Taimi: The Unserious Dating App for Unserious Folks

If it walks like a duck, and it looks like a duck… Photo by Bryan Padron on Unsplash … sometimes it is indeed a duck, but sometimes it is a skunk cosplaying as a duck. Taimi is the latter. Taimi stinks, it already stank, but now it stinks even more. It brands itself LGBTQ+ Dating and Chat. However, Taimi is an unserious dating app pretending to be serious. It fails at this, badly. If you haven't done so already, I do invite you to read my previous take on Taimi. You'll see there that […]

https://www.yourautisticlife.com/2026/03/18/taimi-the-unserious-dating-app-for-unserious-folks/

Five Years In Remission

I entered remission five years ago on February 11th 2021.

Photo from PxHere. (No, this ain’t my brain.)

It’s been a wild ride, to say the least.

Ultimately, everybody’s journey through cancer is their own. If you’re a cancer survivor too, your journey is not my journey, and my journey is not your journey, no matter how similar they may be. Some people never make it through. A sobering thought.

A cancer diagnosis is often a gut punch, but my diagnosis came as a relief to me. Prior to it, I had been slowly dying for months, but I did not know why or have a plan to deal with this slow death. My PCNS lymphoma diagnosis not only told me why I was dying, but it provided me with a plan: first chemo and then a stem cell transplant.

So I underwent treatment. After two rounds of chemo, the tumor was gone from my brain. After five rounds, I was declared to be in remission. Its now been five years since I entered remission, and my latest MRI, done in January of this year, indicates that my brain is still free from cancer. If I had gotten this disease 35 years ago, I would not have been so lucky. I would have died, pure and simple. Medicine has advanced.

After the chemo, I had a stem cell transplant. They extracted stem cells from my body, kept them in storage, destroyed my immune system, and finally they reinjected my stem cells so that I could rebuild my immune system. My entire treatment happened at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and yet, I never caught this disease.

It’s been a wild ride, I tell you!

My cancer was not the cause of my divorce, but it was a catalyst. My ex-wife and I had already been seeing a marriage counselor a good two years before my cancer showed up. After my treatment, I just did not see myself enduring through this marriage if nothing changed. I tried to change things, but it was in vain. So my ex-wife and I divorced. It is not what I would have wanted, but it was the way forward.

As we were discussing the divorce, I figured that there was no longer any reason for me to hide from the world the fact that I’m not straight, but pansexual. I knew since my teenage years that I wasn’t straight, and even told my wife before we got married that I was bisexual. That’s the only term that I knew at the time, but I prefer to call myself pansexual. Gender or its absence is just no obstacle when it comes to my desire to get intimate with someone else.

Besides being pansexual, I’m also polyamorous. Provided that I’m kept aware of my partners’ intimate encounters with other people, I don’t get jealous if they have those encounters. What gets to me is if I feel neglect. I suppose I might also get angry if a partner of mine hid their encounters with someone else, but this, to my knowledge, has not happened.

I also discovered BDSM, and that I am a Dom. I was always generous in bed, but BDSM allows me to optimize this generosity.

Then I realized that I’m autistic. The signs were present from infancy, but everybody treated me as neurotypical, so I thought that I was neurotypical. My ex-wife has ADHD, but we never discussed neurodivergence in our household. We both imagined that the other perceived the world in the same way we did. This is woefully incorrect, but we didn’t know any better.

I also realized that I’m nonbinary. The surest way to generate dysphoria in me is to insist that I should behave or not behave this or that way because I’m “a man.” At best, I’ll find the idea amusing. At worst, it will generate anger. At any rate, in retrospect, this is another element that caused friction between my ex-wife and me. She thought she had married “a man,” but she did not.

If my cancer had not happened, how much of this self-realization would have happened? I’m not sure. I was pretending to be a neurotypical man in a straight, monogamous, vanilla marriage. I think I could have gone on pretending for more years.

It’s been a wild ride, and I don’t think the ride is over just yet.

#autistic #AutisticWriters #cancer #CancerSurvivor #CancerTreatment #divorce #queer #remission #YourAutisticLife

Taimi: An LGBTQ+ Dating and Chat App

Taimi became my go-to dating app, but it did not last.

Photo by James A. Molnar on Unsplash

All dating apps suck. All of them. Without exception. So, yes, Taimi sucks too. However, they don’t all suck to the same extent, and thus Taimi, for a brief period of time, became my preferred dating app, dethroning Feeld. Alas, this was not to last.

Let’s go over my demographics. They are relevant as they color my experience on the dating apps. I’m nonbinary, pansexual, polyamorous, autistic. I’m also into BDSM. Please do not make the mistake of thinking that any of these identities implies another. There are plenty of pansexual folks who are not also polyamorous, to take just one example.

