If you are in a Truman Show-like environment controlled and contained by neurotypicals, to romantically match you with other autistics, you are not living in the real world. A ‘cotton wooled’ dreamscape where you fantasize about forever love, the perfect match, marriage and children and independent living in your own home. This ableist fodder, as I consider it to be, presented in Love On The Spectrum (LOTS), seems like a wholesome and sanitised alternative to the can’t look away sensationalism of Married At First Sight. Admittedly I love watching both shows, however, elements do not match up with my real world experiences as an autistic.
I, like my autistic compatriots in the LOTS TV show, have an idealised view of relationships. I badly wanted to have children and meet someone who would be my forever soul-mate. There is in LOTS a neurotypical narrator and a neurotypical relationship counsellor overseeing the love-fest to make sure the autistics don’t get too weird. Comfortably strange and cute is preferable to scarily strange exhibiting a stim, outbursts of anger or inappropriate comments. The narrator on occasion comes across to me like David Attenborough guiding the viewer through the mannerisms of an exotic new species of bird, 'if I stay quiet, I can get quite close to the autistics who one can see exhibit many human characteristics during their courting process'. We cheer with them when they act normally or in a cute non-threatening variation of normal.
Millions of people all over the world have now enjoyed voyeuristically watching the autistics over successful seasons as they fumble their way through the relationship jungle of normative socially embedded behaviours we have had reinforced hundreds of times over in the westernised zeitgeist through TV, social media and in movies. Neurotypical viewers in the comments sections tell us how it’s their favourite show, it makes them cry and is so heart-warming, yet almost every autistic person I follow on social media express feelings, on the emotional spectrum, from uncomfortable to outraged.
Those autistics chosen for the show must feel extremely anxious and exposed with the cameras following them around allowing us to watch their driving pursuit for love. Yet I see limited footage of stims, shutdowns/meltdowns or other self-comforting activities. No one wants to see an autistic comfort themselves by sucking their thumb or compulsorily picking their nose. Just admit you are watching it because you like their cute and funny squeaky Americanised voices, their innocent idealised views of love and naïve yet earnest attempts to woo their fellow autistic mates. A Hollywood like world, where true love blossoms and everyone lives happily ever after.
I was just like those young people once. I would go into my parent’s backyard and stare at the stars, praying to God that I would find my true love and have children, perplexed by the requisite social engagement to reach my dream. I knew deep inside that I could give love to another person and I wanted to have kids to tell them how beautiful they are and that they are so special and wonderful.
I want to tell you about my experience of the quest for love where my idealised dream crashed head-on into a neurotypical Mack truck, as an autistic person. At school and uni I didn’t have a girlfriend. I wanted one and girls liked me. How could I tell with my dreadful social interpretation skills? They would say it to my face, “you are cute”. This would result in mind-numbing anxiety and dissociation where I would freeze on the spot wide eyed like a stunned mullet.
I could not for the life of me work out the process to transition from being alone to being in a relationship. Why can’t you just say “I want to be your boyfriend?” Then we just do all the things on TV shows. Also, who do you ask about it? Nowadays there is Google and the internet to search for strategies to find and maintain a relationship.
The main issue was getting words out. I had no script and no plan. In high school I would sit next to a girl on a couch at a party, sweating, staring at my shoes, heart racing and hyperventilating. I wouldn’t make any eye contact because it would be too intense to look at their lovely face and felt light-headed. One time I had the great idea to play my favourite Electric Light Orchestra song at the time ‘Calling America’ to share the awesome experience I felt from listening to it. She would feel that same as me about the swirling magical synthesiser tune giving us both goosebumps. Then we would bond over this song and hang out to listen to it repeatedly without talking. That was not effective.
The obvious school peer group reaction for someone who was incapable of having a girlfriend was to say I was gay. I wish I was gay. A lot of autistics are attracted to same sex partners, but I felt nothing romantically for men. I’d walk past one girl and she would poke me with her finger on the bum ordering me to come out. Another would sit on my lap on the school bus to try to get.me to ‘stand to attention’ in front of everyone.
University transition was very hard. I would sit in the uni refectory by myself eating chips wondering how to make friends. I had seen ‘Family Ties’ and ‘The Cosby Show’ giving advice to just be yourself and act naturally. Trouble is who I am is pretty weird to other people. It was actually a massive step to go to the refectory after a year of eating lunch in my car and doing laps of the uni library aisle by aisle before a lecture or tutorial. For final year I gave up and just stayed home watching ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’, Ray Martin on Midday, Phil Donoghue and Sally Jesse Raphael. I swear Ray, Phil and Sally could see me and hear what I was saying to them. They felt like my friends and familiar faces.
My first relationship was with my manager at work. I was 24 and she was 26. She would organise meetings with me at the local pub to talk about my work. So used her position to seduce me using the façade of helping me with my work, no one else knew or, if they did, did nothing. Before I knew it, I was living with her in her house, paying her mortgage and accompanying her to hospital as she was living with mental illness. She wanted us to have a shared mental health journey and, before I knew it, I was also seeing a psychologist, taking antidepressant capsules and having a short stint in a psychiatric ward after convincing myself I wanted to die just as my partner did.
I became engaged to my manager as I thought that is what I am expected to do. In a manic state she rejected the first ring I bought her saying the clarity was too low. I tried to return it and the shop had a no returns policy. So, I bought another ring with higher clarity. I had now spent $12,000 and she had two rings. I had also spent $50,000 on her mortgage and bought her a new car while she was bed-ridden with a bulging disc in her back unable to work.
