The problem with dating services for autistic people.

  • Autistic people struggle to form romantic / sexual relationships
  • Autistic men (diagnosed) outnumber autistic women by orders of magnitude
    • It is not practical to attempt to address relationship difficulties in autism by assisting (diagnosed) autistic people in forming connections with each other only.
      A variety of dating ‘clubs’ and even specialist apps have been created to assist autistic people in dating, but they all focus on hooking up autistic people with each other.

In order to hook up autistic people with non-autistic people a service has to either

  1. Be open to both autistic and non autistic people, or
  2. Have access to a pool of neurotypical ‘volunteers.’

In case 1 the question is

  • how can the service provide a dating advantage to autistic people while still attracting neurotypical people to use the service.

In case 2 the question is

  • how can the service attract neurotypical volunteer ‘dates’ in reasonably large numbers without attracting people who would abuse the volunteer role.
Parents
  • 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?

    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. :)

Reply
  • 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?

    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. :)

Children
  • 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.