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.
In this sort of context I rather favour Digby Tantam's theory about bandwidth ("Can the World Afford Autistic Spectrum Disorder? Nonverbal Communication, Asperger Syndrome and the Interbrain" jKP 2009).
In part it is the difficulty in processing the amount of information coming in (which can be a great deal more than NTs would expect) when the capacity to process is much less.
But I also wonder here whether the subjects that interest, comfort zone special interests, intrude themselves into uncomfortable or hard to integrate dialogue (please can I talk about something I'm comfortable with?).
When you say having a conversation with him what do you mean by that? Is it a conversation he initiates then breaks off from? Or is it a conversation you want to have with him about his intentions or behaviour? If the latter I think you owe it to him to appreciate that he may be experiencing extreme distress. Slow down. Break the questions into manageable bits. Give him time.