In the Google Play Store, Taimi is labeled as a LGBTQ+ Dating and Chat app. True to this label, most of the people on the app are indeed queer. However, you can also find a few cishet folks on the app too. Contrarily to Feeld, Taimi is not specifically geared towards kinky folks. At the end of the day, the difference does not matter much. There are kinky people on Taimi, just not wall-to-wall like on Feeld.

Now, let’s get into the mess of an app that Taimi is.

How It Works… Haha! As If…

I’d like to explain how it works, but any explanation on my part would be pointless. See, the Taimi developers like to use their users as lab rats. Every week, some old features disappear, and some new features appear. Or perhaps I should call these features anti-features, because a lot of them stink badly.

Here’s an example of such an anti-feature. The app presents you with a set of potential connections. You decide which parameters the candidates for connection must have: gender, age, distance, etc. For months, when you ran out of new candidates in your set, the GUI would explicitly suggest that you alter your search parameters to get more matches.

Now, it “helpfully” changes those parameters for you. You don’t do long-distance relationships? Screw that. Now you do. You don’t want to date anyone older than a certain age, or younger than a certain age? Screw that. Now you do.

At first, the app would tell you that it changed the parameters. I complained about this, and now the app changes these parameters without telling you. This is proof positive that Taimi listens to their clients. (This last line was said sarcastically.)

Another anti-feature is that the app now, from time to time, presents you with a slate of people to act on. You can pass on them, or you can all like them at once. However, you cannot look at their profile. Do they live nearby? Are they kinky? Are they compatible with you? Screw you! You cannot know.

There are more anti-features I could talk about, but I do not wish to talk about more of these. I think the anti-features I listed above give you a taste.

Annoyances and Bugs

The bio

Taimi restricts your biography to 500 characters. That’s rather pitiful. Feeld allows 1500 characters, and I find Feeld’s limit rather restrictive. I am of the opinion that such length restrictions smack of ageism. Young folks don’t have much of a life history, but us older folks do. These restrictions stink. If someone wants to infodump about their own life, let them. Maybe someone else will like it.

In addition to the restricted bio size, Taimi deleted my bio twice without warning. This is quite annoying. I regularly run into people who have no bio, but if the app is the one deleting it, I cannot blame them.

Travel

Taimi updates your location when you travel, and does not have the notion of a “home base.” Therefore, it presents the same problem as Feeld. If someone is traveling, and there is no note in their profile about this, you can waste your time with them if one of you is not into long-distance relationships.

I’ve had this problem happen at least twice. One of the person with whom I had started an Instant Chat came back saying that they were just passing through. In another case, I had initiated an Instant Chat with someone. They looked at my message but did not reply, disconnect, or block me. I checked their profile back and found that they were now several states away from me.

Just like with the case of Feeld, from the perspective of the developer, there is no reason to fix this.

Admirers

Their “Admirers” tab is laughable. I found in there someone who had admired me four times, and yet had this in their profile:

I’m fun easy going […] No poly situation. No hookups. CIS gendered men and women only please. Straight men only.

Yeah, I bet that you are “fun” and “easy going.” This person is a good example of the problem with the “bisexual” label. They identified as bisexual, which for them excludes trans folks. I don’t want to keep explaining that my definition does not exclude any gender, so I call myself pansexual.

So, this person, who had admired me four times, would, according to their own profile, not want to be with me because:

• I’m polyamorous.
• I am trans because I transitioned from male to nonbinary.
• I’m not straight.

Then there was this woman around my age who had admired me three times. I read her profile, only to find that she’s not into kink or polyamory.

Similarly, a lesbian had looked at my profile four times, according to Taimi. I’m a male-presenting enby and thus am generally incompatible with lesbians. Finally, I did start an Instant Chat with someone who I might have been compatible with, and which Taimi claimed hat look at my profile three times. They rejected me as soon as they saw my message.

In conclusion, the “Admirers” tab is mostly useless. I’m not going to hazard a guess as to why exactly.

The Ability to Instant Chat

As I mentioned above, Taimi allows you to instantly chat with someone. They do not have to like you back to initiate the possibility of chatting. As soon as you send them a message with instant chat, they can reply.

Now, the ability to instant chat is a limited resource. When I started my trial, I did not pay for a while, but I still was getting once instant chat per week. Then I paid, and I was getting three instant chats per week, but I let my subscription lapse, and now I no longer have any instant chat.

As great as this ability would seem, I’ve had no response whatsoever to the instant chats I’ve sent. By this, I mean that my message was not even read. In one case, I got an instant block, but this is it. So the instant chat feature only seems to be designed to generate revenue for the dating app.

