Might autistic women not be the best match for autistic men?

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A lot of the autistic women I have met, I have found them physically unattractive. Those were just the ones that I have known about.


I was once set up on a blind date with an autistic women and it was a horrible match. She liked to drink and do drugs and was kind of crazy, that never really went anywhere.

If it's the thread I'm thinking of, it's in the In-Depth Adult Life Discussion section. Her husband is NT, they've been married a long time & have two kids together. The husband is doing everything he can to try & make the relationship work while the wife just suddenly decides she does not want to live together but wants to stay married.

I really do NOT get why some people move in together, maybe get married, & stay in serious long-term relationships if they are not wanting to live with anyone I could understand if it was a country where women have few rights, she was very poor, or she felt pressured from her family or religion but I fail to understand why someone would get married if they are wanting to live alone & are not being forced or majorly pressured into it I'm sure the husband must feel completely heartbroken & devastated

Last edited by nick007 on 13 Mar 2023, 12:13 pm, edited 3 times in total.

My grandparents were married almost 60 years and they never shared a bedroom.
Apparently, he never saw her without makeup or with wet hair, either.
That part's weird to me ^, but I can relate to the bedroom idea.

If I had to live with a partner I'd need separate bedrooms and ideally separate snugs.
Separate homes? I don't see a problem with it, but then it defeats the point of marriage financially.

I own a house with my exbf and we don't live in it together. He lives there.
If we were married with two homes it would just be a marriage for financial gain, I guess.
That's weird to me.

I know some couples who have companionate marriage but they usually live together.

It makes me think of those old black & white shows. They wanted to pretend like husbands & wives were not intimate & were just two best friends living & raising kids together due to hard-core morality values.

Me & Cass have a two bedroom apartment & we do sleep in the same bed but we can have alone time to do our own things or unwind.

some autistic men simply may not be the most masculine or able to provide for a autistic woman for reasons. it reminds me of the title of an article im paraphrasing ''why overweight men may not be the best fit for plus size women'' this debacle reminds me of that. this is my perhaps erroneous conclusion because i have seen evidence to contrary in this thread.

I've always thought I'd be happy to try a relationship with an autistic woman. At least to the extent that I'm capable of, because I don't know that I could cope with supporting a profoundly affected woman, having my own autism to handle too. I do feel like there would be a greater chance of understanding and a greater tolerance of inexperience. Or at least I'd hope so.

But, out of curiosity, I was recently looking through dating sites which claim to cater to autistic people, and in doing so I ran into a demoralising amount of women with children.

That would seem to suggest that they're infinitely more successful than I've ever been, clearly they've had relationships before, they've obviously had sex some number of times to have become pregnant. So what gives? If autistic/aspie women are the most likely, at least in my estimation, to give me half a chance... but they're out having relationships of their own, presumably to some extent with NTs, what's left for me?

It's not as though I can reasonably compete, and if those who understand my predicament are able to get what I can't, why should they care about me? They could just as easily go and find somebody more confident, more capable, more experienced, without the baggage of being the one who has to initiate.

I didn't find that many of them to be that physically attractive either, but I did meet a few who were, some I know myself.

But even in the world of NT couples, most NT women have more past experience than most NT men, so it's normal for the women to usually have more experience than the men, whether autistic or NT.

Well, that may or may not be true, but most "normal" people tend to get some experience of some kind at some point. Maybe casual, maybe a series of relationships, even with gaps, whatever it might be.

But there's a colossal experience gap between "has been sufficiently involved with a partner to give birth, potentially multiple times" and "sex? I heard of it once".

That's not just "more experience", that's a different universe as far as life experience and psychological satisfaction goes. It's not even close, at all, by any measure.

It's the difference between believing your life has no purpose whatsoever and being proud of the new humans you've brought into this world, presumably with someone you cared about/who cared about you.

It's the difference between giving a knowing chuckle when a comedian tells a joke about relationships or sex, rather than feeling a spear of depression run right through your brain and down to your guts.

It's having human connection, generally speaking an important thing to most people, where some of us have none whatsoever.

Some women spoke of being "touch starved" during... the several years which started the 2020s. Some of us experience that forever.

The very idea that autistic women (or certainly some of them) can simply "be" in relationships, whilst many of us men have to struggle to get any hint of acceptance, affection, or intimacy at all, it's agonisingly miserable. It's very difficult to not compare when your status as an autistic man, you would think, might suggest that autistic women experience similar struggles, and so there might be some opportunity or compatibility there. But clearly not so, if they're better able to be with autistic or non-autistic men than we are with even autistic women.

This isn't meant to be a "who has it worse" comment, but that observation just brought it home to me just how ruined I am. Not only am I a poor proposition for NT women, I'm not even especially interesting to ND women either, why would I be, if they're that much more capable of finding a partner than I am?

(With apologies to the women here who aren't so lucky, but I can only work with what I see, and what I see, as an overall picture, is what I described above. As someone who is so far removed from romantic relationships, I appreciate that you probably aren't that jazzed about your struggles either. Perhaps we'll run into each other one day.)

This makes sense. I am autistic and my gf is as well. However, she is 16 years younger than me and we met when she was 21, and she didn't have as much experience. Do you think maybe that is an option for you, to date younger so the women have less experience? Or do you think that will not make a difference, if the woman still has some experience?

That she has experience wouldn't bother me, as long as I can trust that she's willing and able to be patient and accepting that I'm probably going to have some catching up to do.

