I don’t think anyone is saying autistic people are rubbish partners. I think some of us have partners whose cognitive & executive function difficulties are severe, in a way that is very hard for people to understand if this is not an issue for them personally. Plenty of autistic people (such as Busty’’s partner) are fine with executive functioning, and the differences that can complicate relationships are in other areas (rigidity, perspective taking, etc).
There was an autistic poster a few pages back talking eloquently about her difficulty in remembering to get cutlery for her partner as well as herself at mealtimes - and this did not strike me as an example of entitlement or complacency or weaponised incompetence, but a difference in cognitive field of vision somehow, and a difficulty in ‘manually overriding’ an inbuilt system of operating in the world.
It makes sense to me in terms of my own DH, who is time blind and spatially chaotic and can’t adhere to systems or routines or structures or habits that did not originate in his own mind.
No, he really can’t remember to feed our child (particularly if lunchtime falls at a time when he himself is not hungry - because he can’t cognitively accept that anyone could possibly be hungry if he is not). He also genuinely can’t work out how to feed our child if anything has changed, like what our child (who has ARFID) is willing/able to eat, or if we are in a different environment, or the oven is different etc. He cannot operate a microwave he’s not used to without first reading the entire instruction manual and feeling satisfied that the machine has been constructed and laid out in a way that makes sense to him. I have seen him lose his shit to a terrifying extent over a new microwave.
Laundry is just not in his cognitive field of vision, and I don’t think he would notice or care if nobody ever washed his clothes 🤢
I think if you don’t have these sorts of difficulties yourself, or haven’t observed them in a loved one at close hand for a long time, it’s hard to believe the resulting behaviours are not just a massive fuck you in one way or another. And this is the difficulty.
I often feel that the tragedy with my DH is that he intents to be kind, he doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or make them feel bad, but he is not cognitively able to consider others’ wants / needs / interests, or to think about things that aren’t of direct relevance to his immediate goals, or generally to direct interest and attention towards other people, because his mind is completely taken up by his own interests and preoccupations and routines. And this is not something he can change or is in control of. He always feels misunderstood because in his mind he is a good person with good intentions - but he doesn’t have cognitive or emotional bandwidth to participate in friendships or relationships in a way that makes others feel they matter to him at all.
And, frankly, the way other people ‘matter’ to my DH is very different from the way in which people ‘matter’ to me. My sense is that what he mainly wants from a relationship is someone to be physically around, and never disagree with him, and hear him talk about whatever he wants to talk about. Bonus points if you know lots of facts about whatever project he’s immersed in at the moment. None of this makes him a ‘bad person’, but it does make him not much of a partner in the conventional sense - and quite a difficult colleague.