Conclusion

Taimi is a mess of a dating app. They keep changing the features of the app, no doubt in an attempt to maximize their revenue. However, I find this approach off-putting, and it does not make me want to spend any more money on the app.

#AutisticWriters #Dating #DatingApp #lgbtq #OnlineDating #queer #Taimi #YourAutisticLife

Why I Prefer Delta Chat To Signal

I find Delta Chat support for multiple profiles to be a killer feature.

Photo by kuu akura on Unsplash

I have Delta Chat and Signal installed on my phone and my laptop. I’ve used both platforms to talk to various people. They both work fine. However, I do prefer Delta Chat because I do find it more flexible than Signal. I’m going to give some details of my reasoning in this article.

What Is It?

Delta Chat is an encrypted chatting application. The messages you send to your contacts are encrypted end-to-end. Even Delta Chat servers are unable to read the contents of your messages. Only a bit of metadata is unencrypted. Its closest relative in the chatting application realm is Signal, which also does end-to-end encryption.

What I Like

Delta Chat does not tie your profile to a specific phone number. Signal does tie your profile to a phone number. However, Signal allows you to use a username rather than a phone number to make a connection, and thus hide your phone number from contacts. In addition, Delta Chat allows you to have multiple profiles. Signal, on the other hand, allows you only one profile. These two features of Delta Chat make a world of difference when you are chatting with people who might not take “no” for an answer.

Let’s take the example of online dating. If you know anything about it, it is that you are likely to run at times into scammers and flakes. Now, most of the people on the dating apps are decent and do not fall into these two categories. Still, scammers and flakes do exist. So how do you protect yourself from them?

Well, the first thing to do is to not share your phone number with someone you do not know yet. I’ll note here that your phone number can be used to find your street address. I’m not going to get into the details of how I know this.

Both Signal and Delta Chat got you covered on this front. With Signal, you can just give your username. This username is a relatively compact string, something like “autisticfun.99” With Delta Chat, you can provide a link or a QR code. The link does not really work like Signal’s username because it has annoying features:

It is too long to put in a dating profile. Signal’s username is small enough to be easily embedded in a dating profile.

Forget about sharing it by spelling it to someone else. Signal’s username may be annoying to spell out, but it is on par with spelling out email addresses.

It may scare people who do not know much about Delta Chat. You’re being asked to click on a link. Who knows what is at the other end of the link? The Signal username can be used only for one thing: you input it manually in Signal to connect with someone. End of story.

Okay, so you’ve connected with someone over Signal or Delta Chat. You chat pleasantly for a while, only to discover that you’re 100% incompatible with this individual. So incompatible that you just have to cut contact cold. This is not the option I prefer. I’ve sometimes had to learn that the person was not into me, or had to deliver to the other person that I was not into them, and yet been able to communicate peacefully about this. However, there are times when you just know the other person won’t be able to handle your news peacefully. What do you do?

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With Signal, you can just block them. Okay, what if they decide to come back at you? If they try to reach you from the same phone number, they won’t be able to: you’ve blocked them. However, they can easily get try from a different phone number. It is not that difficult or that expensive to have different phone numbers on a modern cell phone.

If they try this stratagem, then you have only one solution with Signal: you must change your username. However, changing it means that everyone who had your previous username but wasn’t already in contact with you won’t be able to reach you. If you had it in a social networking profile somewhere, you need to remember this and change it.

With Delta Chat, if you have a bit of foresight, you can avoid the need to remember where you used a username. Remember that Delta Chat supports multiple profiles. You create a new profile, only for your new connection. If you then discover that you need to cut things cold, you can just delete this profile. They won’t be able to reach you anymore, and any information you gave them to reach you with this profile won’t work anymore. There is no need to go change usernames anywhere.

This very scenario happened to me recently. I connected with an individual. The chat was pleasant, until I realized that we were not on the same page about something quite fundamental. I wished them good luck in their search, and deleted the profile I had created just for them. (I had to do this on all the devices on which the profile was present.) I also blocked them on the dating app. From this point on, it became impossible for them to reach me.

Note that Delta Chat allows you to reset your QR code and the link associated with it. If you do this, then your old QR code and old link won’t be able to be used to reach you anymore. If you do this, you also are in the same situation as when you change your username on Signal, what you may have shared in the past has to be updated if you want folks to still be able to find you. However, the need for this eventuality is lessened if you have the foresight to create a new profile for people you don’t really know.

The multiplicity of profiles supported by Delta Chat means that you can easily create a personal profile, one for work, specialized profiles for specific tasks, etc. One nice benefit of this support is that Delta Chat does not require all your profiles to be on all devices you use Delta Chat on. My phone currently has a couple of profiles on it, though this may change in the future.