She was also contesting a workers compensation case with our workplace involving lawyers, surveillance vans out the front of the house and pain killers. It was not all bad. I gained great insight into mental health conditions and empathy for those suffering their effects.
She also taught me that you don’t get paid for sitting around and that you need to put in the effort to earn your salary. She was also the only person, apart from my Dad, who put in the effort to teach me how to do my job.
She also helped me with the process to buy my own house as well as sell items at trash and treasure, live to a budget and enjoy life. Although I did wonder why she would kiss other men and talk non-stop to strangers at nightclubs to solve their problems. The day she suggested we needed to both kill ourselves by stabbing each other after leaving a trail of our favourite books to where our bodies would lay, I jumped over the back fence, rang my Dad and left.
After my first relationship I swore to myself not to ever get into any relationship remotely like that one. I bought my own unit and spent all my non work time by myself, mainly due to me still having no idea how to instigate a relationship. In that time, I wrote a love letter to the daughter of my next-door neighbour and left it on her car windscreen, went out dancing on Friday nights with a gay work colleague, who I thought was my Friday night dancing friend, but turned out he thought we were going out.
I just worked really hard, ate Coco-pops with long-life milk in my room, visited my parents and saw movies by myself. I remember one time walking to see a movie in a purposeful ensemble I had put together to attract my forever love who I would miraculously meet while sitting by myself in the darkness of a cinema. It featured silver tracksuit pants and a thermal singlet. I was halfway down the road when a couple of blokes in a ute wolf-whistled me.
I met my first wife through friends of friends. It was about four years I had been single and I thought this was my last ever chance to find my soul-mate. She was in my house and she seemed interested in me. It all happened very quickly. Before I knew it there I was with a woman who was nine years younger than me. I didn’t fully understand the signs of dysfunction like her faking a pregnancy when I tried to break up with her or wanting to do activities without my involvement that I paid for. In the space of weeks, I was forced to sell my car, my house and over the five year relationship bought another five cars and two houses. We got married at a place she chose with her friends and they decided on the particulars including the honeymoon destination, which I spent mostly alone. All I had to do was keep working, keep paying, stay silent and out of the way.
I did have two beautiful boys. When my son was around 18 months, he was diagnosed with Pervasive Development Disorder – Not Otherwise Specified. My ex-wife fully embraced the identity of the ‘autism warrior mom’ by seeking every possible treatment on a quest for cures sourced from online discussion groups. I was completely sidelined from all of this world, kept well away from the team of therapists, alienated from my friends and from my family. By now I had no access to the joint bank account, no house key and wasn’t permitted to drive the car. I went to work every day. The verbal, financial and emotional abuse was constant. She started going and staying out every night saying she was with her friends and that I was old, stupid, ugly and a weirdo. It was just me and the boys most of the last year as my ex-wife had commenced her transition to her new life.
I knew the relationship was bad, but with two boys in the mix, I did not want to leave them as they were, and still are, my everything. The five years of marriage were a whirlwind, and I had no control or idea what was happening or going to happen next. It has only been in recent years that I have really understood how abusive the relationship was. Then one day, my then wife, said she was lesbian and had a new partner. She said I could still live in the new house we had bought a few months earlier and I could be in the large toy room now used for my son’s extensive daily Applied Behavioural Analysis ‘autism’ therapy and that her new partner would just move in.
When that approach didn’t work, one day after accidentally using the wrong toothbrush, she ran at me in anger. I put my hands up and she ran into me. She said, “you are gone”, took a photo of her arm and also that she was going to the police. I was in great fear of being falsely accused of domestic violence and would not be believed due to my less convincing verbal communication and social negotiation skills. The aggressive and abusive man narrative is powerful and she knew it.
She was a 5 feet tall quietly spoken women who had a disabled child while I presented as tall, odd and a much older man. I had to leave, fearing I would end up on a fictional abuse charge, and moved back to my parent’s house. I left my boys, the saddest and hardest thing I have ever done in my life. Her new partner moved into the house the next day and they started their new little family. For over a decade I have engaged in tortuous dealings with lawyers, Government agencies, Relationships Australia, schools and service providers, where an autistic person has no chance and abuse is perpetuated by many good meaning people. These are societal elements in much need of a reality show to depicting the ongoing experience of autistic people in Australia.
Representation is important and LOTS does give autistic people visibility, however, the show is for a neurotypical audience, with a neurotypical (NT) relationship counsellor telling autistic people to be more 'NT', even when dating other autistics and for a group of adults. Autistic people have found our voice most powerfully on social media. Follow #actuallyaustitic on Twitter and you will find a global network of autistics who share their experiences and fight for change. It is a highly combative fight, with my brave autistic sisters and brothers challenging the billion dollar autistic industry only to find neurotypicals aggressively trying to keep in control. Institutions and professionals who have the power to control our lives, must not be able to continue to profit from us and enable and reward our abusers.
As humans we all must endure some level of pain and suffering to continue on our personal quest of life. Sometimes this quest diminishes us and breaks some parts. Other times we grow and evolve, discovering new meaning to help us through the next challenge. My autism has been a shield protecting me from the multiple experiences of abuse, allowing me to detach from that reality and focus on special interests, in my case sport, music and movies and carry on in my own cocoon of calmness.
They have also attracted harm to me as there is always someone who is looking to take advantage of the vulnerable and the innocent, to steal from my autistic loyalty, extreme empathy and generosity. While neurotypicals have and continue to bring me suffering, they have also taught me and showed me deep kindness and true love.
My wife of 9 years, my sons and stepdaughters, family and our friends who show me each day a love, even I could never have imagined from staring up at the starry night.
