The problem with dating services for autistic people.

You know one reason I bring this up is the IRL dating services for autistic people seem to be shuting down. There were never that many but the few that were seem to be cutting the dating aspect of their service out of their list of activities. [link removed by moderator] for example use to describe itself as a frendship and relationship service but hasn't offered any dating services for years and now describes itself as a frendship service. There are a few services in the south and in scotland but even these cover fairly small geographic areas.

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I mean that autistic women is statistically more likely to be ace/lesbian and there are lot fewer of them. In this scenario we’re really talking about how to facilitate dating Neurotypicals.

Its true, yeah, i could ask a autist woman out, and maybe she even dress nice and everything, but its hard to be social, when all she wanna do is stay inside and play LEGO and watch silly tv shows

just tweek the age range to all ages but add 'no kids' as a search filter and see what you get.

contrary to popular belife not all autistic people are introverts.

autistic people wont wanna meet anyone.

tried it myself.... someone asked me out like... one time, and i didnt wanna go out, i wanted to stay in lol didnt wanna meet some random from the internet after all. 

Have you considered that maybe the solution is to date women who are outside of your age range but who's life experence is similar? Maybe applying flexability to the search result to give priority to autisic peoples matching critera is another way we can give autisic people an advantage.

Say autistic person A has 8 people who match his search criteria. But he doesn't match any of those 8 peoples search criteria. Maybe we show A's profile to them anyway.

The reserch comunity invented it and continues to use it in litrature. When you are creating a study on autistic people you often want to look at only people with normal / high IQs and people with low IQs seperatly. Parents tend to object to their kids being put in the 'low IQ' group. So low functioning is used instead.

Let me ask you this if I rephrase this:

I am involved in a number of local autism charities and I do like to remind them from time to time that there are a lot of high IQ autistic people out there who maybe aren’t getting the services from these charities they ought to.

Do you think that makes it better and more sensative? People are still going to be offended we are 'dividing' autistic people based on IQ sensable as that might be. And it causes confusion because when people hear high IQ they think of someone with an IQ over 115 (above normal) not over 85 (normal and above).

I re-joined two prominent online 'dating' services not long before my recent diagnosis, then amended my 'bio' to make it explicitly clear I have ASD.Whether generated artificially or not is unknown, but my profile (based on photo) continues to receive quite a lot of views.....but little more. Trouble is, 90% or more of those views received are from women with completely opposite life experience: my age range but with grown up kids! The follow-up messaging contact has almost exclusively been scammers. I really like the thought processes in this thread, but reality (dammit) dictates that such efforts are unlikely to work in my opinion.....

Peter said:

I am involved in a number of local autism charities and I do like to remind them from time to time that there are a lot of high functioning autistic people out there who maybe aren’t getting the services from these charities they ought to

For the general benefit of all involved, I'd respectfully suggest that you don't refer to "high functioning autistic people" when talking to these autism charities.

"High / low functioning" have never been official diagnostic terms.

The terminology is widely considered to be problematic for many reasons, as outlined here (among many other places online). For all of our sakes, the less it's perpetuated the better. :)

https://psychiatry-uk.com/higher-or-lower-why-using-functional-labels-to-describe-autism-is-problematic/

If we’re talking about in real life events pestering other people to start something is more likely. I am involved in a number of local autism charities and I do like to remind them from time to time that there are a lot of high functioning autistic people out there who maybe aren’t getting the services from these charities they ought to.

Maybe yeah.  Why? Are genuinely thinking about starting something?

So would you be in favour of in real life events like speed dating and singles nights and singles activities like I suggested?

Dating  sites are not for me.  I was on them when I was younger but they tended to result in awkward dates between awkward people.  I met all my sexual partners in the real world and found that easier than meeting them online first.

I mean volunteer can carry connotations of charity, but it doesn't have to. Some people volunteer for early retirement for example and feel it was a good choice. The term volunteer in this case just means that the NT going into the service knows they will be 100% interacting / paired with autistic people. Some people may actually prefer that. But the reality is if enough did autistic people wouldn't have an issue finding dates.

The idea is to give slow burn romances a chance. So, you may have heard the quote by clementine church hill that Winston Churchill faults could be learned in a day but his virtues required a life time to study. I do believe autistic people have a steep dating curve where breaking the ice is the hardest part. A service like this is helpful for overcoming the initial step.

This is what Pythagoras did with his first maths student. He paid him to learn maths. Then he pretended to be broke and unable to pay anymore to see if the student was willing to learn anyway. That is approach 2 in a nutshell. Reeling in NTs with ulterior motives then taking that bait away after the ice is broken to see if they stay.

If you are uncomfortable with that maybe you prefer a type 1 approach where you find ways to stack the dating game in autistic peoples favour in non-obvious ways.

An NT using a pro autism dating site doesn’t see the difference from any other dating site in any obvious way. But the coding confers an innate advantage on autistic users by making them more visible on the site. That’s a huge advantage for men because most dating sites have way more men than women.

The same is true of an old fashioned human driven match making service. The NTs don’t see any difference, but the policy of the service is to match autistic members up first or always offer the autistic choice first if there are more than 1 match.

The same is true for an autistic singles club night. If you let NT women into a club night (or any other social event) put on for autistic people to make up female numbers, are they volunteers? Because they are still getting to go to the club. It’s not like its charity for them to go to the party in fact you’d probably charge a fee.

Yeah, that's weird.  So a NT, decides one day, "you know what, I might have pity on some chick with a disability and date her, ya know just to make her feel human for a short while. You now, just out of charity. I'll even pretend to be into it. " imagine that. It's just silly. That's not how the world works. Yeah, lets all volunteer, make the world a better place.

There's no way to change the root cause of this. The  raw fact is that autistics are highly undesirable in the NT world, the reasons why, the evolutionary biological underpinnings of our hierarchical society are not something that can be fixed or altered. A mass murderer who sits on death row cause he went on a killing spree, a total monster of a human being, with no remorse, can still more attractive, and has more attractive traits, and mannerisms, than 80% of autistics. It is what it is. Success in dating is largely dominance and confidence and self assuredness, social competence, all these things, autistics severely lack.

Asking people to volunteer to date autists sounds wrong.

And I think people can take advantage on any dating site, not just a autism one

I apreciate it's not ideal. But neither is setting up a service for autistic people only to have it used mostly by non autistic people. I supose you might acept a doctors letter confirming that someone is on the waiting list for a diagnosis as a compromise. I think GPs are unlikely to refer the kind of NT looking to con their way into a dating program.

And lots of autism frendship services already ask for doctors letters regarding compitency before you can join.

Peter said:

In short I'm not aware of any evidence that gay autistic people strugel relative to their NT counterparts. If you have some I'd be keen to see it.

I feel uncomfortable with various aspects of your overall premise, so - having flagged my initial thoughts / reactions - will step away from the discussion. No offence intended; it's an interesting subject overall and I'm interested to read anything that others may post.