to do what you're hired for, it won't matter if you talk to yourself, carry a big stuffed parrot everywhere and flap your hands. Others may be less tolerant. Some jobs directly require skills an AS person may lack, but many high-paying jobs would be just fine for AS people. For example, I swear about a fourth of psychology professors are on the spectrum. Being a professor is a very well-paying job.

As long as you're high-functioning enough to meet AS criteria, I don't see jobs and marriage and friendships being related to severity. Many people actually treat the less-obviously AS people worse, because they're less likely to think the person is disabled and give them some slack. (I know mild social impairment puts you at higher risk of being bullied than severe social impairment.)

My mild autism

Sometimes I get some "pretty good friends" who know and "understand" my differences. They find my passions "refreshing," my faux pax "cute" and "boy howdy, you have such CHARISMA!" CHARISMA! ME! [only a few times have i heard that]

And then, something happens in my life. Someone I love dies, or my kids illness worsens, or I tell the truth about how scared I am of having breast cancer. And they reassure me and tell me that I am their friend and I can let it all out. And so I do. I cry and I sob and I tremble and I start stammering and losing my train of thought. That's about the time they walk out the door accusing me of "pretending to be so together but actually being needy."[ "And that stimming! You ARE insane!"] They seem to feel betrayed, that I had fooled them into thinking I was "human" and wasted their time.

I can't drive a car. Heck, I can't even drive a golf cart.

When I was able to work I would get a job, think it was going great until the day i was brought into the managers office and let go for "just not fitting in." [not a one time thing]

Back in school, ALWAYS picked last for team sports, dreading when the teacher would have us break into teams of 2 or 3.

Constantly confusing aquaintances and polite people as friends.

Falling apart if I do not stay on schedule.

I am considerably older than most in here, but it was not fun being diagnosed as mentally ret*d in school.

Mute in school until 14. Kids would tease me about being too ret*d to speak until I threw up.

Mute, "ret*d" crazy girls can be sexually abused on a regular basis, and thats okay, especially if they cannot tell anyone.

I could go on and on and on, give thousands of examples.

But, yeah, I'm married to an awesome man. Yeah, I have been blessed with awesome kids. I'm not a 'regular Avon lady, but I do pretty well. I design and make my own line of jewelry and sell ice cream to naked people in the woods.[nudist club] I do well enough with my writing to pay for my memory thumbdrive, ink cartridges, paper, copy machine, and even my 5 ounces of wine and 3 cups of coffee I I drink every morning when I pick up either my lap-top or my pen to work.

Am I glad that my autism is what is considered mild? I would be lying if I were to say otherwise.[it would also go against the grain of some of my autisticky neurological traits] I would be lying even more were I to consider myself in any way NT.

Yeah. Being gifted can help, but in my case, it doesn't change the fact that my adaptive skills are at about the level of a twelve-year-old, or an adult with an IQ of 60 and adaptive skills at the same level, or a gifted autistic adult who sucks at adaptive skills. Right now I've got a pile of mail that's just really intimidating, trying to figure out how to pay bills... I'm hungry and have been for the past few hours, and hopefully I'll be able to get myself some food at some point. I'm barely independent, and not financially independent at all.

I usually call it analytical or academic talent, rather than giftedness, because "giftedness" implies that I am good at everything. I'm not. I'm good at school. I'm good at thinking and learning abstract stuff. That's cool, and it's something I really enjoy being good at, but it's not a global talent-for-everything as people usually think "giftedness" is.

I do take advantage of it. I can design some of my own adaptations to my own disability. If I didn't have the ability to analyze and solve problems, I probably wouldn't have learned how to remember to take showers every day, how to eat often enough, how to keep my apartment clean and my cats fed. I wouldn't have been able to adapt technology like computer programs and smartphone apps to help me with executive dysfunction. I'm almost my own rehabilitation engineer at this point. Maybe someday I'll be a rehab engineer for real. So that's cool. But it doesn't change the fact that I have some very real deficits.

I don't think I'd change the way things are, either way. The problems I have, the disabilities and the skills I'm really bad at, are part of me just like my talents are. It's weird to think that a person's identity might include things like not being able to switch tasks easily, but mine does. And it includes being able to learn a new subject by myself, or devise a solution to a problem out of duct tape, hangers, and clothespins.

It does get frustrating sometimes, though, because one way or the other, people like to pretend I am all the same. Either they think, "She's disabled, so she can't be good at anything, especially not better than me, because I'm not disabled." Or they think, "She's gifted; how could she possibly have trouble with such easy tasks? She must be lazy." Like many autistic people, I'm a paradox to those who like to put human beings in neat little boxes. I just don't fit.

Well there is also the traumatic events in social interaction that can cause you to doubt your every single move, and being able to analyze everything and thinking 40 moves ahead, can also cause you ( it does that for me a lot ) to determine that too many games will result in a check mate.
So you could already have decided by using your cognitive abilities, that seeking a partner will inevitably have less pros than cons in your current situation, and is therefore not a risk worth taking right now.

That's how it usually works for me at least, analytical skills are great but are sometimes also really annoying.

Social situations are sort of like playing chess for me every single time.

Last edited by Jonov on 02 Aug 2013, 9:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I wish I were that advanced, but it more likely was a combo of being in the "uncanny valley" [lacking inborn fluency in body language] and being found unattractive to begin with. the social nuances have always eluded me.

you can be mild,but still have social related trouble.
but the aspie who are both mild,and have good social skill,capable of dating,
actual have a social life.

