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The problem with dating services for autistic people.

Peter
1 month ago
  • 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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  • 1 month ago in reply to FH

    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.

  • 1 month ago in reply to FH

    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.