How autism affects romantic relationships and dating | Dave Plummer and Lex Fridman

What about love and relationships? What are some of the challenges of that? And you know, there's a show Love on the Spectrum. I've heard of it. I've not seen it, but I've heard of it. Because certain aspects, like literal interpretation of things, it just makes the complexity of relationships, of romantic relationships, even more explicit in that context. You know, I've been married 31 years and together for 37, so a long history there. And I think our first indication that we knew we were very different was we were sitting in the car one night out front of the house at dark and across the street, there's kind of a nice house that has these big brick pillars that are linked by like anchor chains and it forms a fence around the yard. And I'm looking at these things cause they're about two feet square and I got a capstone and I'm like, you know, I wonder if they're hollow or they backfill, do they fill with concrete or what? And my now wife looks at me and she's like, what's wrong with you? Why do you have a place in your head that cares about that? Yeah, that's great. In the moment that I was passionately involved in caring and she was passionately involved in, why would you even worry about that kind of thing? We knew we were very different. Yeah. Very specific, seemingly irrelevant details. But I was never good with people. I don't get it when people like me, I guess. And so I, and my son is the same way cause they all don't fall very far from three. And I got him a t-shirt that says, if you're hitting on me, please let me know and be specific because I'm clueless. And it's very similar for me. I mean, I had to be around a long time and kind of grow on people because I had no game because I had no ability to do the social dances that that whole thing requires. So my only option is to just be myself. And that works for some people. Were you able to say like, like, I love you, that kind of stuff. Yeah. I mean, her family was way more open with that kind of thing than mine was. And so it was a growing period for me, but yeah, it's not a problem I have. Okay. All right. But, but it seems like unimportant. It was like, what is that actually accomplishing? Well, now we do a lot of affirmation and checking. Like in the last couple of years, we do a thing where she'll just be like, you good? I'm like, yeah. And there's two steps to that. There's the, are you good? And then there's my response. Cause if I'm like, yeah, she knows something's up. And so there's always this pinging back and forth. Cause there's not the ability to read people just from looking at them to know what's going on. So we have this explicit check mechanism, I think, where we've developed that. So there's a vast chasm between yeah. And yeah, again, that's subtlety of human communication.