The Truth (part 2)

Jealously is such a hideous thing, I was thinking about past relationships and one in particular where everything was tinged by jealousy. As I have mentioned in the past, like many autistic people I can’t or won’t lie. If as an autistic person, you are confronted by a jealous partner it is deeply frustrating to cope with; Firstly, you are being accused of cheating, which for someone who takes everything at face value and says what they mean is against our nature to go through all the lying and scheming involved in being unfaithful. Secondly, if we say that we have deep feelings about someone, it’s because we do, end of story, if we have found someone else or fallen out of love with someone, we would tell them.

I am not suggesting we are all perfect people and it’s a sad fact that autistic people are over represented in the custodial system and an awful lot of us only get diagnosed once we have been convicted of a crime. I was reading recently that autistic people remain in prison longer than their fellow inmates because they don’t make out that they are sorry for things they have done, because they aren’t. So whilst allistic captives turn up to their parol hearing full of fake remorse, autistic people come over as unrepentant and stay inside longer.

Unfortunately, there is no better way to lose a partner or make them fall out of love with you than to erode their being by constantly accusing them of being in love with or having rude thoughts about other people and, if you have to keep explaining why this isn’t true over and over again, this can poison even the most solid of relationships.

Autistic people aren’t blameless in this situation though and it really doesn’t help that many heterosexual neurodiverse people have a disproportionately large amount of friends of the opposite sex. Apparently, it’s a subconscious choice because we seem odd to those of our own gender which makes us less appealing as chums. This can cause problems when we start dating as a jealous person has plenty of opportunities to choose from when it comes to cheating accusations , the irony being that if that was going to happen, it would have already and we would not be with the person who is now getting jealous… Confused? Yes? Well, that is just how we feel when we are getting accused of shagging our mates for the umpteenth time.

There is the other elephant in the room though and it’s this… If someone is accusing you of being unfaithful it could be because it is something that they have done in the past and are perfectly capable of doing again. That level of treachery to a loved one seems likely because they would, and did, do it themselves. Sadly, in my case, it turned out that this is exactly what they were doing. All those nasty things that they were assuming of me were down to what they could and inevitably did do, given the opportunity. With that knowledge and the knowledge of all the other nasty things they have done since we parted, I find it hard to understand how they look themselves in the eye each day but then, being autistic, a lot of what allistic people do and how is totally beyond me.