Autism, Amatonormativity and the Culture of Confidence

 So the other day I got a chance to talk to my ex-husband, and apparently what I felt the need to do was rant about how difficult it is for an aromantic person to grow up in a culture as amatonormative as the one we were both raised in, and I sounded pretty frustrated? So I decided I needed to analyze that.

I’ve recently re-embraced the autism label, after hearing so much from tumblr about how it’s not an illness but a way of being, a way which still applies to me no matter how much “progress” I’ve made.

The problematic cultural attitude toward autism as an illness, as a defecit in the person rather than a difference in the type of function they’re best at, is finally coming into focus for me, and it’s coming alongside with my realizing that I might be aromantic.

Autistic people crave consistency, routine and stability. We crave a forum of human interaction in which the expectations are defined and obvious. Can you see why the idea of a romantic relationship might seem appealing, even if the appropriate feelings are absent? And the thing about being autistic is that when it comes to your feelings, you never really know.

The pressure to act normal is so strong that it warps our perception of ourselves to a seemingly absurd degree. People who have really distinct perception of their own emotions probably can’t imagine what it must be like to not have that, to have this huge rift or disconnect between self and emotions that you’d need binoculars to really see the other side of.

Everyone wants to know how I feel. Well gee, I do too!

Pretending to be a neurotypical person comes with all these attitudes that are not necessarily good for autistic people. I kind of had to change my definition of knowing, so I could satisfy people that I knew the answers to questions. Because if there is one thing culture teaches us, especially school culture, it is to pretend to know the answers to questions. It’s associated with confidence.

But I thought there was something wrong with me, that needed to be fixed for the sake of happiness/acceptance, that I had to reprogram my mind to spit out emotional responses, and because my brain has always been so malleable I actually managed to short circuit between “know” and “educated guess” because it was the only way I could act normal as so many people wanted me to.

I can feel my emotions much more vividly and presently now that I’ve fixed a lot of the health issues that were exacerbating my communication issues. But whenever I tell someone how I feel and why, it’s still only an educated guess. I’ve just been pushed so many times to know that stuff. People push autistic people so hard for awareness of that stuff when it is impossible.

The direct connections just aren’t there, and it’s always going to be a question of scanning the available information for patterns and making a statistically educated guess.

Someone much better at reading people than me (in some ways at least; I suppose I know now how fallible he was) once assumed I wanted to be in a relationship with him and tried to let me down easy. I was so confused. I had no awareness of any romantic attraction there. I was only aware of physical attraction and trust. I trusted that person’s perceptions of emotion more than my own, though, and I think that led ultimately to the blunder that was my marriage.

The things he said impacted me, even though I have never been under the impression that I had romantic feelings for him. The capacity for romantic feelings still seemed to be implied, and he always did claim to be an energy reader. To see those things that so eluded me in some kind of concrete form.

The more I think about it, the more likely it seems that I am aromantic. But the pressure to seem neurotypical, the pressure of amatonormativity and a twisted version of the concept “fake it ‘til you make it” led me to trick myself into thinking I was in love with my ex.

I had recently discovered that if I avoided certain foods, the fog dispersed and I could actually see clear to the other side of the canyon, although it was still too far away to make out much detail. It changed the way I saw people and the way I perceived myself reacting to them.

The part of my life in which I was dating/married was the time period in which I believed that I was “fixed” - that I had dispersed the barriers between myself and my emotions, that I could interpret them with a high enough degree of accuracy, that the way that I “knew” them was no more inaccurate than the average person. That knowing things more surely than that was impossible. That I was no longer autistic.

The things people recommended as a litmus test for a lasting relationship - friendship, trust, a surety that you could happily spend the rest of your life and on into old age with this one person - were all there. My husband was my zucchini. But - what is romance? - Whatever it is, I think he wanted that, and I had no idea how to give it.

He always wanted to know what I felt and why. He wanted to go deeper and the deeper he probed the more obvious it became that I really didn’t have any answers beyond the broad statistical shadows I’d learned to interpret. That frustrated him to no end. I guess romance is wanting to get in under each other’s skin, understand each other more and more deeply? I didn’t have that. My ex was a blank slate to me, comfortable because it helped me to cope with my own chaos. I was still trying to figure myself out, let alone anyone else.

I don’t know if that was the problem. The closest thing I’ve felt to that desire to understand and become one with a being is when I delve into a fictional character and want to know everything about them and what it’s like to be them. Because they’re made of concrete things like words and facial expressions, they helped me understand what those signs meant and refine my own statistical analyses. But other humans have all, more or less, been blank walls to me, understandable only through their words and, in time, expressions. There’s no delving deeper than that, for me. Not without guessing. And I don’t like having to guess or assume when it comes to real people.

But I do it anyway, because I’ve been trained to act normal.

If I had grown up being told that it was okay that I didn’t know things about my feelings, that I didn’t think the same way as other people, I think I would have ended up just as functional, but in a different way. If other people were more aware of this chasm in some people’s minds, it could maybe do more to prevent awkwardness and miscommunications than any amount of training autistic people how to act normal.

It could maybe stop lives from getting torn apart when an autistic person’s facade collapses in on itself, because it’s a projection to make other people comfortable, not a true solution to the problem of autistic/neurotypical interactions.