Edit to clarify, as later text seems to contradict this: That she has experience wouldn't bother me in itself, but I imagine such a woman to be relatively rare and, combined with the other factors I mention below, that further narrows the already narrow-looking field. Single, without children (and probably not looking to have any, at this point), and happy to chance a relationship with a guy who is inexperienced and probably rather nervous until trust has been established, despite racing towards 40. Whilst somehow also being social enough to find and meet. It seems a tough ask. So that, in itself, is a source of anxiety, knowing that most of the women I'm likely to stumble across probably won't fit that profile.

Frankly, 21 would be a little young for me. I may be inexperienced, but I'm also acutely aware that I'm not getting any younger, and there are limits to the options I have. If I were to go to a club, for example, I don't reasonably expect to be able to walk up to a group of young women, as a late 30s man of questionable social capacity, and charm my way into their circle. I would, let's be honest, be considered a creep.

But, as I say, it's not age or experience, really, it's opportunity. It's finding the energy to keep believing that I can, one day, experience the highs and lows of a relationship. It's keeping faith in other human beings not to be immensely shallow, dismissive, and petty, as I experienced all those years ago in school (and have had very little opportunity to paper over with positive experiences), so that I can believe somebody out there would have that patience, understanding, and to want to be with me enough that it's just something we can overcome together, rather than a dealbreaker, or a joke, or whatever.

It's not easy at this age to find people to be friends with, never mind a partner, especially with poor self-esteem, depression, social and romantic inexperience, and anxieties around knowing what to do and how to do it. Many of the women who would be in my age bracket are either in families of their own now, or have parts of families with them as they try to build new ones.

Which, as I'm sure you can imagine, makes it very difficult to find someone - even without the difficulty of autism and a history of "very poor treatment" by the people around me. I can only imagine that any woman who is single at this point would probably be expecting (and likely have poor tolerance for low) experience. If not, she may have children, as in the cases I mentioned earlier on the dating websites, and that wouldn't be fair on me, on her, or on her children for me to try to assume that role, I'm not ready for that, I can't go from zero to light speed, it would be immensely stressful.

I feel like I'm rambling at this point, and probably veering a little off-topic, but I hope that made sense.

tl;dr: The general point, and the relevance to the thread, is that I (perhaps wrongly) imagined that autistic women might be... how do I say this without using the word "desperate"? Ahem. I mean, I imagined that autistic women might be at a similar place in life to mine, so that we could grow together, learn things together, and that neither one of us would be at a huge disadvantage. Which is why it prompted me to comment, having seen that I may have been operating under an optimistic misunderstanding.

Last edited by bottleblank on 14 Mar 2023, 9:15 pm, edited 2 times in total.

This makes sense. I am sorry to hear this. I hope you find someone for you for sure.

Thanks. Still, I wish you continued success with your partner.

Oh thank you very much.

Well it seems that based on what I hear on here, that autistic women have it easier because guys do not mind a socially awkward woman, compared to vice versa. However, can an autistic woman be so socially awkward to the point where a lot of NT guys would mind, and therefore autistic guys would have more advantage there, or no and NT guys do not care about social akwardness at all?

Like a lot of things, I think this is a case by case situation. I'm sure that there are relationships between autistic women and NT men that have broken up due to social awkwardness. Some probably don't mind. Some probably even see it as a cute quirk, because that is also a thing I've come across in the internet where there are some NT who want an autistic woman, because those quirks will make them "better" than a normie women, i.e. , one that can be more controlled.

I'm very wary of accidentally turning this into a "women have it easy" thread because, as I say, I know there are women here who don't have that experience.

However, the overall view I have is that because of the ways autism presents in many women, and because of the general expectation that men much approach and women must choose, and because there are many men who aren't particularly selective in terms of social awkwardness in women, broadly speaking it does seem that it might be easier for women to find a partner than it might be for a similarly autistic man. The expectations of men and women in that regard are simply different, for better or worse.

I, for example, don't feel especially inclined to expect a woman to be highly educated, I don't expect her to be wealthy, and so on. That might sound rather "traditional", but to me it's more... inclusive, I suppose. I see no reason to exclude, if I like her then I like her, I have no need to rank her on material statistics. But it doesn't seem as though that's necessarily reciprocated. Again, I appreciate there will be exceptions, but that's the impression I get, that men are expected to reach particular milestones and social success markers, moreso than women.

There's also, sadly, the possibility that some men simply don't care as long as they get to "enjoy themselves". An attractive autistic woman is no doubt still an attractive woman. Being used in that way is, I'm sure, very unpleasant. But I don't feel as though autistic men are likely to even have that simulation, that façade of a relationship, by which to gain experience, to learn lessons, to form memories, to gain self-esteem, and to know what to do or what not to do in future.

I think part of the difficulty is that there are obviously many different "types" or "levels" of autism, it's perhaps unhelpful that it's all called the same thing. I'm not so autistic that I find daily life to be infantalising, patronising, or exceptionally challenging, for example. I at least have that to be thankful for. I feel so close to being NT (although I'm clearly not, as my diagnosis formally states), yet I'm "weird" to actual NTs. I might therefore find it to be stressful to try to support a very autistic woman, even though I would feel like I wanted to. So, if such a woman were to be profoundly autistic, to the distaste of an NT man, they might also, sadly, be unsuitable for me too.

As I say, though, I'm open to options, I don't like to be exclusive. If I could make it work with someone who needed a little extra help, I'd want to do what I could. As long as we were compatible, if I enjoyed her company, if she enjoyed mine, I'd want to make that work, and I'd give it a shot. I'm just aware that, as an autistic man, I too have my limitations, and I wouldn't want to promise more than I could realistically offer.