 Good day, my attractive and oh-so-lovy-dovy viewers. Welcome to the first episode of the Dating and Autistic series. My name is Thomas Henley, I'm an Instagrammer, YouTuber, podcaster, and I make videos around autism and mental health. And today we're going to be laser focusing in on relationships and how to better understand your autistic partner. Autism is one of those things that's splattered with different misconceptions and stereotypes. Considering the low prevalence of autism in the population, our difficulties with social interaction and our relatively high amounts of social anxiety, there's not a lot of content out there on understanding autistic people, the lens of relationships. In this series of videos, I'm going to be diving into different topics around dating an autistic person, but I'm also going to help you to better understand us and understand our many oddities and strangenities that we have. And generally work towards a more healthy relationship and dating experience. So there may be a few reasons why you have decided to click on this video. Number one, you may have been dating an autistic person for a while, but they've only recently disclosed that they're autistic. Number two, an autistic person that you know has recently shown a lot of interest in you and you want to understand the condition a little bit better. You may also be trying to process a recent breakup that didn't go very well and you want to kind of understand and process what went wrong and how to better improve yourself for relationships with autistic people in the future. Or lastly, you may just have an unhealthy interest in what dating an autistic person will be like, and you want a little bit more information on that. My experience, the experience of Thomas Henley, of course the well and only, the one and only rather. Ever since I can remember, I have generally been quite fascinated with other people and for the years I've had multiple relationships that have given me a lot insight into the differences between autistic and neurotypical people and the sorts of things that are more common, more of the common difficulties. In my young years, I used to be a little bit more sensitive and socially inept, which kind of impacted the quality of my relationships, but over the years I've more or less improved myself in lots of different ways and I have a lot more of an idea of what a healthy relationship would look like. I spent a lot of time during and after relationships, analysing, looking at the psychology, writing, generally looking into what went wrong or what went good and the type of things that popped up quite a lot. I spent a lot of time during my relationships and after breakups, researching into communication, attraction, relationships and the psychology of the autistic mind. I mean, honestly, I spent about at least a year just going down the rabbit hole of YouTube videos trying to figure out what I needed to improve on and what went wrong and all that sub-story stuff. Very stressful time for me. The whole experience of attraction falling in love, breaking up, totally encapsulated me for a large portion of my life. It was really difficult to try and reflect on myself both truthfully and concretely in order to better understand the things that I was doing wrong, but as I said over the years I've grown massively in my social maturity and understanding. So in light of the difficulties that I had in my own relationships, the research I've done and for the benefit of you lovely people over there, look at me for a camera, I've constructed a list of ways to get around those common difficulties, ways that you can better understand the autistic mind and finally to improve your relationship. Today we will be tackling living on a different wavelength, looking into gut responses to problems when they arise, but also some of the hurdles that we have to get over. When you first get to now an autistic person, you'll go through those same stages that you see in most relationships of being in a honeymoon period, learning a lot more about autism, learning a lot more about the other person and generally just having a good time. But after a while you may feel that these miscommunications just seem to be a little bit hard to deal with. It may feel like your partner is just on a different wavelength or tuning into a different radio frequency that is just so different to your own and especially when you're talking about difficulties or problems in the relationship. They may bring up things that irritate them or things that annoy them and they may sound particularly harsh, critical, blunts, whatever other kind of social word that we have for that, littered with logical dissections and lengthy explanations that go into what exactly the problem is and how they think they can fix it and this is generally accompanied by a general lack of facial expression. On the flip side, when you're explaining your emotions about a situation or a problem or a difficulty, you may feel like they are just not really appreciating the emotions that you have about the situation. In the extremes it may just feel like they don't care about what you have to say. Responding to you with very logical and fact-based evidence that makes it feel like they're more of a psychiatrist or a scientist or a politician. This sadly may lead to a lot of situations where you both go away from each other feeling completely bewildered, confused and emotional. These are both things that I feel are very common in relationships between autistic and neurotypical people so trying to understand what's actually going on in their head might be a good place to start. From my own experience, I tend to view problems in relationships more like, as I said, like a psychiatrist would or a scientist would, trying to approach it from a very logical and unemotional angle, bouncing off thoughts or ideas or evidence that I have instead of actually engaging emotionally with my partner. When problems arise, we tend to view the problem as like a thought experiment, a problem-solving experiment. And when you're doing those kind of thought experiments, you have to approach it with a very analytical and logical mind. It actually requires a lot of energy and thought for us to try and bridge the communication gap that we have. So in an effort to try and fix the problem, we may discard a lot of the emotions because we are so laser focused on trying to fix it and that would explain the emotionless look on our face when we're trying to process and understand the situation. But from your side, it may just feel like we just don't care about you and your emotions on the situation. You may feel like we're being very dismissive or we're treating you more like a stranger than a partner. If the problem is approached from your way with a little bit too much emotion, then we can become very defensive, emotional and sensitive. Some autistic people may seem to be getting quite aggressive about it. But for other people, they may get completely muted. They may go completely silent. And that's something called an autistic shutdown. And I will put a video up in the corner for you to have a look at that. If it goes any further and the conversation is still going on and you're getting frustrated at them and there's a lot of emotions flying everywhere, then they may get completely overloaded and overwhelmed and have a meltdown. I think the way that autistic people get it wrong is that we don't really appreciate just to the extent that emotions are a very integral part of communication. In an ideal world, they would listen to you and ask questions, take on board what you're saying and how you feel about it, maybe share a little bit of a bonding experience and then work on it in the coming weeks. The thing is, it's really not that we're unemotional robots that we completely don't understand emotions. It's just that we exist on this very concrete, logical, blunt level that makes sense in our brains. Our natural reaction is