Finally, the ability to have multiple profiles for multiple purposes means that you can put different things in the bios of your profiles. You can have a professional bio for the professional profile, and a personal bio for the personal profile. On Signal, you have one profile, with one bio. If you use Signal both for work and for personal purposes, what do you put in your bio?

A Few Cons

I would be remiss if I did not talk about the few cons I ran into. These are not dealbreakers for me, but they could be for someone else.

As I had implied above, it would be nice if Delta Chat had a username system similar to Signal’s. I don’t think it should be identical to Signal’s system, but the hyperlinks that can be linked to a specific profile are too unwieldy, and can appear suspicious in some contexts.

Both Signal and Delta Chat allow you to create group discussions. In Signal, there is the capability to limit who can add or remove people from a group. Delta Chat has no such capability. Anyone can add or remove people from any group created in Delta Chat. If someone added to a group goes rogue, good luck!

Delta Chat does not allow you to search for animated GIFs in an online database like Tenor. There is a good security reason for this. If you query a database, you are effectively leaking some information from your discussion. It is possible for users to work around this issue by saving ahead of time those GIFs they want to use to a directory which is synchronized between their various devices. Then, you can select images from this directory to add to your messages. (This is what I do.)

Delta Chat does not have a user-friendly system for supporting stickers. Yes, there is a bot. I tried it. It is far from being user-friendly to use.

Addendum: I Smelled Drama

The dreaded scenario happened. I matched with someone on a dating app. I offered my Delta Chat profile, but they preferred Signal. So I gave them my Signal username and the link. We chatted on Signal for three days, and this morning I realized I was smelling drama, and I don’t do drama. I wished them good luck in their search and blocked them on all the platforms we had connected on.

However, I’m sure that my old Signal username was still accessible to them. So I had to change it to make sure that drama would not follow me.

I’ll note that having to change my username could have been avoided, if I had given them the link to my Signal profile or the QR code. However, this strategy completely eliminates the advantages of having a username in the first place.

#AutisticWriters #DeltaChat #security #signal #YourAutisticLife

Snug Like A Bug In A… Hole

A short story in honor of those who cannot help digging.

Hello!

I can see by the look on your face that you’re confused. Look down.

Further down.

Hi! Yes, I’m the head that is protruding from a hole in the ground. As you can see by my waiving, I also have arms. I also have a body and legs, but a lot of it is not visible to you because, well, I’m in a hole.

Oh, don’t worry about me. In fact, this hole is exactly where I wanted to be. I ended up here while engaging in an argument with a friend. I was trying to score some points, but lo and behold, the ground started to cave, and slowly, but surely I ended up in this hole.

You know what? I feel rather comfortable in my hole. In fact, I’d like to enlarge it so that I can sink even deeper into it. Do you happen to have a shovel I could use for this task?

Oh, wow, what a stroke of luck! Thank you for the shovel. Now, if you don’t mind, I need to get on digging. Have a nice day!

I regularly run into people who like to dig themselves into a hole.

The latest one was someone who approached me for dating. I sensed drama in their profile. I said, “no, thanks,” and they immediately proceeded to prove me right by tossing drama at my head with their response.

#arguments #AutisticWriters #DiggingOneselfIntoAHole #holes #YourAutisticLife

I Still Cannot Recommend Feeld

Feeld used to be my go-to dating app, but no more. How the mighty have fallen!

I let my subscription to Feeld lapse in mid-July. In the year prior, I spent about $270 on this app, in subscription fees and individual pings. However, they raised their prices at the end of Spring or the start of Summer 2025. If I had the same usage for the coming year, my cost would be about $410!

I’ve written an article already about the problems I had with Feeld:

https://www.yourautisticlife.com/2024/05/13/i-no-longer-recommend-feeld/

True to my own advice in that article, I returned to OkCupid. However, this app sucks too. I just had forgotten how much it sucks. I can say that, by and large, there hasn’t been a migration of kinky people to OkCupid. I did find my boyfriend on OkCupid. However, OkCupid was just too irritating for me, and I deleted my account there.

In the article above, I mention how Feeld had a problem with pings not getting through. This was a very serious problem. I’d get a notification that someone pinged me, and I’d tap the notification, but they did now show up among the people who pinged me. This problem has now been fixed.

However, the distance problem I mentioned in the article above remains. This, coupled with the price increase, and a new round of bugs, still keeps me from recommending it. What bugs? Read on.

It has happened twice now that Feeld matched me with people I had not liked. Normally, for a match to occur, both parties have to like each other. It is not possible for someone to just show up as a match if you haven’t liked them.

This first time this happened… I was confused and thought that maybe I had made a mistake somewhere. However, the second time this happened, the individual that showed up was so incompatible with me that I’m 100% sure I did not make a mistake.

