#autism #AutismAcceptance #AutismAwareness #autismappreciation #Aspergers #actuallyaustic #love #romance #dating
I never understood the concept of the thrill of the chase with dating. It was always hyper stressful and awful, just made me stupid and much more likely to mess up and ruin everything.
Then I realize recently that if I wasn't playing the social interaction game on nightmare mode, I might well enjoy that thrill of the chase and longing over getting. Like any game whoever, if its too hard you really only want to give up in frustration. If the game mechanic is well balanced people love putting up with difficulty as the win is so much better. If not they just give up or in my case with difficult video games, it causes too much stress. If you are on the spectrum, you can just imagine you are living the dating game on nightmare mode and therefore you have to try way more than times of failure than other people slowly learning the pitfalls. Like that nightmare version of Mario where you have to try over and over and over again with negative lives until you've carefully memorized every pitfall at each stage. Even worse its a pvp and the people you are playing against are all playing on easier modes than you so you just come off as a mid or low tier boss, and they get little to nothing out of it. For you there is no game, it just feels like Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill trying to get what you desperately crave and need in terms of human connection but failing so many times.
At some point if you never give up you will make it but treat it like a 5 year plan and know you have to practice constantly, like with a musical instrument or you will never be good enough at it. The reason why it will happen when you least expect it is because if you are hyper-focused on it, you will ruin it with the high of infatuation when your brain basically shuts off. Like driving a car on a kilo of cocaine.
But understanding it like this, that social interaction is more of a game with points and scores and such to most people makes sense. They get joys and satisfaction of the pursuit often even more than the acquiring. For me, the acquiring is when the game actually starts because I actually have a chance at succeeding without having to watch my every single tiny step or get disqualified without mercy. There is a game there in the relationship that we can win, so if you find one of us who have been struggling forever, you might actually get a better relationship because the game is still there as you learn the novelty of communicating with us. We most often don't get bored. It took us literally decades of nightmare mode just to get you, we are going to do everything we can to not have to do that again. That's assuming you don't break our strong sense of loyalty and then we will ditch you without mercy.