Relationships with women and tales of regret

When I was growing up, my relationships with women were unusual. This article covers a time line that stretches from my early teenage school days, right through to my mid twenties, and as such, covers situations that happened at school, university and in my early work life. This article is deeply personal, and contains mild sexual references – if this isn’t your thing, then you may want to skip this one.

Throughout this time in my life I was ignored by a great many of my female peers – almost as though I was invisible (something, incidentally, which Rachel writes wonderfully about here). In a sense, that didn’t bother me. I felt no great desire to interact with these young women – whilst many of my male class-mates and work colleagues found them to be hugely attractive, I didn’t.

Those that did interact with me – well that was a completely different story, and one that perplexed me until very recently. Maybe once or twice a year on average, someone who I was either at school or work with would discover me. They would always make the first move, and start talking to me. Whilst I find group conversation difficult, I have always enjoyed talking one to one with others. I can manage this sort of conversation quite well, and it allows me to feel a connection with others. Over the years I often found myself doing quite a lot of it with young women.

And at this point, expectations and desires started to go in different directions. For their part, the young women found a bright young man that they could get on with. Someone that they found strangely easy to talk to. Someone they could confide in and be themselves with.

Whilst I may have found this too, I invariably found something else. I started to see beauty. Not beauty in the sense that people typically use the term. Some of these women were, of course, conventionally visually beautiful, but the beauty I was seeing was in how they functioned and thought – all of what they were was beautiful. The more I spoke to them, the more beautiful they appeared to be to me, and the more I fell in love with them.

Ah. A hopeless story on many levels. They found an unusual thing – a male friend who they could treat like a female friend. Some of them revelled in this for a while. I found unrequited love, and that ultimately lead to the end of most of these friendships.

You see, whilst I may be unconventional in the way I interact with people due to my lack of social intuition and sometimes even basic social skills, I’m still often engaging to talk to one to one. But whilst I’m clearly a gentle guy that doesn’t use body language that suggests that I’m trying to hit on you, I still feel those typical male urges. Perhaps my definition of attractiveness in a woman is different to my peers, but it is still very much there.

These friendships caused me a great deal of pain over the years. They are nothing, however, to the despair caused by missed opportunities.

There were only a small handful of these, and for the most part, they happened in my early work years, whilst I was single, and living in London. A woman I worked with would take the usual route of striking up a conversation with me, and would find, to her surprise, someone who she really like to talk to. No surprise here for me, of course, it was what I was used to. And then after a month or two, typically after a social evening at a pub, or at a party at someone’s house, it would happen. She’d make a pass at me. I’d miss it. Seriously. My uncertainty and lack of confidence meant that I acted too aloof when suggestions were made that could have lead to intimacy. Nothing intimate ever happened.

Like the time after a house party full of work colleagues, where many of us had decided to hang around until morning. A female friend of mine was in one of the beds, and had recently stripped off, complaining of being too hot. I was at the other end of the room, laying on the chaise longue. We’d been chatting with the female host, but she’d made some excuse to go and chat with someone else, so we were now alone. We were both quite drunk and stoned. My female friend took off her glasses, yawned, stretched and then smiled at me. She made a few little snuggly wriggles under the duvet, and then suggested that instead of shouting across the room, I should come over to the bed to talk with her. She even patted the bit of bed next to her. I didn’t. I stayed where I was – I could hear her just fine. We chatted some more, and eventually, our host rejoined us, and ultimately sleep overtook all of us. I slept on the chaise longue, and they shared the bed.

It wasn’t until the next day, having caught an early tube home, and after I’d caught up on some sleep, and shaken off the hangover, that I started to think over the events of the night before, and what was actually going on. The removal of clothes, the excuses made by our host to leave us alone. She even shut the bedroom door on her way out. The subtle but clear suggestions from my friend. At the time, I missed it all. Did I find my friend attractive? Of course. Could I have shared intimacy with her? Absolutely. If she’d said, “come over here and kiss me,” would I have reacted differently? I suspect so.

To this day, that night frequently haunts me and fills me with deep regret. Right now talking about it is nearly bringing tears to me eyes. How could I have missed what was so obvious?

And then there was the time that a group of us had a night out and agreed to all go back to someone’s flat and go our separate ways in the morning. A female friend from work who had been chatty with me for a few months was there. She confided early on in the evening that there was someone else there who fancied her, and that she couldn’t stand. Could I help her out? There weren’t enough beds for everyone, and the chap she didn’t like had suggested that they share a bed a the end of the night – purely in a platonic way. She wanted to avoid this, she said, and asked if I might share the bed with her. Platonic once more, course – I was such a good friend that she knew she could trust me.

I agreed. She almost immediately made the sleeping arrangements public, and everyone then agreed amongst themselves how the other beds would be shared out so that everyone got a mattress and no-one got the floor. How wonderfully democratic, I thought.

The night passed, and we all ended up back at the flat, drunk and happy. People started to drift off to bed, and my friend went a good half an hour before I did. When she decided to go, she made a point of saying it multiple times, like we’d not heard her the first time. When I decided that it was time for sleep, I crept into the darkened room, and saw her silhouette as she lay facing away from me in what turned out to be a single bed. Oh – I wasn’t expecting that – I’d never asked what size the bed was. I quietly called her to see if she was a awake. She wasn’t. So, taking off my jacket, but keeping the rest of my clothes on, I squeezed under the duvet next to her. It immediately became apparent that she was naked from the waist down, with just a T-shirt on her top half. I lay on my back, not daring to move. Had she forgotten that she said we’d share the bed? Should I go elsewhere? I was drunk. I lay there for what seemed like an eternity, and then eventually fell asleep.

In the morning, I woke, and nursed my hangover. It was a work day, so I needed to get up, and out to work – in the same work clothes (yup, full suit) that I’d been wearing the day before, and that I’d just slept in. I pulled the duvet back, and then went to sit on the edge of the bed. Once more I was reminded that my friend was naked from the waist down, so I gently covered her back up. She stirred, then turned and smiled an uneasy and slightly perplexed hungover smile at me. For days afterwards, my friend kept mentioning what a nice night it had been.

Years of rumination have left me concluding me that this situation was far less clear cut than the other I mentioned, but I do still think that on balance my friend had intended for us to get intimate at bed time. I’d failed to spot her signals, and she had fallen asleep by the time I got to bed. Another beautiful woman, another completely missed set of signals. Another lifetime of haunting regret.

–

If you aren’t autistic, then you’ll probably think that I’m crazy sharing the above with you. It’s very personal stuff, and not the sort of thing that people talk about. Even I know that. If you have an ASD, then I wonder if you also feel I’m crazy, or if you actually understand. I’d be grateful to hear from you.

You see, this is an area of my life that has been greatly influenced by my Asperger’s and how it affects my ability to interact with other people. The stories I relate have swirled around in my head for many years now causing repeated hurt, and I’ve never told anyone about them. I don’t want them to haunt me for the rest of my life, and I’m hoping that by explaining them, I’ll help to exorcise their ghosts from my memory.

Perhaps the saddest thing of all is that  another aspect of my neurological makeup means that I can’t remember the name of the young woman in the first tale. We worked together for at least eighteen months, and were close for several months, albeit without any intimacy. Whatever your name was, beautiful woman, I’m sorry.

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