What happened?

Did Feeld misdirect one of our likes? Was I supposed to match with someone else and Feeld misdirect the match?

Was Feeld’s display when I was going through the stack of dating prospects messed up and showed me the profile of person A when it meant to show person B? And then when I liked person A, person B got the like?

Did something else happen?

I don’t know. I’ve complained to customer service, but I had no reply.

Then, one recent morning, I got a notification that I had a new connection. I tap the notification, Feeld loaded, and I got a message that it couldn’t load my conversation. When I was able to load my conversations, it told me that the person had left the chat.

Wow… that was fast. Could the person have changed their mind this fast? Yes, they could. However, this is the first time I saw the error message that Feeld gave me. Coincidence? Maybe, but maybe not. I’m betting on maybe not.

“Why are you assuming, without absolute proof, that it is Feeld’s fault?”

Because of my history with Feeld. If you go read my previous article, you’ll see there was a bug so fucking serious that it demonstratably made me miss some matches. Let me repeat this, some matches that should have happened did not happen because of that bug! This was a major problem, that plagued Feeld for months.

So yes, I am assuming that it is Feeld’s fault, even if I don’t have absolute proof. If my history with a platform shows that it operates erratically, then my future inferences are going to point to its behavior still being erratic.

Finally, they tried to entice me to resubscribe with a 15% off offer. I did not want to resubscribe, but I checked it out nonetheless. Well, I went up to the Google Play screen for renewing my subscription and found that 15% off to be absent. Way to go, Feeld!

Moreover, after my subscription ended, I’m getting a suspiciously high number of people who like me without a ping. Since I no longer pay, I cannot see their likes. Yes, I used to get likes from deadbeats who didn’t read my profile even when I was paying, but the quantity and frequency of these makes me wonder whether Feeld is paying for some dunces to like people who don’t pay so that these people will subscribe to see who liked them. This hypothetical stratagem won’t work on me.

I’d like to be able to recommend Feeld. I used to say that it was the least terrible app of a terrible bunch, because, yes, all the dating apps are terrible. However, I cannot in good conscience recommend it, to anyone, in any demographics.

What are the alternatives? I’m only going to talk about those platforms that I consider could be alternatives to Feeld. If I do not talk about some platform in this article, then I do not consider it to be a viable alternative.

Taimi

Taimi is a platform for LGBTQ+ dating. I plan to publish a more extensive review of it in the future. For now, suffice to say that Taimi has become my go-to dating app. It is not perfect, all the dating apps are terrible, but it is decent, and definitely better than Feeld. I’ve made some nice matches on this app.

Masked Kink

Masked Kink is a platform for people into kink or BDSM. It definitely is not great. The geographic search leaves me with no matches within 1000 miles of where I live. However, this app has several bugs, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the geographical search is buggy too. As a matter of fact, I’d be surprised if it weren’t buggy.

One of its bugs is extremely vexing. I managed to be liked by a scammer. I did a reverse image search on their dating profile picture, and found a hit on Threads. Then, I quickly discovered their YouTube channel and their OnlyFans page. I wanted to report this scammer, but try as I may, the UI would not let me submit my report. Tapping on the submit button did nothing.

I plan to let my subscription to Masked Kink lapse when it ends.

KinkD

KinkD was already rather inactive when I left it about a year ago. I came back to it for two or three weeks recently. It is now completely dead. I sent messages to easily eight people. Nothing whatsoever happened. They did not even log into the system to check their messages. KinkD was not worth my money when I first went there, now it is not worth my money and my time. I uninstalled.

KinkD is also a great example of how Google reviews are largely worthless on their face. It has a rating of 4.4 as we speak, and keeps getting glowing reviews. I’d bet a leg and an arm that these are fake.

#AutisticWriters #Dating #Feeld #KinkD #MaskedKink #OnlineDating #Taimi #YourAutisticLife

Dating: The Attitude Problem

To find a lasting relationship, you have to accept those relationships that won’t last.

Photo from PxHere

I’m a strange creature. At 53, I have a fair amount of experience at living. However, when I joined the dating world just over three years ago, I had no experience to speak of regarding dating, and the minute experience I did have was from over 26 years earlier. There were no dating apps back then.

My inexperience led me early on to naively accept behaviors that I shouldn’t have accepted. There was the “polyamorous” woman who used me as a pawn to get her husband jealous. There was also the woman I went on a date with, but who seemed only interested in getting a free meal and promoting her business. They both displayed behavior that now would put me off from pursuing anything with them.

I’m a quick learner, however. My many adventures and misadventures quickly taught me what I call an aphorism of love:

To find a lasting relationship, you have to accept those relationships that won’t last.

