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.
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  • 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?