 What kind of qualities have you identified or mentalities that you need to have a successful autistic or holistic relationship? The first one is you have to understand yourself. You have to be self-aware. Yes. And if you are not, I think- Self-awareness is important. It is number one. You know? How can you explain to your partner what you need if you don't know yourself? And I have had several guests on the Neurodiverse Love Podcast who have talked about internal family systems. And I think it is such a wonderful therapeutic model to use for neurodivergent folks because I think there are so many folks who have been masking their entire lives and they don't even know who they are and they don't know what ways they have been not authentic. They haven't been true to themselves, so I think that self-awareness is number one. And then to be able to communicate clearly and concisely, which Mona was not good at in her marriage, what it is that you need and you want. What I would say to your audience is you are not going to get all your needs or wants met in your romantic relationship. It is not going to happen. So understanding that some of those needs and wants are going to be met through work or some kind of volunteering. They're going to be met through friends, through family, through other outside relationships is really critical, right? And then I think understanding what your non-negotiables are. And for me, those are different than boundaries. So your non-negotiables, like for me a non-negotiable Thomas is, you cheat on me, I'm done. I'm done with the relationship, right? And so I have to define what cheating is, right? Yeah, you're the same. But that's a non-negotiable or you do drugs of a particular type. You need to go for help and we need to work through that. So those might be my non-negotiables. But boundaries are also really important in any relationship. But they may look different in a neurodiverse relationship. So one of the boundaries that I made sure I communicated to my partner after I was divorced, my new partner, was if you scream at me, I will leave the room. I will either go for a car ride or I will go into the other room and I will close the door. And when you're calm, then feel free to either text me or call me or come into the room. But I will not engage in a screaming match with you. And I will not be yelled at, right? So I had to be clear about what I was going to do because you can't change anybody else, right? And then I think understanding what your dreams are for the future is really, really critical and figuring out if you have compatible dreams and if you can support your partner in achieving those dreams that they have. If they're not compatible, that's okay. But can you support your partner? You said maybe you would consider being the primary person who is taking care of the children, right? Raising the children. And you might have a partner who really, really wanted a career. I'm sorry. The officer away. That they would take care of the children and you would work? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so if you both want careers and neither one of you wants to stay home with the children, then can you both get to appointing your careers where you could hire somebody to take care of the children, right? If one of you isn't a very social person and on the weekends, you just want to stay home and kind of chill, your partner wants to travel, is there a happy medium, right? If one of you really likes going to family events and the other, the anxiety going to family events is just overwhelming and just shuts you down, how can you kind of meet in the middle? And if you can't, can you agree that this is something where you're going to do things differently? But if you don't share what your dreams are, you know, at the beginning of the relationship when you're getting serious, like some of the core dreams, I think that you might think you're going the same direction, but you're not necessarily going in the same direction and that can cause conflict. And then I think the last thing is understanding each other's core values. You know, so for me, a lot of people don't even know that they don't know what their meaning is in life or their purpose. Like nobody thinks about it. I know, but it's such an integral part is like trying to find what your value and meaning is through the external things that you do rather than thinking about it and moving over like, what do I value in myself and other people and the work that I do and the relationships that I have, you know, it's really important. It is so important. And I'm not just just talking about values in general. I'm talking about the core values, kind of like the non-negotiables are the things that I will not put up with my core values are the things that I absolutely want in my partner. Like for me, integrity is a core value. If you say you're going to do something, do it, follow through. If you can't, please let me know at least 24 hours in advance. Now, that may be hard for some people, right? That was a conflict that my ex and I had often. It's a hard thing for a lot of people in the modern dating world. Yeah, right, right. So so you can imagine that could cause conflict, but, you know, there are people out there that have a similar core value. So and you can go online and you can Google a list of core values and you can maybe pick the top five that are of importance to you. And at some point as your relationship is moving forward, you can share those things. Hey, YouTube, I hope you have enjoyed this podcast clip so far. And if you have, why not check out the full episode, which you can find on my YouTube channel or on