Empiricism and dating with Asperger's

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When I say empiricism, I mean using the pattern of history and past results as an indicator and/or influencer of present and future results. As in my other threads, I am 30 and still a virgin plus have never had a girlfriend. I have a 100% rejection rate and 100% failure in anything relating to dating. As in, not even in one instance has anything worked out up to now.

I wonder if my mindset of empiricism and focussing on all of my failures is part of the problem. However, I am obsessed with statistics and numerical facts, and the fact is that 100% of the time I have failed in dating and related areas. Based on this data, what is the actual probability of any success in the future? Sometimes it seems overoptimistic to expect better results given these numbers.

Statistics indicate as well that having Asperger's decreases dramatically the probability of success in dating, in addition to having a history of a 100% dating failure record at age 30.

I may be analysing these data numbers too closely like Microsoft Excel, but based on numerical statistics, how do I stop falling into depression like I did when I was around ages 23-25 when I did not talk to a woman in any social setting at all during those years? Am I basing my bad results too much on statistics and carrying these statistics into the future too much such that becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy? Should I just stop thinking about empirical statistics and just try my best as if from a clean slate?

Yep. Clean Rousseau slate is best.

Just a question first. When was the last time your spoke to a woman with some kind of dating intent?

I never had any success being pro-active at dating, but did fine at going along with those interested in me, for whatever reason. Successful salesmen make many calls, counting each one as progress in experience if nothing else. One guy decided he wasn't cut out for sales after a month, and decided to quit when he got back to the office. On his next call, he didn't try his speech, he just listened to the prospect's situation, after which he bought the product. By listening more, he became a success.

James Herriot has a nice story about an unhappy farmhand who was sent to run an errand. There, he saw a house maid, and it was love at first sight. Her boss was bored, and glad to put on a big wedding for two 60-something misfits who had finally found their soul mates.

I think you pointed out an important thing: people today dream of someone who would listen to them. Just letting people talk and trying to understand what they mean made me through a lot of difficult social situations.

STATISTICALLY, every time you flip a coin, you have a 50/50 chance of it being heads. REALISTICALLY, you can still get tails 20 times in a row. Getting tails 20 times in a row does not mean you will always flip a tails, even though, up to that point, you have a 100% rate of flipping a tails. Statistics have their uses, when interpreted correctly. This is not one of them.

Forget the statistics. There are better things to focus on.

My counsellor confirms that after you listen to someone, they feel that they know YOU better! I suppose they know that you won't laugh at them over some things, so that is progress.

I don’t think you should let statistics define you. Maybe you could watch some helpful videos online regarding communication and dating. I’m sure you could find a great deal of information that may help you.

I am not sure that I understand this correctly. Do you mean when was the last time that I spoke to a woman and set up a date? If you mean that, the last time was August 2019. Before that the last time was probably sometime in 2017 or 2018, I cannot remember exactly.

Using pure statistics, a coin flip is 50% heads/50% tails. This outcome's probability is stagnant no matter what happens in the past.

What I meant is that I have been using empiricism in addition to statistics. So in your analogy, say that I did a coin flip, got tails. Then again tails. Then again and again, etc. Say that I got 100 times tails. Empiricism involved would mean that, based on the results of the past coin clips, maybe there is some outside factor that is not really making it 50/50 in my case, maybe after so many failures it was going 40/60, 30/70/, 20/80 in favour of tails. In other words, some particularities in my case are skewing the next coin flip drastically in the favour of getting tails.

Even though I have a maths degree, statistics was not my strongest area. Even so, I do remember that for pure statistics to be analysed in an unbiased form, no outside factors can influence the result. Which is what I meant by empricism--analysing outside factors that are causing me to get tails on each consecutive coin flip, that is, failing in dating.

The "blank slate" idea can be traced back to Aristotle and was popularized during the Enlightenment by John Locke. Rousseau had nothing to do with it, and the idea itself has nothing to do with starting afresh in dating.

There is this idea of Bayesian probability inference, which is based on Bayes's theorem, and basically means that we adjust our expectations about the future based on experiences of the past, or prior knowledge. It involves subjective experiences rather than objective empirical measurements. There are a few problems with this, though, such as (1) our episodic memories are not always reliable; (2) what we can recall at any given time is biased by a separate stream of information regarding how we feel about ourselves, which could mean that we give undue focus to memories that confirm these feelings. For example, if deep down we have a low self-esteem and are depressed, we may be more inclined to focus on memories like social rejections, faux pas, misdeeds and mistakes of our past, body image, or traumatic experiences, which further hinders us in future endeavors. It's a vicious cycle.

