Not Meant For Me

As I go about reflecting on a life without employment or relationships, I find my thoughts on the romantic element are markedly different than they were when I still considered myself to have potential in that realm. This is not to say I haven't given up before, because I have done so many times. That fact causes no small amount of entirely understandable skepticism in the ranks of my family and friends. While I totally get why they don't believe me and suspect that I'll get back on the horse if/when the proper combination of good humor and opportunity arises, I calmly insist that I am well and truly done based both upon my past experiences and the underlying reality of what about relationships and family life always appealed to me. Every time I've given up before, it has been based on some notion of my inability to manage relationships. Although that is present this time too, the deeper issue is who I have come to understand that I am, which is to say a profoundly disabled man.

At 33, I'm quite old enough to where most of my friends, especially most oldest ones, have had kids. I look upon each new life with fondness, because my friends are good people and they are making new good people, a phenomenon that can only result in good things. Of course, I also know people who've had kids where the opposite of all that is true and, with them, I feel badly for said kids and for the world that will have more dysfunctional humans thrust upon it. One has to think about what kind of parent one will make before one becomes one, and the same moral obligation applies to romantic matters. Understanding the extent of my disability, as I have been forced to do, causes me to conclude that I have nothing to offer worth having. Mine is a sad little life full of struggle and maintained only by the blessings of my family. So I, what, bring a woman into a circumstance where I can never be a breadwinner and am constantly battling my own neurology to even come close to functioning in society? There is no romance in that. Tears, frustration, disappointment, stagnation, and incompetence are no kind of foundation for love.

Of my six major relationships, I only bear ill will to two of them, and that is only because they did things to me that I would bear ill will towards anyone if they did them to me. The other four are mired in curiosity about why they ended. None of them said they ended for autism-related reasons, but I suspect it played a role about which I was simply never told. Maybe I alienated friends of hers, maybe I kept at it oblivious to an obvious lack of chemistry, maybe her parents secretly didn't like me, or maybe I moved too fast for her. Whatever their reasons, I am genuinely sorry I came into the life of the women I've dated. They were looking for the same thing I was, I suppose, but neither of us could know, at the time, that I just can't give then what they need. Human nature dictates that we want love and are slow to accept it when we are too disabled for it to be possible. Part of accepting my autism is learning to embrace the loneliness that it will bring me. As I watch my friends and family fall in love, get married, and have kids, I must remember that, however much biology and culture make me want to emulate them, I must not. They are functional adults and I am a profoundly disabled autistic man. Sometimes, we simply shouldn't have what we want.

-Frank