Published on 12, July, 2020
Though anatomically a male (this sounds awkward) and straight. I have had some messed up sex life in my youth (I am 77),but no stable relationship. I understood very lately that if I could have some success in the field of romance it was only because I was attractive. I was also sweet, though my sweetness derived from my fear and lack of aggressiveness. I was shy. I was also literate, so for some kind of women, I had many qualities that might make me, mistakenly, desirable. This brings me to the core of the point I want to make. You may know a language (say Finnish) enough to talk to a Finn, but if for this you have to keep in your bag a dictionary (or to search in your mind for the right word), if you are not fluent in reading in others' mind you only are brought to fake some competence you don't possess. You become a showman, you cannot really be sincere. Many performers in cabarets, impersonators, are people lacking identity (Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, and many others less famous or simply considered eccentric, bizarre). Traces of mannerisms in social behavior are an indication of a non consolidated and not self assured personality which is one step in the direction of autism. I would say that in the field of attractiveness, the problem is how to manage your attractiveness. At the far away times of my youth I didn't even know about such built in deficiencies as may exist for the “miswiring” of your mind, and I read tons of psychoanalytic literature (which I now consider garbage) that might only mislead me and have mislead millions around the world. Bettelheim (which I read and studied) is still reprinted twice a year in my country. Not to talk of Freud and his epigones.
I usually lose any control of myself if I plunge in a conversation with somebody. Some short exchanges are structurally short lived (like with a shopkeeper, or if you ask an information to a passerby in the street). But if the conversation has some consistence and durance I lose completely control and I need often a long time to reconstruct the bubble in which I live (in which I only may live). One technique I employ with some success is to devote myself to solitaries for some time after quitting the exchange. As solitaries (free cell for example) engage the left hemisphere only, I hypothesize that engaging the left hemisphere I may put the right one at work to rebuild my emotional bubble. I may suggest that this is one reason for which people in the autistic spectrum tend to “lecture” others. Lecturing others about some subject you think you know well avoids dialogue and maintains your false “integrity”.