As you mentioned in another comment, the probability of flipping heads or tails does not change with each toss; each coin flip has a 50/50 chance of being either heads or tails. However, humans aren't coins that never change; we can control our outcome to more of an extent than we sometimes realize. Being autistic, this is more of a challenge to us than it may be for neurotypicals, because we're not always aware of how our behavior may affect others, and respectful, constructive feedback is hard to come by when our peers have a strong social incentive to misunderstand, criticize, bully, and/or gossip about things that run counter to their expectations and values. Also, our more respectful peers are often unwilling to disclose why they reject us because they don't want to hurt our feelings.


Absolutely. I have often fallen victim to dwelling on past rejections and negative experiences that contaminate my perception of future success, but as I mentioned above, this turns into a vicious cycle and, as you feared, a self-fulfilling prophecy. As we both well know, ignoring these and being optimistic is much easier said than done, and I'm sorry to say that I can't offer any sure-fire solution. How I deal with loneliness is by finding like-minded people on the Internet, and I have set dating to a lower priority. One motivation for working on my career skills and physical health is because it would improve my self-esteem and self-confidence, which in turn would make me a more desirable candidate for a significant other.

Last edited by Abstract_Logic on 14 Dec 2019, 1:19 pm, edited 4 times in total.

If you stay the same and the kind of women you try to date stays the same, then the results are very likely to stay the same as well. However, if you change or the kind of women you try to date changes, then your chances will be different. If your current places and circles aren't working, eiher find other places to meet women or become someone the women in your current circles would want (personally though, I'd advice you to do the former instead of later.)

There's also the fact that on average, people's priorities change as they age. You're a serious guy who doesn't like to party, right? Been that way in your younger days too, I assume? In that case, women your age who were the party type in their twenties naturally wouldn't have had any interest in you back then (in general, sometimes there are exceptions), but some of those women might no longer be interested in partying in their early thirties and are looking for something calmer and serious, meaning that what once was a deal breaker about you isn't so anymore.

I believe that for anyone who is a decent person (not violent, agressive and so on) and can pull their own weight, there is someone suitable out there. It's just that you have to a) find that person and b) charm them before someone else does.

That's not empiricism - that's an assumption. "Maybe" there is an outside factor, and "maybe" there isn't. Nothing about the data actually implies the possibility in any way. There doesn't have to be an outside factor afoot to cause unusual patterns to occur. When the outcomes are consistently good, its called the "survivor fallacy" - the belief that something external caused the string of outcomes (luck, fate, destiny, "in the zone", etc..) - the same applies to continuous undesirable outcomes. It's arbitrarily injecting an external variable to force an explanation of events, rather than accepting that the pattern is still well within the parameters of probability.

That aside, as you indicated, in order for statistical information to be relevant, the experiments / outcomes have to be unaffected by external influences or normal variations. But if there is an external influence affecting your success, then the numbers are already meaningless anyways, since there's an external factor afoot. Not to mention the fact that every person is different, so every situation is already a different variable anyways. Either way, the stats aren't valid, based on your own parameters of explanation. Everything is too inconsistent.

Additionally, in order for your success or failure rate to actually be meaningful, we'd have to know the success and failure rates of other people as well. If EVERYone has a failure rate of 90%, we know there isn't a high success rate in the first place. Also, how does one define success or failure? Even successful people don't succeed every time when it comes to dating. And how do we know the next one won't succeed? The only way to improve outcomes with static odds is to make more attempts. Keep trying. If all that's needed is one success, it doesn't matter how many times you have to repeat the game, as long as you get that one success. You won't get that one success if you stop repeating the game. Sometimes the only difference between failure and success is whether or not you stop trying.

Besides, framing things as being a result of "external factors" automatically ignores the possibility that it could be an internal factor. Many times we are the architect of our own undoing. Of course, nobody likes to hear that, but it's often more true than we like to admit.

Forget the statistics - there are better things to worry about.

I want to add that what I meant was that we should adjust our expectations about the future based on experiences of the past. What I was getting at was that this kind of inference aids our social learning. For example, if we retrospectively observe that certain behaviors of ours are associated with certain social outcomes (e.g., rejection), we can reasonably expect the same outcome to occur if the behavior doesn't change. This is also what Fireblossom was saying above. However, my other point was that being Autistic, we're not always aware of how our behaviors affect others, so we often don't understand why we were rejected, and thus we don't have any data with which to update our beliefs and expectations. This sometimes leads us to believe that it is something outside of our control, such as unchangeable physical or cognitive features, or that we are inherently flawed somehow.

uncommondenominator has made a good point that you should avoid thinking of this in terms of technical statistics. Casual Bayesian reasoning and subjective probability regarding dating and relationships is more of a psychological/therapeutic endeavor than a quantitative mathematical one.