Im not going to name anyone.but there are some aspie on wp,that are very
social,have alots of friends,are married or have no trouble getting dates,
attractive,and people like them. I don't understand why these socially
popular aspie don't just call themselves nt's.

Aunt Blabby: You might be lacking in socialskill in real life. That being said, your skills online in comforting those who are feeling down about themselves, and the beautiful wisdom you share with others is pure spiritual genius. [Also, if that's your actual pic in your avatar, you are very good looking]

^^^
why THANK YOU Vicky that is very kind of you. wrong planet is where I belong, I wish it could be extended to a real-world physical community.

Because ACTING NT is different from BEING NT.

Imagine being able to do all the things you say these aspies do, but in order to do that you need to wear a very heavy mask that literally weighs a ton, now you manage to wear the mask just good enough to make sure that nobody will notice that you are wearing one.

But when you come home you are extremely tired from wearing that mask all day and you forget to eat and don't have the energy to clean your house, and you are sad because you want to show those "friends" your real face and not the mask you wear.

Those "friends" you act socially with are not going to clean your house for you and will not make you a sandwich when you are hungry, and will not comfort you when you feel bad about wearing a mask all day, because they don't even know you wear one.

My mom has Asperger's and is married, and still she is too tired to clean the house sometimes, and after a day of being social she is so extremely tired, that she needs a full day to recover from it.

I really cannot explain this better so I hope you understand what I am trying to tell you.

Last edited by Jonov on 02 Aug 2013, 10:32 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I am a very high functioning Aspie. I thought I was an NT for decades until a year and a half ago. I have worked and I am married. But I am not an NT. You would not know it at first glance and you may not ever notice it. No one in my family noticed it. But I have a lot of traits that put me on the Spectrum and they are very obvious to the trained eye. Once I was told and I started looking at all my "quirks", I realized that these are all typical Aspie traits. And the more I learned about the Spectrum, the more I understood how my behavior as a child as well as a lot of my behavior now makes sense. Growing up I had to learn social skills and learn many things to survive and thrive in an NT world. I had to do this from a very early age since Autism was not even really heard of back then. So I learned and I very much enjoy being social, and many Aspies do, but I still to this day have some difficulties with getting it "right" sometimes.

So yes, a lot of HFA's can look and act very similar to NT's sometimes but remember, Autism is an actual neurological disorder and some of the things that classify you as an Aspie or an Autie are not things that you can so easily change. Some of them I don't know if you can change at all. It's like people who are mentally ret*d. Some of them you would never know unless they told you. I actually have a friend who is classified MR but he is so well adapted that you could not readily tell. But once you really get to know him intimately and once you see his test scores, there is not question that he is. So even though he may be very capable of many things he is still MR.

NT stands for Neurotypical. So for those of us who have a neurological disorder, whether it is mild or severe, it is still not nuerotypical. To say that we were NT's would be denying a very deep and important part of who we are as people. It would be like asking and Albino African American, why don't you just call yourself white? The answer is because he is not.

Last edited by skibum on 02 Aug 2013, 10:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Because we're not! You see all these things that are different than what you can do and think that because we can pretend to be normal we don't deserve to be honest with ourselves, even if we have to lie to the world. Just because my co-workers think I'm "just a little off" but generally a good worker, or that I'm married and raising a brilliant aspie son and an equally brilliant NT stepson, that I must be NT. It takes a presumptious ass to think they know what anyone else is going through. My co-workers weren't in my bunk room an hour ago when I had a panic attack. Or that I was so distressed when my ipod was stolen that my husband replaced it, even though we couldn't afford it. You weren't there when I was introduced to a new partner and could think of nothing useful to say, and what came out was "Wouldn't it be embarrassing to be attacked by a giraffe?"

I spent my life being taught by my mother to "pretend" to be normal, never let anyone know you're "different" or "broken". Screw that! I'm who I am and I don't have to live up to anyone's labels. And as far as that goes, when my son was little, he said he was a puppy. He was not, and there would be no reason for me to put a collar on him and take him outside to piss. You can say you are whatever you want. That doesn't make it so.

Being gifted/genius sometimes means you don't get the help you need because people think you can handle everything yourself.

EMTkid, I hope your new partner was kind and understanding when you asked about giraffe attacks. I said something similar before, I don't even remember what it was but I remember that the person looked at me dumbfounded wondering if I was from another planet. I laugh at it now because now I can actually say, "Actually yes I am, I am a proud member of the WP!"

billiscool, I know you are asking because you really want to know the answer and not to be insensitive. Not that your question is deeply personal, but I ask deeply personal questions to people all the time not realizing that they are embarrassing for people and I have to be reminded about sensitivity sometimes, I think that may be one of my Aspie traits, not always knowing the right social sensitivity thing. But I really believe that you mean no harm in asking so I just ask that those answering might try to understand that and answer with gentleness as well. Just my thought. Thanks.

Last edited by skibum on 02 Aug 2013, 10:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

the OP's question [which is my question] has not been answered- to reiterate: what is the magic sauce that the higher-functioning aspies here use to effortlessly snag mates? my suspected answer is body language fluency combined with macho confidence due to high levels of testosterone. IOW the higher functioning ones are alphas.