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.

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.....

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.

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.

Re 1: With waiting list delays for autism assessments often stretching into years rather than months, wouldn't requiring a diagnosis unfairly discriminate against those who are actively seeking their diagnoses, whilst "only" being self-diagnosed in the meantime?

1. It's an issue if the service is designed to give autistic people an advantage. which is what we are talking about here, giving autistic people an advantage to componsate for the disadvanteges they face. People would have an incentive to pretend to be autistic for that advantage.

3. I think there is a not of evidence that they do in such rare cases when those matches occure. But there simply aren't enough auistic women to go around. It's even worse when you consider that a disproportionat number of them are gay / asexual.

I apreciate that. But that reserch still shows 75% (3 in 4) autistic males are straight and only 8% are homosexual. Homosexual dating runs through very difrent chanels and has difrent culture to hetrosexual dating. 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 think that answers question 2?

Related info re one of my questions: 

Autistic individuals are more likely to be LGBTQ+ - University of Cambridge

"the study found that autistic adults and adolescents are approximately eight times more likely to identify as asexual and ‘other’ sexuality than their non-autistic peers. And there were sex differences in sexual orientation: autistic males are 3.5 times more likely to identify as bisexual than non-autistic males, whereas autistic females are three times more likely to identify as homosexual than non-autistic females."

Peter said:

Autistic men (diagnosed) outnumber autistic women by orders of magnitude

1. Why do the women - or the men, for that matter - need to be diagnosed? Isn't self-diagnosis sufficiently valid?

2. Your posts give the impression (to me, at least) that you are only discussing how to facilitate straight / heterosexual pairings. Is that intentional? If so, is it appropriate?

Peter said:

It is not practical to attempt to address relationship difficulties in autism by assisting (diagnosed) autistic people in forming connections with each other only.

3. Conversely, couldn't it be argued that two autistic people would make better matches? (eg higher likelihood of mutual loyalty, etc).

Not arguing - just asking. :)

We can help structure these questions by categorising dating services by type:

1. Dating apps and web services
2. Match making services that arrange 'dates.'
3. Services that run in person dating events.
   1. Those that artificial pair people at the event (eg speed dating).
   2. Those that do not (eg singles nights and mixers)

1. dating apps / web services (also to some degree covers telephone clubs and lonely-hearts columns).

It's difficult to see what inducement could encourage volunteers to use these services as the main utility of a dating service is finding other users. However, as a service open to neurotypicals and autistic people it’s very easy to confer an advantage on autistic people simply by putting them at the top of search results. The attraction to neurotypical people in this case would presumably be that the service offers features that are often pay walled on other sites / apps.

2. Match making services that arrange dates.

It's easy to see why neurotypicals might be interested in volunteering for this service if dates are 'all expenses paid' and at reasonably nice venues. However, this renders to program open to abuse. Potential ways to address this would be to exclude volunteers who do not swap contact details with someone after 3 dates or who autistic users complain about ghosting them. This service is expensive to provide.

On the other side opening the service to autistic and neurotypicals there is no longer a need pay for dates to attract users. You can even charge a small fee. Again, advantage can be conferred to autistic users by giving them priority for matches.

3a. Services that run in person dating events involving pairing.

Since demand from autistic men can be expected to out match autistic women the simplest approach is simply to have a dating event where men entering the event must all be autistic but women may be either autistic or neurotypical. Most likely you would have a list of autistic men and women and fill up the deficit with neurotypical volunteer woman. It's difficult to see what advantage NT women would derive from this. Hypothetically beverages could be offered at a free or reduced rate. However again you would need a system to discourage abuse. Perhaps by excluding NT women who never exchange contact details.

3b. services running in person dating events without pairing.

Effectively what you are talking about is running a party or outing for a particular activity. It might be a club night or laser tag or any number of things. But the basic principle is as before you make up low numbers of autistic women with NT women. The attraction here is exclusivity. NT women still need to pay fees but fees or not coming to this event full of autistic people is the only way to join in the activity in this particular time or place.

 pros and cons:

1. comparatively cheap to set up and run at small scale but very expensive to market. lots of other services in this space.
2. fairly expensive to run. difficult to run at scale.
3. -
   1. questionable whether inducements can effectively attract 'volunteers.'
   2. blurs the line between volunteer and service user. difficult to get off the ground without a cheap / free venue or a preexisting user base with common interests.