When you realize that you got dumped for being autistic…
6 minute read
December 16, 2024, 8:47 AM
It’s funny what kinds of things cross your mind sometimes. I was preparing some material for my photo site, which is work of a more “mechanical” nature, i.e. it doesn’t require much in the way of thinking. When I’m doing this kind of work, my mind has space to wander. And for some reason, in this instance, my mind went to the relationship that I had with a girl named Sarah Chegash back in 1998. We were both 17, and we both worked at CFW Information Services doing directory assistance. We went to different schools, so we only ever saw each other at work. She started there in the summer of 1998, after I had been working there about a year, and we really hit it off. We chatted a lot, and we would give each other smiles from across the room. It was really cute. We started dating in November of that year, but it only lasted a few weeks before she dumped me, and then she quit her job at CFW not long after our relationship ended.
When we were dating, it was not exactly the easiest thing ever. I suppose that I got too caught up in my own head about it, putting too much emphasis on the idea that it was a “date” and how to behave on account of that, and not about just enjoying the time with this person who had clearly shown an interest in me. “Highly nervous” would be putting it lightly. And she was trying to put the moves on me from time to time, but I was too uptight to actually respond or otherwise participate. I was like, I know that she is doing something that indicates interest, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to respond to this. That said, because I had no idea how to respond, I did not reciprocate. All I knew is that was a very awkward situation, and I felt very uncomfortable, not so much because of what she was doing, but because I was totally clueless on what I was supposed to do and how I was supposed to respond.
Meanwhile, what we did on our first date was so stereotypically me. We went up to the DC area and took the Metro from Vienna to Pentagon City, where we fully explored Pentagon City Mall. My first time transferring between the Orange Line and the Blue Line at Rosslyn was on that date. We had a good time, and I got to hit a few nerd goals, even if the time was a bit awkward overall. But getting on the train and being able to be a little nerdy about it at least made me feel slightly more comfortable.
The relationship ended when she dumped me after we had been dating for the better part of a month. She said to me, “You don’t know how to communicate,” and told me that my social skills were lacking. In hindsight, I really wasn’t ready for a dating relationship at that point in my life, and my uptight and uncomfortable behavior on our dates made that fairly clear. I was nervous, and that was all on my side of the equation, because I didn’t know how to act on a date. I suspect that I was too nervous to actually be much fun. Additionally, I don’t know what her end goal was with all of the touchy-feely stuff, because if she was hoping to get laid with me, that was never going to happen. In hindsight, I think that she might have been trying to go that way, because on our final date, she mentioned to me, “You have no sex drive,” and then, based on that, questioned out loud the possibility of my being gay. I knew that I definitely wasn’t gay (turns out that I’m asexual), but I was also a bit confused by that statement. I had never heard the term “sex drive” before, and didn’t know that I was supposed to have one, i.e. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but based on the context, I suspected that she thought it was a bad thing.
It also gave me pause when, on our first date, she told me all about the time that she chased her brother around the house with a butcher knife, “with every intent to kill him.” That was a bit disturbing, to say the least. I never did find out how that incident ended without the intended murder (the brother was still alive), nor what prompted it, but it made me question whether I wanted to be involved with someone that would even consider that.
She dumped me over the phone, telling me, “You don’t know how to communicate,” and that my social skills were lacking. Okay, then. Apparently, my first foray into the world of dating had just come to an end. I admit that I was hurt by the way that she dumped me. I coped with it the way that I often do, via this website, though the method was a bit different back then, in those days before the Journal. Back then, I would often double-dip the website with school, and get a school assignment out of something for here or vice versa. I always thought that it gave me more reason to create something amazing when the content had a larger audience than just the teacher, or at most, the teacher and room full of kids. This doubled as a freewrite for my AP English class, so rather than simply ranting on about it like I might have otherwise done, I did it in blank verse in order to meet the requirement that the piece relate to what we were doing in class, and doing that linked it up to class material as both poetry and Shakespeare. It was called “Love for All the Wrong Reasons” and I published it on Schumin Web after I presented it in class. I looked at it again recently for purposes of writing this entry, and I was like, OH GOD ANGSTY TEENAGER STUFF as I reread it. Major cringe. Multiply that cringe factor by about ten because it’s my own angsty teenager stuff. (If you want to see it, Internet Archive has it, because as we all know, the Internet does not forget.) Then after I published it on the website, I sent it to Sarah. Let’s just say that if the relationship wasn’t dead and buried by then, it was after that, because there was no walking back from that one. But may the bridges that you burn light the way forward, as they say. Whether that was what prompted her to quit her job, or if she had been planning to leave anyway, I don’t know, but I only saw her there one more time after that, and then she was gone – and just as well.
Then I was sitting upstairs recently at home, with the benefit of 25+ years of hindsight, and for some reason, my mind randomly decided to revisit that relationship. And I realized something: she cited communication issues and inadequate social skills as the reasons for dumping me. Those are both indicators for autism. Then it hit me: she dumped me for my various autistic traits, even though none of us realized it back then. At the time, I was just doing what I could. I knew that I was a little bit different than most, but I didn’t know that it had a name. A lot of things finally came into focus when I was formally diagnosed two years ago, and it’s changed my perspective on a lot of past events. This, apparently, was no different. I had moved on from the relationship a long time ago and hadn’t thought about it for quite some time, so when I realized that I had essentially gotten dumped for being autistic, I laughed about it. And all of a sudden, rather than the very accusative way that she phrased it back in 1998 that made me feel like it was my fault that the relationship failed, I realized now that it was actually a two-way thing, and that she was equally inept at communicating with me, and the reason that we couldn’t communicate well with each other was because I was autistic and she was not. Either way, that was rather rude of her to place all of the blame for it on me, and if she couldn’t accept me for who I am, autistic tendencies and all, then it was just as well that the relationship ended.
My laughing about it is consistent with my typical response to realizations that then-undiagnosed autism was at play in my past and no one recognized it at the time. Autism wasn’t as well understood back then as it is today, and high-functioning cases like mine weren’t typically diagnosed. So I just did the best that I could in the moment, and only recognized such things in hindsight. I don’t place blame or harbor any ill will towards people from my past for not recognizing the autism even when it was clearly showing all of its signs, because of the state of the research back then, i.e. they had no reason to know or suspect it. This is especially the case for a 17-year-old kid pursuing a relationship with another 17-year-old kid. We were practically babies, and absolutely didn’t know any better. And considering that I clearly wasn’t ready for a relationship anyway, I imagine that this was doomed from the start. Funny – I told Elyse about this realization after I had it, and she was like, “Well, yeah. You’re autistic.” After all, Elyse had suspected that I was autistic many years before I was actually diagnosed.
All I know is that while my autism may have contributed to the end of my first dating relationship, I am in a much better place now. If nothing else, that first relationship was a learning experience, and one that I’m glad is over.
Categories: Autism, Schumin Web meta, WMATA, Work