 Hello and welcome back to the Asperger's Growth YouTube channel with your host, Mr. Thomas Henley and today I'm bringing you, I was going to say a different video but to be honest every single video that I make is quite different so probably not. Today we're going to be diving deep into the world of dating and relationships, of course for the autistic variety of people. This series of videos is meant for neurotypicals, so people who aren't autistic, who are in relationships with an autistic person. But if you are autistic yourself, I'm sure there'll be something in here that would be a good pointer because a lot of these things that I'm going to mention are just in general good relationship advice for everybody, for most people. A lot of the things that I look at in this video, the four ways that you can improve your neurodiverse relationship are particularly around my personal experiences, my experiences reading into relationship psychology, listening to relationship experts and also understanding about autism. So without further ado, what are my top four tips for improving a neurodiverse relationship? I'm sure you're biting your nails, you're ready for it, so let's get into it. Number one, use personality tests. Now you may be thinking, why should I take a personality test? What's that going to do for my relationship? There are a few tests out there that I would highly recommend anybody taking, specifically the Big Five, also the 16 personalities tests and also tests around your sexual and intimate relationships. The one that I'd really, really, really highlight in this instance would be taking a love attachment style test. This basically puts you into one of four categories. You've got secure, you've got dismissive avoidant, you've got fearful avoidant, you've got anxiously attached and depending on your personality, your attachment style is going to have different dynamics in your relationship. So if you're with someone who's secure and you're fearful anxious, anxiously attached, it's going to be quite overwhelming for that secure person. Likewise, if a secure person is with a dismissive avoidant, that's like a lot of work needs to be done in order to make sure that that intimacy and that that relationship is maintained over a long period of time. And in general, these things, these Big Five, Myers-Briggs, the 16 personalities, the attachment styles, the intimacy tests, give you a baseline just for yourself, for your knowledge, the things that perhaps people with your profiles would struggle with and be good at in relationships and in life, but it also gives you a good sounding board to talk about your relationship. It gives you a good sounding board to talk about what you need from a partner, what you need from friendships, what you need from life, the way that you think about relationships. Because if you just go up to someone and say, look, here is my profile, look at my profile, it's a lot easier than going up and say, look, I'm very high in conscientiousness and low in agreeableness, but I'm very open and I love people and I love you. It's not really going to mean much because there's no further information on that. There's nothing to spark up a discussion about it. And that's the key point there, it's a starter for a discussion. So you may find that a lot of these things, if you get a particular archetype, for example, for myself, it's the advocate for these 16 personalities, most of that stuff is pretty accurate to me, how I work, how I think, how I feel, how I deal with life. But there are some things that I don't, and some things that need further clarification and individualization in a way it's good for you to understand yourself, it's good for your partner to have a good understanding of you. But it also gives you that open dialogue, which is always, always good in a healthy long term relationship. Number two, following heavily on from what I was just talking about. You need to develop an open, vulnerable dialogue for conversation. It's very, very, very important in all relationships if you don't communicate about a particular aspect of your relationship, like how you feel, your insecurities, you're not opening up to them about things that you're sad about, things that you're happy about, and you're not, you know, you're not communicating together like your adults. One particular area of difficulty comes in for a lot of people, which is intimacy. You know, if you're not talking about intimacy, then how is the other person going to know how to improve that? How is how are you going to repair that without talking about it, knowing what each other likes? That goes for the same in every single aspect of a relationship, particularly when it comes to autistic, neurotypical relationships. Let me put this way, most people in relationships, it's hard. It's hard work. There's differences that you have, and you need to come together on the things that you find similar and help the other person understand and navigate around things that you're different with. When you're autistic and you have, you're a neurotypical autistic relationship, you already have differences just based on being a different person, but then you also have being autistic, having a different brain type, having a different baseline level of social ability, having a different propensity for being extroverted and introverted and expressing your emotions, you know, due to things like alexifamia. There are a lot of differences, and so inevitably if you don't talk about things, then you get a lot of crossed wires, and crossed wires basically just means your brain's not being completely compatible with someone else. You think a certain thing about a situation, you intend to express something in a certain way, and it comes across the complete opposite of what you're trying to say, or what you're trying to get across to the other person, or what you're trying