Concepts are difficult

I have trouble with concepts. Concepts are woolly. You can’t easily define them.

What is a friend? What makes you romantic?

My Asperger’s causes me problems with interaction and the expression of empathy, which is why the above two concepts in particular cause me trouble.

I’ve figured out over the years how to respond to many social interactions, to the point that for most day-to-day conversations I have sufficient camouflage in place for them not to be a problem. These are learned responses – something that if you’ve got AS will seem very normal to you, but if you don’t, will seem odd. Those of use with Asperger’s learn from an early age to mimic other people, and store away canned responses for many scenarios, as a way to camouflage our lack of natural intuition when it comes to interacting with other people. It works in a trigger/response sort of way – the specific situation I’m in acts as a trigger for a given learnt response.

Canned responses are all very well for specific interactions, but they don’t work for things like friendship and romance.

Romance is a particular problem of mine. To be honest, it’s something that my wife complains about a lot, and I struggle to explain why I find it so difficult. Surely I could learn to be romantic?

I find romance difficult because it isn’t a clearly defined thing, and it doesn’t have a trigger that requires an instantaneous response. Thus, my usual coping camouflage simply isn’t appropriate.

What do I think romance is? This is a really difficult question for me to answer. I think it’s about showing someone that you care, by doing something thoughtful. It’s about taking your loved one away from their usual night in to see a film, or for a nice meal. It’s about effort expended by me to make my wife’s life easier.

Are those right?

I can cope with the above sorts of things, but here’s the killer for me – for romance to work well, it has to appear to the other person to be spontaneous, yet well thought through. This is where things tend to go wrong for me.

To get things done in my life, I need a hand-written to-do list. If something isn’t on the list, it doesn’t tend to get done. I use an online calendar to try and schedule future events, and also to act as a reminder for the things I’ll forget – like birthdays, and renewing things like car tax and insurance. The calendar sends SMS messages to my phone, and I then write the task in my list for the day to make sure I get it sorted. This may seem like an overly complex system, but it works for me – the act of writing down helps me to get more things done than simply having a rolling to-do list on a computer.

I could schedule romance into my calendar, but when the reminder SMS arrived, I’d find it difficult to implement. It’s at this point in discussing romance that my wife tends to get frustrated and angry with me. If I can schedule a reminder to buy a birthday card for someone which I then manage to do, why can’t I schedule in time to be romantic and follow that through too?

It’s a really good question, and I wish I had a really good answer. I don’t, but I will try and explain.

If I sent a reminder via SMS to my phone to ‘Be romantic’, I’d instantly hit a problem. Romance is a concept, and as I’ve already said, I find it difficult to make sense of something that is by definition woolly. Buying and posting the birthday card is easy – it is a well defined thing to do.

If I’m going to succeed in being romantic, then I’ll need to do something that both shows that I care, and is sufficiently different from anything I’ve tried recently to show that thought has gone into it.

But what? We went to the cinema recently. Going for a meal is something we do reasonably often as well. Whilst I could fall back on a scenario like these once in a while, they are not very imaginative, are they?

How about a little trinket? That’s potentially a great idea, as choosing something that she liked would not only be romantic, and show that I was thinking about her, but would also show that I knew her taste in things. But what? Anxiety and self-doubt creep in almost immediately. I don’t know what makes a great little gift – that’s a woolly concept too, but I do know that the sorts of things that I’d like wouldn’t be what my wife would like. Rather than buy the wrong thing, I’d rather buy nothing.

Flowers? No. I am aware that flowers are a tricky one. I have never regularly given flowers during the whole seven years of our relationship, so giving them out of the blue is actually likely to give rise to unfounded suspicion rather than anything else. I recently bought her a house plant, however, and that did go down well. Can’t do that one in a hurry again, though.

I’ve even got a little book at home that is supposed to give romantic ideas for gentlemen to try. It doesn’t work, because most of the items in it are either too skewed towards the American market for which it was written, or the ideas seem far too twee. If I’m going to be romantic, it has to be something that would seem right coming from me. But that’s the problem – if I can’t define romance very well, what would seem right coming from me?

Occasionally inspiration does strike, and I’ll buy my wife something small and practical that I’d noticed she would clearly benefit from. But practical and occasionally are the key words here, which means that my gestures are seen more as a kind thinking-of-you sort of thing rather than being romantic.

So what do I do? Typically, regretfully, nothing.

I don’t have the answers for how to make this work better at the current time. Has anyone got any suggestions that I might try?

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