other streaming services like Google, Apple, Spotify, you can find it pretty much anywhere you want to. If you have enjoyed this, make sure to like, subscribe, drop a comment down below. Even if it's something simple like sending me a heart or an emoji, it really, really does help me with the algorithm. All of my links to my socials like my daily Instagram blog posts are down in the description. But other than that, I hope you enjoy the rest of this clip. That's a good list. I will add some of my own to that list. Please. I'd say that important like traits in people that you meet that I've noticed have been good is that they're open-minded. Yes. So if they are willing to listen to your experiences, take on board, try and think about how it might be for you. That's obviously going to be a great thing in any relationship, but very important for your diverse relationship. If they're closed-minded, it's not going to work. They're going to have some idea of how the relationship needs to go and how you need to interact and it's just not going to work. It could work, but I think it's highly, highly doubtful. I think that the kind of the mentality side of things. If someone is not, doesn't have a growth mindset with things, that's also going to be really tough because you need to do a lot of growth in relationships like this and also a lot of learning and adapting and probably a lot more than most relationships, I would say. Yeah. And having this kind of mentality of you take me as I am and all of this kind of, if you don't do this and this and this in a relationship, then it's over and you could say that people have a lot of non-negotiables. Yeah, and I was one of those people. They're not necessarily like these really cool things, but it's just it's very kind of narrow-minded and they're not willing to admit when they're wrong and they're not willing to admit where things are miscommunications and they're not willing to kind of grow and you need to grow. It's growth does not stop after you reach the age of 25 when your brains develop fully. It's after that as well, definitely. Yes. I think that's what a lot of people get wrong. But I think as well, patience is definitely a virtue in relationships like this, both from both parties. Yes. Because as we said, with miscommunications, they do happen. And even if you're like myself and you know a lot about autism or like yourself, if the other person is perhaps not like that and things become inflamed and things become reactive and things become very emotionally peaking that could could not be in another circumstance. Then that can sometimes end things, which, you know, I think that's something I think also someone who has more of an independent mind as well, I would say, because I think the the issue that that I found, particularly in my most recent relationship, is that people don't really understand the relationship from an outsider's perspective. They have this idea of how neurotypicals should communicate with each other and what a relationship should look like, what that person should do for you, everything. And so when you listen so much to outside influence of people who don't understand what autism is or they don't understand like the intricacies of it and the relationship and the communication style that that person has with you, then, you know, I think that that can often be really difficult and it's a hard thing because, you know, on the one side, it is important to have those connections and to talk about it with other people because, you know, in a lot of relationships, perhaps that some of the more kind of toxic related ones, people do try to isolate you from your friends and family. And that's obviously not good. So it's it's a careful kind of balance. I think just having an awareness that things are different and people may have reactions to it that to them seem completely justified. But to you, it may not be the case. So I would say that that's probably definitely quite quite a big one. You know, just being able to remember that that person is different and that all the rules don't necessarily apply. No. And I think, yeah. And I think being curious because when I found out curious is was going to be my next one. Is it? Oh, my God. I wish I wish we had both been curious throughout our marriage, you know, the last whatever nine months when I found out we were a neurodiverse couple, Thomas, I couldn't get my hands on enough books and, you know, YouTube videos and everything I could find because I wanted to know. I wanted to understand what did I do wrong? What did he do wrong? What could we do better? How could we transform things? So if you don't have if you don't have a curious mindset, you're going to judge, you're going to get angry, right? You're going to be quick to react rather than respond. Yeah. Yeah. And communication, I think would be the last one. Yeah. So critical. Big, direct communication. Yes. And you know what? I want to add one other and it's something I talk about in the couples groups is being able to repair after conflict because one of the things that happened often in my marriage is my ex would just want to sweep it under the rug because it was easier. And I know a lot of people do that, but those conflicts kept coming up. So there are a lot of great books out there on conflict resolution. There's one by Jason Gaddis, G-A-D-D-I-S. And I forget the title. I don't have it here in front of me, but you can Google it. That's excellent. It's one of the best books I've read on that. So if you are afraid of conflict and you're not willing to repair after there's being conflict, that's going to be a challenge in your relationship. So yeah.