to get out of a conversation. Being able to be emotionally vulnerable, and also knowing how to reward your partner for doing that, for opening up to you, it doesn't really take much, just a bit of encouragement, just, you know, a thank you for telling me about this, it's something that's important to you, and I want to know about it, and how can I help? It's literally as easy as that, but I think nowadays there is a lot of difficulties around keeping relationships, you know, we're always looking at the negatives, but it's not necessarily the negatives themselves that are the problem, it's that you're not talking about it, you're not trying to get around it, you're not trying to work through it, it's just there, and it just stays in the background and it mulls over, years and years and years, you know, you've got married and the problem's still there, and you just haven't addressed it, or haven't addressed it in the best way possible. In order for you to have a good, vulnerable, open dialogue between two people, it needs to be reciprocal, and part of that may be, if you're neurotypical, learning about autism, learning about how we work, how we think, the things that are different in our baseline level of communicating with people and the world. On the other side, autistic people, we do tend to struggle in a lot of key areas, particularly for relationships I've found, was cognitive empathy and alexifamia. Alexifamia difficult to notice and categorise emotions you can see in a relationship, which is very, very emotionally based, or it should be, if it's love and it's a long, long lasting thing, then it's kind of important to know how you feel. I've done a lot, I'm going to release a video sometime later about alexifamia in relationships, and I'll be talking about that and some of the cognitive empathy stuff, so if you're looking forward to that, please drop me an old subscribe, because it really does help a lot. Number three, develop an interest and an attention for the... develop an interest in their special interests. Put time into it, put effort into it. The thing is, autistic people, we hyper focus on certain things. We go through phases where we like certain things a lot, and then we don't like them and we move on to something else, but we also have long standing special interests. Things that we are always keen to know about, keen to learn about, keen to watch, keen to do. Special interests make up a big part of our life. Primarily just as an interest thing, we're very curious. We like to learn, we like to develop ourselves, develop our knowledge of a special interest, but it's also a really big part of us. It's a lot to do with helping us manage with life, giving us a direction for our insanely, anxiously whirling thoughts. It gives us a medium to get rid of that blurriness on the outside and focus in on something. When you start dating an autistic person, you may find that, yeah, they meet up with you and it's good, and there comes a point in which the special interests are going to come by. If you're spending a significant amount of time with them, it's likely that they're going to play a big part in their life and therefore your life. Now not everything that an autistic person is interested in is going to be interesting to you, but what you may be interested in is how they think about it, their theories about it there. You know, it doesn't take much to show a little bit of an interest, to listen a bit. You don't have to dive head first and make it your special interest, but just acknowledging that it's something that's good for them, something that they like and something that brings a lot of joy to their life and not discouraging them to do them. It's a very important thing in a long-term relationship because if you were to perhaps come across an autistic person like myself, let's do a little bit of role-play, god I can't speak today. So let's do a little bit of role-play. You meet me, I'm 6'3", I do my YouTube stuff, I like going to the gym, I go to work and I'm always very, very, very busy and you think that I'm great, we get on, we connect on a level, this is really weird. And there comes a point at which in our relationship you find out that my special interest is Spongebob Squarepants. I've never even been to my house, but the Spongebob stuff absolutely everywhere in my room and I love it and I think it's great and you may not be that keen on that, you may want it to go, you don't want your adult room, adult house being clouded by childish cartoons. The thing is if you were to deny them that, if you were to discourage them to keep that passion that they have, you are denying a very, very sizable amount of their life. Our interests in general are an integral part of us. It makes up what we focus on doing during the day and I won't go into it too much but I would like to highlight that if you want to get to their heart as quick as possible and stay there, develop some level of interest or engagement with their special interest. It doesn't have to be much, just a little bit. And that will do absolute wonders for your relationship. Numero four, peace among worlds. This is perhaps one of the most important ones that I can highlight. This is a real, a real thing that happens. People get into autistic, neurotypical relationships and eventually the neurotypical partner tends to take on a lot of the responsibilities for certain things in the house and it's not something that they're happy about. They don't want that. They don't want to force their autistic partner to go out and socialize or bathe regularly or make food or clean. I think this could be a problem in some relationships in general but the thing is that there are things that are different in our brain that make some things really easy and natural for us and other things really difficult and very taxing on us. You know, the things that I've just listed now