Diagnose or not?

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I am new to this site and I am so glad I have found it.
Your post connected so much with me. I also have had felt like an outsider my entire life. Even as a young child. I never had any close friends. I have had a very hard time with social relationships, I try to figure things out by myself. Did not have dating experiences. Relationships have always been a struggle or failure. I have not been able to develop emotional relationships. People see me as rude or not caring. Which I am not very empathetic. I do have a hard time showing emotion and actions to people a care about. How do you get people that you do care about to see that you really do care for them? I am a failure to this and would appreciate any advice or tips.

I am currently on the waiting list for a diagnosis. Nevertheless I am more than a bit leery, for the following reasons:

1) I strongly suspect that reliable methodologies for diagnosing older adults have simply not yet been developed. I've seen lots of online psych journal articles, from around 10 years ago, regarding what was then acknowledged to be a male bias in autism diagnosis. Since then the psychotherapeutic establishment has apparently made an effort to correct for this bias in the diagnosis of girls and (young-to-early-middle-aged) adult women. I strongly suspect there's a similar youth-oriented bias that has NOT yet been anywhere near adequately examined, let alone corrected for. It seems glaringly obvious to me that it would be intrinsically much harder to diagnose older people, simply because older people have had longer to develop, in a wide variety of different possible directions. But I've seen hardly any discussion at all about this obvious issue. If indeed it has not yet even been discussed much, then it almost certainly has not been corrected for, either.

2) I can't provide reliably corroborated info about my childhood. My parents are both dead. I've been contacting relatives to try to find other people with memories of my childhood. Some do have sporadic memories of my behavior at family reunions, etc., but mostly from my late childhood, not my early childhood. One cousin does remember family gossip about how my parents were worried I might be "ret*d" because I didn't start talking until I was almost 4 (consistent with what my parents told me about when I learned to talk), but my cousin's memory on this point is just hearsay; she does not personally remember seeing me as a nonverbal 3-year-old. (In any case my parents' worries about me being "ret*d" ceased when I reached first grade and began doing well academically -- though not socially.) This lack of reliable info about my early childhood will make it hard for the person evaluating me to determine whether my autistic-like traits date back to early childhood (as per the definition of ASD). I'm pretty sure my traits do date back to early childhood, but I don't have a good way of corroborating that.

3) Over the years I've adapted in unusual ways. During childhood I had no real friends and did not feel close to anyone except my parents. Later I became more social, but pursued an unusual strategy. According to various stuff I've read over the past year, many/most autistic/Aspie women have spent most of their lives trying desperately to fit in, blindly copying NT behavior in the vain hope of being accepted by mainstream society that way. On the other hand, my main social strategy has always been to seek out fellow oddballs. I've gotten involved in a series of oddball subcultures over the years, with varying degrees of success depending on the subculture. I am lucky in that I've managed to avoid a lot of the co-morbidities (clinical depression, etc.) that many autistic adults of the "Lost Generation(s)" have developed as a result of loneliness and/or the stress of endless masking. (But I've paid a price for my refusal to force myself into an unnatural mold. I've been under-employed for most of my adult life, except for one full-time electronic engineering job that I did manage to hold down for 7+ years. Then again, had I put anywhere near as much effort into masking as many autistic women are said to do, I might not have had enough energy left over for the actual work of any job at all, or for my education.) I managed to make some very good friends when I was in my twenties and early thirties. (Most of my friends are now dead, alas.)

Hence my social skill development as an adult has been very unusual. I still can't (and never tried very hard to) do anything remotely resembling normal eye contact rhythms, nor can I do unfocused chit chat with multiple people at a time. I nevertheless have managed to acquire (not perfectly, but enough to be very helpful) some of the deeper skills that can help maintain a good relationship, e.g. assertiveness (or at least the purely verbal aspects thereof), active listening (purely verbal aspects, again), and giving and receiving constructive criticism. I'm also generally decent at one-on-one conversation, at least with people who don't mind my odd body language.

Anyhow, I wonder if today's diagnostic methodologies sufficiently account for the variety of different possible paths of adult social development.

4) The diagnostic procedure relies heavily on psychological testing, which is something I don't put a lot of stock in, especially for something as heterogeneous as ASD, some of whose defining traits are inherently subjective and culture-dependent. (See Can social pragmatic skills be tested? on the website of the Indiana Resource Center for Autism.) As I see it, the psychotherapeutic establishment uses standardized testing instruments to create some semblance of consistency and objectivity -- even though autism, as currently defined, is way too heterogeneous a category to be captured adequately by any attempt at a standard. Such quasi-objective standards are necessary for various bureaucratic purposes (insurance, allocation of special ed funding, various other services available only to people who were diagnosed as children), but I don’t see how they can possibly correspond, in any truly objective, consistent, quantitative way, to the highly individual realities of people's lives. I also wonder, of course, whether the tests are at all suitable for older people.

5) I strongly doubt that there is any therapy likely to be of much benefit to me at my age.

6) I am generally not comfortable with the idea of relying on outside authority figures on any matter pertaining to my own personal self-discovery.

Despite my concerns about the validity or usefulness of diagnosis at my age, what I am 100% certain of is that I have numerous autistic (or at least autistic-like) traits, to a sufficient degree to have significantly constrained my life. So I am at least "autistic-like," even if I am deemed, for whatever reason, not to be properly "autistic" according to current standards.

What I am interested in is doing what I can to help build a subculture in which both I and my boyfriend (who was diagnosed with Asperger's back in 2001) can thrive. To that end I am interested in helping to build a subculture for "autistic and autistic-like" people. Whichever side of a certain arbitrary line I end up being deemed to fall on, I don't see the point of relying on outside authorities as gatekeepers, rather than simply bringing together people with common needs. Fortunately, one of the local NYC support groups agrees with me on this.