#these responses are all really meaningful
Other people have probably written about this, but the intersections between neurodivergency and being aro/ace have been on my mind a lot since I found out I’m neurodivergent. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how the different types of discrimination I face play into each other.
I’ve been infantilised for pretty much my whole life because of my neurodivergency. The way I tend to act, and the things I tend to struggle with, mean I get treated like a weird excitable kid who doesn’t understand how the world works. The fact that I’m also aromantic and asexual is viewed just another facet of this “immaturity”. So the idea goes: of course Iwouldn’t be interested in romance and sex. How could I even understand such adult topics? I’m just a kid who gets distracted by butterflies and likes to infodump about history. Isn’t my innocence so endearing?
Instead of my orientation being taken seriously, it’s belittled and taken as a confirmation that I’m just childish and strange. This has led, on several occasions, to people assuming it’s just a symptom of my neurodivergency that needs to be medically addressed.** Aromantic and asexual people already face excessive questioning about our orientations and get told the cause must be [insert diagnosis or symptom of diagnosis here]; being neurodivergent makes this exponentially worse, because the underlying assumption is that I can’t have the agency or the self-knowledge to identify this way. After all, I’m just a weird kid, aren’t I? I need other (read: neurotypical and allo) people to explain everything, even my own experiences, to me.
This infantilisation made it particularly hard for me to come to terms with my orientation, because I didn’t want to prove everyone that they were right. For years, I pushed back against the way I’d been treated by seeking out the one thing that would make me an adult in others’ eyes - a romantic and sexual relationship. It hurt to realise I didn’t actually want that deep down. It felt like being told I really was that weird kid, tolerated but ultimately babied. It’s taken a lot of work to accept that the way I am doesn’t make me any less mature and deserving of respect.
There isn’t really a conclusion to this - mostly I wanted to post about my experiences as someone who is both neurodivergent and aroace, and the issues I’ve faced because of it. If any other aro/ace neurodivergent people would like to add to this or share their own perspective, I’d love to hear it.
**A lot of neurodivergent people do consider their experiences of attraction to be linked to their neurodivergency, and that’s obviously cool and valid. That’s not what I’m talking about here. My point is the systematic pathologisation of aromanticism and asexuality and the denial of my ability to define myself.
This is (perhaps unfortunately) a very relateable experience. It’s not something I really accepted personally until recently, but in hindsight, many of my interpersonal conflicts stem from others misreading my neurodivergence. My arospec and acespec experiences are furthermore dismissed because they are assumed to be part of my neurodivergence.
It’s definitely hurtful, especially because (for me) some of my beliefs about relationships maybe influenced by my neurodivergence. Parts of how I experience my identity are probably tied into my neurodivergence. And other parts of it seem entirely separate. I think those are both valid experiences, but both of them are belittled for different reasons.
Thank you for sharing this; I’m glad I came across it and had the spoons to add on. (Hopefully that’s all right - I can always make my own post.)
This is very interesting for me to read, and I’ve had a very different experience with the way people treat my orientation and neurodivergence. I think there are three big reasons why I’m treated so differently. First, I’m AMAB, large, and hairy. Second, while I’m aro, I’m not ace, and I’m partnering and romance-favorable and have had a lot of partners. Third, my neurodivergences manifest a bit differently from either of yours.
I’ve never been called immature or infantilized for my orientation or my neurodivergence. I’ve been called a lot of demeaning (or intentionally demeaning) or dismissing things, but never that. I think it’s worth examining why, because femme AFAB people especially receive a lot of that kind of thing that masculine people don’t. I think stories like this, from marginalized people, reveal depths to the insidiousness and harmfulness of misogyny that may not come up with straight white able neurotypical gender-conforming women.
What I have been called, both because of my orientation and my neurodivergence, is unmasculine, unaggressive, stoic, uninvolved, unemotional, uncaring, unsupportive, detached, and aloof. While those first two are absolutely true and accurate adjectives to apply to me, they were intended to be bad and insulting, but to me they are big compliments. The rest, though, aren’t even remotely true, and anyone who spends any time getting to know me at all knows I’m the opposite of all of those things. But because of my neurodivergence, I don’t express being highly emotional, deeply caring, and intensely involved the ways that neurotypical people do, and this comes up in intimate relationships quite a lot.
Interestingly, I also get complimented a lot because of these same traits. I’m often called wise, “an old soul”, observant, patient, and eloquent because I see things from an outside perspective and take time to think before expressing my thoughts. People ask me for advice about romantic problems frequently and tell me my advice is particularly insightful, even though most of the time it can be boiled down to one of three things: “Have you asked directly for what you want?”, “Have you expressed your feelings directly and clearly?”, and “Have you explicitly discussed that together or are you making an assumption?” Neurotypical alloromantic people get really wrapped up in the social scripts of romance and expression and forget to be direct and clear, and that can give people like us some big advantages in communicating and building relationships, at least if we can convince the neurotypical alloromantic people in our lives to challenge their own assumptions and take what we say about ourselves and our own experiences as true and literal. We can ask them to do that, and if they don’t, that’s their failing, not ours.
combined experience here - I relate strongly to the narrative before me, except - I’m treated as an old, wise soul only until my neurodivergency can be used to ignore my self perception on topics people don’t like. The second that the conversation becomes what I want, which is a topic I struggle to express, my identity as aro (and not ace), and as genderqueer/genderfluid (and goodness knows I’ll never tell these people that I do think being neurodivergent has influence on my each) become “oh how cute. you’re so smart about others but you clearly can’t see your own feelings!”
I’m aware that others often view me as a particularly paradoxical serious and yet highly emotive individual (most translate that to emotional, but whoops I learned to exaggerate expressions at a young age) and I find it interesting that both extremes are applied to me being aro. “Oh look at you, putting school first, taking the logical route just denying yourself happiness” etc. And folks aren’t surprised to find out that i’m neurodivergent - unless they spoke to me in a serious context, despite that being a significant component of how I’m viewed.
(this is all just, stream of consciousness more or less, no particular points)