to go to that kind of wavelength, understand what you mean, pitch in our own experiences and thoughts and then come to a middle ground. If there is a problem that you haven't physically got us sitting down and engaging with you, but it's something that you've pointed to on a number of occasions over a period of time and your emotions, your negative emotions are building up over that period of time, then it can feel like snap. It can feel like you're blowing up out of nothing. We don't recognize these small changes in your emotions and your way of behaving with us. From the autistic side, it can feel very, very, very overwhelming. For us, it just feels like the problem is coming out of nowhere and your emotions are just so high for this thing and we don't understand why and we get stressed and we're trying to think about how to solve it and how to deal with confrontation. It can be very stressful and uncomfortable and it surprises us so much that it can really produce a lot of negative emotions in us. Now, of course, neither of these stances, these way of tackling a problem are right. They're just different and if you're not aware that these processes go on in your autistic partner, then it's going to be difficult to try and get to a middle ground and try to understand each other better and ultimately get over those difficulties and move on. This is why I've absolutely named it living on a different wavelength. I think it's a good metaphor to try and explain the gut reactions, the instinctual things that we do when we're confronted with a problem. So I've talked a lot about problems and difficulties and experiences but what can you do to solve it? What can you do? For yourself and indeed for an autistic person, the best thing to do is to step back, have a breather, wait until those emotions get to a capable level and think about it from your perspective and the autistic person's perspective. And for yourself, you can do this by reading about autism, by listening to autistic people talk about their experiences like this video. Another important thing to do when you are in that sort of situation where you sit down and having a conversation about it is to accurately describe exactly what your emotions feel like and use examples that are relatable so that the other person understands what you're talking about. Before this, it might be a good idea to try and collect your thoughts and think of an ideal scenario or way of getting around this problem that you can communicate to the other person. The worst, the absolute worst thing that you can do is to constantly mention it in a very transient, non-direct way in order to try and get them to understand what the problem is. Eventually getting so frustrated about it that you do actually confront them but you're actually confronting them with a lot of negative emotion. In order to get the best start of the conversation and make sure that the other person doesn't get completely blown out of the water and overwhelmed, you need to try and approach it in a very calm manner in a way that is non-threatening so that the other person, the autistic person, doesn't feel like they have to be defensive. It is also really important to be emotionally open and to be honest about your feelings, verbalising those feelings in order to accurately communicate what the problem is as well as the emotions that follow with it. You'll find that once you've approached it in more of a logical sense, more of a problem solving way, you'll naturally find that you'll be able to find that middle ground sooner and without all the emotional distress. After you've solved it and you've bonded a little bit over it, then the emotional reassurance and understanding of those emotions will come from the autistic person. Whether it's you know at the time or the day after or week, the autistic person will likely think about this problem and deliberate it and think about it and see it from your perspective and eventually come back and bond over it and get over it. It's a very aggressive way of saying it. Solve it and move past it. For an autistic person, emotional transparency is very important. Making sure that you explain your emotions and give them relatable things to try and understand. Having that emotional transparency, those explanations for your emotions, those relatable things that they can follow up on does a lot for them to try and understand what the issue is stemming from and how you feel about it. A second, probably one of the most important things, you need to try and approach them in a very calm and friendly manner. This will help mitigate a lot of the difficulties around shutdowns which will probably just completely end the conversation, meltdowns which will be a very horrific ordeal for both of you and the general heightened stress and anxiety that autistic people experience when there is some sort of aura of confrontation. Lastly, they don't want to feel stupid, they don't want to feel like you're attacking them for not picking up on something that they had absolutely no idea about. We won't pick up on that stuff and it's sort of expected in our society that you do and you pick up on those emotions and you act on them and you ask them how they are and you understand the situation before an argument happens. But with an autistic person it generally can just feel like it comes out the blow because we don't pick up on that stuff. For the future it might be important to describe to them what you want from these conversations. For example you may want the appreciation for your emotions and thoughts, for example listening and repeating things to make sure they understand it and basically that they are trying to feel what you're feeling and try and understand the situation. You may also want reassurance that the lack of apparent care or emotion that surrounds your relationship is not due to them not caring about you. Having that little bit of reassurance is always helpful even if you know that they're autistic. The last thing would be to try and let them know that the problem doesn't need to be solved immediately, they don't need to go away and start writing about it and dissecting it and giving evidence, they just need to think about it over a long period of time trying understand and process it and then maybe make adjustments in the future. So I hope that this video has been somewhat helpful. I know a lot of people can struggle when they are first dating a person of a different neurotype, let's be honest everyone's different enough for them to be some amount of complications without autism in the mix. This advice is based purely on my experiences and the things that I've read about in the research and the psychology that I've done but every single person every autistic person is different and you know sometimes if one of either party isn't willing to put that effort in to try and bridge that gap maybe it's not meant to be. You both have to view the relationship in a very constructive way and be willing to meet each other halfway. Neurotypicals can be arseholes but autistic people can be arseholes as well it's not something that is you know all autistic people are amazing and great it very much depends on the person. So it's good to know what is a product of just having a little bit of a different brain and what is an actual genuine flaw in their personality. I hope that my videos give you something concrete and clear to work on a little bit of a different angle on a situation. Taking these things in consideration can make these difficult scenarios easier to deal with and having something concrete is a lot better than flapping and flailing trying to figure out something that works. Stay subscribed and hit that little notification bell to get notified when the next episode in the dating autistic series comes out. In the next video we're going to be talking about physical contact and affection. Stay cool, stay attractive, stay hydrated and I'll see you in the next video. See you later guys.