BOOK EXCERPT: Attraction and emotions: My autistic experience
I’ve been thinking about how I experience attraction, and I think that I might be recipromantic. I’ve noticed that if I’m romantically attracted to someone who isn’t available for me, my attraction towards them gets reframed to fit the connection that we have. I do this unconsciously, and have just picked up on the fact that I do it. One instance of this is with the barista that I have a crush on. When I found out that she had a partner, my expectations of my interactions with her changed. Even though I like talking to her and seeing her around, I have no expectations of romance in my interactions with her. I feel that I’ve naturally de-escalated my expectations with her, where I can just enjoy the connection we have, and enjoy my crush on her as just that.
Some people find it confusing when I talk about having a crush on someone and not wanting to pursue them, but for me, that’s often how a crush plays out. My crushes often don’t feel explicitly romantic, but rather seem to have dormant or never-realized romantic attraction that’s been channeled into something else.
I had a friend that I had this kind of crush on when we first met. We quickly became really close, but because she was in a monogamous relationship, I never expected anything romantic with her. I was just very happy to have the relationship I had with her.
Her relationship with her partner was untraditional, and they had room for me to be very close to her.
I was once lying in bed with them. She was sitting in front of me. I was looking at her. She looked at me. “Hey,” she said softly. “Do you love me?”
This is an excerpt of an essay in my book, At the Intersection of the Margins.