I don’t see any way around this aphorism. For one thing, the statistics are operating against us. Still, I was in a relationship that lasted 26 years. We were married for 22 of those years. She was my first relationship. Wow! Lucky, right? I had beaten the odds! I thought I was lucky, until we started talking divorce. Absolutely nothing is guaranteed.

Now, I do run from time to time into those who will declare that the dating apps have always been or have become a large wasteland in which it is impossible to find anyone. I accept that this has been their experience, but such hasn’t been my experience.

I expect the vast majority of such individuals to be straight, monogamous, vanilla, and neurotypical. In all likelihood, they are also trapped by the dominant ideology of our times, capitalism. This entrapment has multiple manifestations. There’s the fact that wages have not risen at the same rate as inflation. This means that they have to work harder to keep their standard of living. This leaves less time and energy for forming connections of any kind, including romantic ones.

Another way in which this entrapment manifest itself is the desire for optimization. A lot of people these days get into debt while trying to impress the crowd. They buy expensive things that they cannot afford. People in this type of situation are likely to look for a specific type of mate. Someone who plays well the capitalist game.

Thus, these folks will compare their dates against an unrealistic ideal of what their mate should be. Thus, their experience on the dating apps will be molded by this attitude. They won’t connect, and when they connect, they will run at the first sign that their date does not hold up to their ideal.

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My own experience has been different. For a start, my demographics make me a minority. I’m pansexual, polyamorous, into BDSM, and neurodivergent. I do not hide these things from my dating profile. These characteristics make me unpalatable to a lot of people. In addition, I have my own dealbreakers which narrow the pool of candidates even further.

For instance, I do not date cops or the military. Yes, I know for a fact that this requirement of mine has cost me some potential matches. Someone I had contacted, who was polite about it, told me as much. In addition, I pass on all the straight folks. I just don’t think that the random straight individual has any idea of what being queer entails.

My demographics and my preferences make it extremely difficult to meet anybody by just going to social events. I do go to social events that have nothing to with dating. My chance of running there into someone who is looking for a mate and is going to be okay with me being pansexual, being polyamorous, being into BDSM, and being neurodivergent are extremely slim.

I also go to queer events, events for neurodivergent people, or events for people into BDSM. When I go to these events, there is a greater chance at compatibility. However, it is usually the case that the people I find there are going to be compatible with me in all respects, except one. This is highly frustrating. Do not make the mistake of thinking that one characteristic entails the other, especially if you are not part of these minorities. For instance, pansexual people are not all polyamorous.

So this leaves me with online dating. I’ll note here that all my relationships started online. Yes, even the one with my ex-wife, which started in 1996. It started through email. I did not start using the dating apps until after our divorce, in 2022, however. Truth be told, I’ve had my successes on these apps. I’ve heard from several people that they got absolutely nothing out of them.

So what counts as success? As far as I see it, a match is already success writ small. Then there’s having a nice date, which is a bigger success. Then there’s being intimate with your dating prospect, which is even better. Don’t get me wrong, some of these encounters were unmitigated disasters. The net balance, however, is a positive one overall. Ultimately, what I seek is a lasting relationship. However, I feel the need to point out that all relationships last, right up until the moment that they don’t. I do not possess the crystal ball to tell me which relationship will last, and which won’t. Moreover, remember my aphorism of love:

To find a lasting relationship, you have to accept those relationships that won’t last.

Because of this, I always approach relationships with an open mind, and assume that they will last. Yes, I’m most likely mistaken, but it does not matter. I let myself be pleasantly surprised by my partners, and I hope to pleasantly surprise them too. It has happened. And yes, opening yourself to pleasant surprises, means you can also get unpleasant surprises. I’ll say that almost every time a relationship has ended, it was an unpleasant surprise. And yet, these are inevitable.

Furthermore, I do not attempt to make my partners fit into some narrow confine of how my “ideal” partner should be. Now, I do have boundaries. Most of these revolve around money. However, if a partner does not respect those boundaries, the result is not typically a breakup.

Finally, I’ve rejected the ideals of capitalism. I do not aim to optimize my life, or my relationship, and I do not impose such optimizations on my partners. I aim to be present in my partner’s life, and so I do not favor living the rat race that capitalism likes to foist on us.

I am currently partnered with my boyfriend. We’re at the nine or ten months mark, right now. The longest relationship I’ve been in after my divorce. We found each other on OkCupid. Prior to this, I was in a seven-month relationship with a girl. We found each other on Feeld. Other than these two post-divorce relationships, I’ve had unplanned one-night stands, and some relationships that lasted one weekend, or a few days.

