I didn’t have a proper relationship with someone until I was 21 years old and I was already tapping out after 3 months due to how it wasn’t what I expected from relationships.
As someone who struggles with social cues and understanding when someone could ever fathom that I would be a good option to date, I have a very limited record of relationships.
That limited record of relationships also doesn’t help with my understanding that I could be someone people could want to date.
I was undiagnosed with autism until my last year of secondary school, which is a time in life in which I noticed that the people around me would connect and figure out the basics of dating.
I had one “relationship” in secondary school in S1 that I don’t count and had a few people ask me out as a joke – not a very funny joke, in my opinion.
Since I was still undiagnosed with autism, I was confused about what was happening during this time – I developed a low self-esteem and thought I would never get into a relationship ever.
Yet now that I am diagnosed with autism and have been building up my self-esteem bit by bit over the years and actively seeking a relationship in a form that doesn’t freak me out – I still have these moments where I think:
“Really? Me? You’re interested in me?”
Years of thinking I wasn’t normal, wasn’t attractive, boring, too odd, and many more other harsh things I thought about myself – is a hard mindset to shake and to sit back and look at myself as someone that could be desirable.
When I do get into relationships now, I feel this panic that makes me want to leave it behind straight away – I self-destruct the relationship before I even realise I am doing it, sometimes until I sit back and look at it afterwards.
It could be a combination of things, like the mindset I had beforehand in secondary school but it could also be (a reason that I think has a huge hand in how I go about my relationships now) because of my autism making it difficult to connect with people completely – like there is a barrier in-between me and everyone else I try to connect with.
Hopefully, with many more trials, I figure out what is the perfect balance in a relationship for me without leaving it with self-destructing it due to freaking out over it.
This article formed part of BRAW Magazine Issue 5: Mind, Mood, Mentality. You can read more of Issue 5 here.
Featured Image Credit: Alice Pollard
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2nd year - History and Journalism student