tend to be things that people who have executive dysfunction find excessively hard. Those minuscule, tiny tasks around the house that are always there and you always have to do them. I personally, I really struggle with that aspect of my life. I'm happy doing the videos. I'm happy going about and going to the gym and going to work and doing all my social media stuff but when it comes to the actual life things that keep you maintained and keep you clean and just make life a bit more smoothly, those are the things I really struggle with. I don't think in any circumstance you should take on a caring role in an autistic neurotypical relationship. Sure, there are going to be things that they find hard but it's a reciprocal relationship. You're in love, you're in a long-term relationship, you're dating. It's not a disabled person, carer, dynamic kind of thing and so I'd be really wary around doing things for your partner if they haven't explicitly asked you to. I find that my skills, my life skills, my independence tends to drop when people do things for me that I haven't asked them to. When people do, so maybe they are depressed and my executive function isn't as good as usual, you know, perhaps maybe I get a bit more support in general for just life things, trying to manage my mood, trying to keep me on top of things and that's all good but even in that state there are some things that I would still want to do myself and I can't because they do it for me. Although we do struggle in some areas, we are also a human, we also like to be adult, we like to be independent, we like to do our own thing, we like to plan out our life. If you don't give us space to do that or at least you don't ask us about things before doing them for us, then it's going to make the dynamic in your relationship a little bit uneasy. One person's going to feel like they're being babied which they don't want to feel because they're an adult, they're human and then on the other side someone's getting very resentful for doing all these things constantly for the other person. I would suggest that you have a conversation about this. You iron out the things that they find difficult and things that you could help with. If there are things that they would like you to do on a more regular basis, then sure but you need to have that conversation and if there's something that you, you know, if you're just doing it sort of a gift of appreciation, you know, you're putting in some effort into the relationship to do something for them, then fair enough. But if you do that consistently and you don't ask them, you know, if they want something, if they want to help with something and you just do it, then it's going to lead to a lot of dependency and their skills are going to drop and it's not going to be a good situation. Now it may, to any of my viewers, it may come across as me trying to put autistic people down and I'm not doing this because this is something that is true and it's true for everybody. It's just a little bit more true for us because we tend to struggle with the social stuff, the mental health stuff and some of the executive functioning stuff. These are things that I have found in my relationships, not any particular relationship, but just in general. And I would definitely try and put this at the forefront of your mind. Talk to your partner about it. Watch this video together if you want or contact me if there's anything that I can help with. So that does it for the four tips. It really did free again. I hope this has helped you. I can understand that navigating autistic neurotypical relationships, it's a little bit of a shaky, shaky road if you don't have any support, if you don't have anyone to help you understand. And to be honest, there is not a lot of useful autism-related relationship advice that I've seen on YouTube. There may be, I'm not saying that there isn't, but I haven't seen it. If you want to help support my work, you can see that I've had, I've added a little subscribe, join button under my videos on my channel. And basically that is a substitute for Patreon, which I have used for a while now. And the whole premise behind it is that I just want people to be able to give to me as little as they want for as long as they want, and at least get some level of recognition for the support that they've given me. The thing is with Patreon is that you kind of have to put the monthly donation thing quite high, whereas here on YouTube, I just get the money straight up. There is, it just goes straight to me, I'm pretty sure. And that means that I can put the join button at about one pound a month. So if you like any of the content that I make, or you want me to make more of it, then please consider joining my channel. And if you want to check out my t-shirt merch, my collaboration with Born Anxious, as you can see, I've got the Nirodova Squad print t-shirt back. All for Jim, very sensory-friendly clothes, autism-related Jim Apparel. And if you want to follow my social medias, you can find them here. The best place to find me is on Instagram, of course. That's my main hub of information, but you can also find me on Twitter and Facebook, and you can visit my website if you want to get in contact. Maybe commission me for a speech or some public speaking or some training. That's the kind of thing that I'm delving into at the moment. So if that's something that interests you, it's thomashandley.co.uk. So I hope you enjoy the video. Thank you for sticking all the way through. And I hope you have a good day. I hope you have a chill day. Hope you've had a shower today and drank some water. Because that's something that I've not done, and I probably should. But I'm not going to. And as getting out of the shower last night, I've got a good two days on me. Take it easy, folks, and I'll catch you in another episode of the dating and autistic series. Have a good day.