It may be a function of my demographics, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about how I present on the dating apps. I use all the space at my disposal to fill out a thorough profile. There is little I hate more than profiles that have pictures but are otherwise empty. It is pretty much guaranteed that you are going to get likes from misguided people who are trying to fit square peg into round holes, even with a filled profile. How much more of those are you going to get if your profile is empty, and how many of them will treat you as an object? You’ve given them no reason to do otherwise with your empty profile.

Moreover, I go to the apps with the attitude that nobody owes me anything. I’ve had matches, and sometimes short-lived relationships, where I was thanked for my understanding and kindness when things, for reasons that have nothing to do with me, unravelled and the relationship came to an end. I cannot, and do not want to force someone into a relationship with me if it is not in the cards.

I’ll conclude by saying that attitude is not the entire reason people do not find success on the dating apps, but it is a significant reason. The choice of the dating app, and even geography can affect someone’s experience significantly, and yet the effect of one’s attitude is non-negligible.

#attitude #AutisticWriters #capitalism #Dating #love #OnlineDating #relationships #YourAutisticLife

Yvonne Rorrer Declares Herself Ethically Non-Monogamous

Good for her, and for those of us who are also into ethical non-monogamy.

Yvonne Rorrer from her campaing website.

I have never heard of Yvonne Rorrer until Stephen Colbert talked about her on The Late Show last night. I know she is a Democrat, but I don’t know more about her political positions. At any rate, it is a good thing that she declared herself ethically non-monogamous in a statement. I’m not saying that she came out because I got from a Huffington Post article that she was already out.

Colbert talked about her as a swinger. Mainstream media often does such a piss-poor job at reporting about things they do not understand that I was wondering whether swinger was her expression, or whether the journalists jumped the gun, and assumed. The Huffington Post article I link to above confirms it is her expression.

Ethical non-monogamy is a large umbrella term. Swinging falls under this umbrella, and so does polyamory. (I am polyamorous.) In all cases, of ethical non-monogamy, the assumption is that everyone involved knows what is going on. Ethically non-monogamous people do not hide one relationship from another.

One thing irritated me in Colbert’s talk about Rorrer. It came across to me as mononormative. Colbert said,

She might be one of those people who thinks everybody wants to hear about their thing.

😩 Why did he need to go there? Why?

Colbert, like the majority of our population, monogamous, and straight. People will assume, correctly, those two characteristics about him. When people run into someone like me, or like Rorrer, they make the same assumptions, and they are wrong. We are both ethically non-monogamous. I am because I’m polyamorous. Rorrer is because she is a swinger. I’m moreover not straight, because I’m pansexual. I don’t know about Rorrer’s sexual orientation.

We do not talk about our ethical non-monogamy because we think that everybody wants to hear about it. We talk about it to normalize it, and because some people will benefit from it. In a world where monogamous people are in the majority, we who are ethically non-monogamous are assumed to be monogamous too. That is, until we tell people otherwise.

I’m open, too, about all kinds of things. I cannot count the number of times when, after being open about being pansexual, polyamorous, or autistic, I had a nice chat with someone else who was in a similar situation. This discussion would not have happened if I had not been open about my identity.

Please do not assume that when someone is in a minority group that, when they are being open about their identity, their intent is to shove their business into your face.

#AutisticWriters #EthicalNonMonogamy #polyamory #SexualMinorities #StephenColbert #swinging #TheLateShow #YourAutisticLife #YvonneRorrer

Why I Usually Don’t Get All Pissy When A Relationship Fails

I don’t like drama.

Photo by kevin laminto on Unsplash

Finding a picture for this article was hard. That’s because a lot of the pictures I found imply feelings that I don’t have. (I’m not crushed, or angry, etc.) Or they imply the end of a long and intense relationship. It wasn’t the case here.

My latest date told me minutes ago that she was polysaturated, and that it would not be possible for us to have a relationship. I replied that I understood, and she thanked me for my understanding.

For those who may not know, the term “polysaturated” implies that we are polyamorous. I already have a boyfriend, and she already has a husband and another partner. I don’t wish to give a lecture here about polyamory. Suffice to say that our existing partners were duly informed about our date. Polyamorous people do not hide their new romantic liaisons from their existing partners.

The term “polysaturated” also indicates that someone has too many partners, and cannot conceivably add another partner to the mix. What this number is will vary from person to person, and from situation to situation. The person in question has four kids, besides her husband, and one other partner. I readily understand the issue.

The behavior I displayed is not unusual for me. This is actually how I want my relationship failures to happen. No drama. Just people who tell each other their truth. This time, she passed on me, but I’ve sometimes been the one passing on the other person. It is never fun, but not devastating. In the case at hand here, we did not have sex, but sometimes the failure happened after we did have sex. Some external factor caused our relationship to end prematurely. I still did not get pissy.

