Re-thinking dating, from 2 different angles

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I'm not only on the ASD spectrum, but openly asexual to boot (please do not bombard me with the "sex is great! You should try it!" badvertising---I've heard it all), so it's not difficult to understand why at nearly age 50 I'm still looking for the right woman. When I googled dating+Asperger's, I quite accidentally landed on a couple of pages devoted to the dating difficulties unique to female aspies---the characteristics of whom read like a laundry list of many of the qualities I've always wanted in a love interest!

First off, I gave up on dating sites because they've turned into little more than playgrounds for scam artists (and ATMs for the corporate suits who run the sites), though you're always going to get that one person in a couple thousand who says they met the love of their life on an OLDS. I understand WP is not a dating site, but that's off the crux of this topic in the first place. I do run a meetup group for asexual, celibate, and virgin singles, but given the tragic stories I've heard from people on the ASD who tried without success to find love, I started seeing a lot of parallels between the way both aces and aspies are treated by mainstream dating.

It's been my experience that the thing which makes it toughest for people like myself to have any success in mainstream dating is that there are all these unwritten rules everyone's supposed to know. Break one, and the dating world will neither forget nor forgive you for it. It's like getting a sticker slapped on you that says DANGER---DO NOT LOVE THIS PERSON!! ! Not knowing how to speak flirt-ese (and not knowing what all those sexual code words really mean) have been the worst barriers in my experience as someone on the ASD. Why can't we both just bring our laundry lists to the table and do this dating thing like a job interview? Makes perfect sense to me!

As an openly hetero-asexual male, I have a second, different dilemma: I'm looking for emotional bonding without the sex, and that pretty much throws the whole male-pursues-female thing out the window because it's implied that sex (and probably parenthood) is the endgame of the pursuit. Right? There are other asexual meetup groups, but AFAIK mine is the only one in the region which is more about love and romance than asexual activism.

But knowing what I know now, I'm definitely looking forward to expanding my meetup group to include singles with Asperger's (though not necessarily in the same sessions as AC&V singles, though the two do overlap somewhat)---here's looking forward to many happy and interesting potlucks, roundtable discussions, and costume parties!