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Navigating Love and Autism - The New York Times. But she found comfort in Jack’s forthrightness. If he did not always say what she wanted to hear, she knew that whatever he did say, he meant. As he dropped her off on campus that morning, she replayed in her head the e- mail he had sent the other day, describing their brief courtship with characteristic precision.“Is this what love is, Kirsten?” he had asked.
Only since the mid- 1. Because they have a hard time grasping what another is feeling — a trait sometimes described as “mindblindness” — many assumed that those with such autism spectrum disorders were incapable of, or indifferent to, intimate relationships.
Parents and teachers have focused instead on helping them with school, friendship and, more recently, the workplace. Yet as they reach adulthood, the overarching quest of many in this first generation to be identified with Asperger syndrome is the same as many of their nonautistic peers: to find someone to love who will love them back. The recent recognition that their social missteps arise from a neurological condition has lifted their romantic prospects, they say, allowing them to explain behavior once attributed to rudeness or a failure of character — and to ask for help. So has the recent proliferation of Web sites and forums where self- described “Aspies,” or “Aspergians,” trade dating tips and sometimes find actual dates. Lessons learned with the advent of social skills classes and therapies, typically intended to help them get jobs, are now being applied to the more treacherous work of forging intimacy. The months that followed Jack and Kirsten’s first night together show how daunting it can be for the mindblind to achieve the kind of mutual understanding that so often eludes even nonautistic couples. But if the tendency to fixate on a narrow area of interest is sometimes considered a drawback, it may also explain one couple’s single- minded determination to keep trying.
A Meeting. Kirsten was first introduced to Jack in the fall of 2. Rao’s Coffee in Amherst, Mass., to greet his friend, who was dressed uncharacteristically in a suit that hung from his lean frame. Jack, it turned out, was on his way to court. A chemistry whiz, he had spent much of his adolescence teaching himself to make explosives and setting them off in the woods in experiments that he hoped would earn him a patent but that instead led the state police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to charge him with several counts of malicious explosion. By the following spring, he would be cleared of all the charges and recruited by the director of the undergraduate chemistry program at the University of Massachusetts, who was impressed by a newspaper account of Jack’s home- built laboratory. Kirsten’s boyfriend, a popular Amherst High senior, had offered to serve as a character witness for his former classmate, and the three spent much time together that year.
The boyfriend told Kirsten that Jack had Asperger syndrome: his condition may have blinded him to the possibility that the explosions, which he recorded and posted on You. Tube, could well be viewed by law enforcement authorities as anything other than the ambitious chemistry experiments he saw them. But if Kirsten noticed that Jack held himself stiffly, spoke with an unusual formality and rarely made eye contact, she gave little thought to his condition, other than to note that it ran in families: his father, John Elder Robison, is the author of “Look Me in the Eye,” a best- selling 2. Asperger’s at age 3. After reading of the intense interests that often come with the condition — the elder Mr. Robison’s passion for Land Rovers, he had written, was the basis for his successful business servicing luxury vehicles — Kirsten and her boyfriend made light: “I have Asperger’s for Mc.
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Donald’s,” she would joke. But Jack was all too familiar with the book’s more sobering stories, too: about the despair his father felt in his youth as he looked at happy couples around him and his rocky marriage to Jack’s mother, which ended in divorce.“All these young Aspergians want to know how to succeed at dating,” John Robison told his son after his speaking engagements. And as a high school girlfriend broke up with Jack over the course of that year, Jack began to wonder more urgently about the same question. Kirsten’s two previous boyfriends had broken up with her, too, and her current boyfriend was an unlikely match — a charismatic extrovert with soulful blue eyes who thrived on meeting new people. But when she admitted at the outset of their senior year in high school that she envied his social ease, he had embraced the role of social coach.
Photo. Jack and Kirsten have trouble reading emotions and gauging social cues that others take for granted. Credit. Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times Years of social rejection had made her, in his view, overly eager to please. People will take advantage of you if you act that way,” he warned.
If you don’t watch out, you’ll be a natural doormat.”Noting her tendency to speak in a monotone, he urged her to be more expressive. He sought to quiet her hand movements, gave her personal hygiene tips (“You can’t do that,” he told her flatly when she used her fingers to scoop up food she had dropped on a table at Taco Bell and ate it) and pointed out the unspoken social cues she often missed. He elbowed her as she spoke for long minutes to an acquaintance about her interest in animal physiology. When people look away,” he explained, “it means they’re not interested.”And sometimes, he was plainly upset by what he perceived as her rudeness.
I can’t believe you did that,” he huffed when his mother asked Kirsten how she was and she did not reciprocate. Much of the time, Kirsten embraced the tutoring, which he punctuated with unabashed displays of affection. I love this girl!” the boyfriend once proclaimed, tackling her on his mother’s couch.
Diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder at age 1. They were convinced that with some effort she could become as socially adept as he was. But she also chafed at his frequent instructions, which required constant, invisible exertion to obey. And she despaired of ever living up to his most urgent request: that she share her innermost feelings with him.“Just don’t filter,” he said one night, lying in bed with her.“It’s like the blue screen of death,” she said, describing her difficulty conveying her emotion with a widely used term for a Windows computer crash. There are no words there.”“You’re not a robot,” he insisted, intending to comfort her. I know you can do this.
You’re a human being.”But not, she thought, the kind he wanted her to be. In contrast to her boyfriend’s emotional probing, Jack’s enthusiasm for facts — like how far his green laser pointer could reach across the University of Massachusetts campus in Amherst — came as a relief. So, too, did his apparent lack of concern for fitting in. A supporter of President Obama, she found herself admiring Jack’s anti- Obama bumper sticker, which almost invariably elicited angry honks in left- leaning Amherst but once got him out of a ticket.
If Jack had trouble reading Kirsten’s expressions and body language, he also noticed that she had what he considered a perfect smile. FR-EE Community Full Movie. On his laptop, he showed her bootleg episodes of his favorite TV show, “Breaking Bad,” about a chemistry teacher turned methamphetamine producer.
Times Video - NYTimes. Watch Smile Pretty Online Smile Pretty Full Movie Online here. World. After Defeats, ISIS Now Sells Nostalgia vs.