I’ve qualified my sentence with “usually” in my title because it is in fact possible for me to get pissy in these circumstances, but you have to have also betrayed me in some fashion for this to happen. This hasn’t happened often, and the mere fact that our relationship is not going to evolve is not in and of itself betrayal.

However, I’m the type of autistic person who likes, at times, to consider the path not taken. What if? What if I had become pissy and indignant? “How dare you pass on me? Don’t you realize what it is you have in me?” There are two likely outcomes to this hypothetical behavior.

She can respond in kind with her own indignation. In this case, I’ve made an enemy. Not that I think there’s a lot she could do to me, but I don’t want to make enemies unnecessarily.

Or she can change her mind to please me. In this case, I’ve won, right? Not at all. This putative “victory” is illusory. What good does it do me to be with someone who agrees to be with me only to pacify me? What kind of relationship would we then have? It would be a relationship based on fear, which is not what I want.

It is a shame that this relationship is not going to flourish, but I never pressure people into things they do not want or cannot handle. It is just not my style.

#autistic #AutisticWriters #Dating #polyamory #relationships #YourAutisticLife

A Senseless Breakup As a Zen Koan

She put me in an impossible situation, and gave me the gift of a koan.

Photo by Takeshi Yu on Unsplash

I’m still reeling from the worst breakup of my life. Well, the worst breakup so far. There’s no telling if something even worse will come some day. It’s been almost two years, but last night a song came up and I cried anew. Sometimes, it is like it happened yesterday.

I don’t go into relationships reservedly. This is true with everyone. My current boyfriend. My ex-wife. And the girl who is the topic of this piece. So, without reservations, I gave her everything I could give her. Most of all, I gave her my ability to listen, and my patience. How were my ability to listen and my patience useful?

She engaged in self-harm. The scars were plainly visible during our first date. She answered truthfully when I asked about them.

She abused substances. She was truthful about this, too.

She did not follow her medication regimen. She told me so, truthfully.

She flat out told me, months before our breakup, that she did not see a future for us. This was her truth.

I listened patiently to all of this, without flying off the handle. I don’t know what anger would have given me, beyond an immediate and short-lived feeling of satisfaction. If anything, it would most likely have ruined our relationship sooner. It actually almost did. One day, we had an argument in which she denied the existence of racism. I could not tolerate this, and so I flew off the handle.

She saw me as her abusive mother, and I triggered her cPTSD. I did not physically harm her – I would never have done this – but my yelling was enough. She ran out of my apartment to cool down. I was so horrified at my reaction that I decided to break up with her. She came back saying that if we worked on our relationship, we could make things work. I accepted her offer and we came back together.

Her denial of racism punched me in the gut. I’m the type of enby who will readily cry if he sees black parents on the news talk about the senseless assassination of their child by cops. I live in a majority black neighborhood. Heck, my boyfriend is black. Denying obvious racism is an excellent way to get me to explode. I’m not proud of this, but it was the truth (and maybe still is the truth). This is the only time I displayed anger with her.

The life I had lived with my ex-wife prior to our divorce was extremely peaceful… and I daresay now too peaceful for growth. The partners I’ve had after my divorce have taught me so much. I am already enlightened. Anger is not generally a useful emotion. Anger is a choice that I am making. Etc. If the girl I’m talking about denied racism today, I’d hope that I wouldn’t fly off the handle. Still, I’m not sure that even today, I’d be able to handle it peacefully. It is such a gut punch.

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Okay. So, I said that she gave me the gift of a koan. What is a koan? It is a device that Zen practitioners use. Some koans are textual. Here is an example of a textual koan:

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

In order to answer the question, a Zen student encountering this koan will typically try to think their way through it, and will fail miserably. It is possible to answer this koan, but not through discursive stratagems. There are many such textual koans in the Zen tradition. There is, however, another type of koan. I don’t think I’m being original here, but I’m going to call this a life koan. It is a situation that grips you deeply in your gut. It is unsatisfactory, and maybe unresolvable.

When this girl broke up with me, she did put me into an impossible situation. When our relationship was firing on all cylinders, it was pure magic. I had adored her, and given her everything I could give, and yet… this was not enough.

Why?

Oh, I can list dozens of reasons, but these reasons are all bullshit. She did give me reasons, but a few weeks after our breakup she revealed to me, from her own mouth, that her reasons were lies. How far had we fallen from her initial truthfulness?

Thus, it is, that almost two years after our breakup. I wrestle with this koan: why did she leave me? I don’t think this question has a satisfactory answer. This koan is a parting gift that she gave me, inadvertently. Still, it is a gift, and one that I will most likely animate my Zen practice to my death.

#anger #AutisticWriters #breakups #koan #listening #love #patience #relationships #YourAutisticLife #Zen #ZenBuddhism