A dating boot camp to help those with autism look for love

Straits Times

19 hours ago

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Psychologist Elizabeth Laugeson developed programmes to help adults with autism with jobs searches and friends.
NEW YORK – Thirty-six hours after dropping his date off at her apartment, Mr Bradley Goldman was on a video call with his dating coach, breaking down the events of the evening.
For one thing, he told the coach, he had chosen the wrong venue for someone on the autism spectrum – a bar of the Sunset Strip hipster variety, so loud and overstimulating that he could almost feel himself beginning to dissociate.
Mr Goldman, a tall, rangy 42-year-old who works as an office manager, had not decided in advance of the date whether to mention that he had been diagnosed with autism or that he was working with a coach. So he deflected, and they found themselves, briefly, in a conversational blind alley.
'I struggle with how to disclose,' he said. 'Do I say I am 'neuro-spicy'? Or 'neurodiverse'? Or do I disclose at all?'
His coach, Ms Disa Jean-Pierre, was sympathetic. 'You could just wait for it to come up naturally after a few dates,' she suggested.
Mr Goldman thought this over. 'I'm still figuring this out,' he said.
Mr Bradley Goldman, who has autism, with his dating coach, Ms Disa Jean-Pierre, in Los Angeles on June 7.
PHOTO: ALEX WELSH/NYTIMES
Nevertheless, it was a solidly enjoyable date, something he credited to the coaching he had received from a team of psychologists at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
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He had avoided 'info dumping' or making too many jokes about American serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, and he had carefully observed his date's body language to detect whether she was signalling openness to a good-night kiss. (She was.)
Mr Goldman's results would be entered alongside those of 56 other human subjects on a spreadsheet marked 'dating history updates', part of a three-pronged randomised control trial.
Over the coming months, researchers at UCLA will mine the data to identify which approach is most likely to help people with autism find love.
For mental health professionals to ask this question is new.
Twenty years ago, when UCLA psychologist Elizabeth A. Laugeson began developing the Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills, or Peers, to teach social skills to people with autism, 'nobody really wanted to touch' the subject of romance or dating, she said.
'This was the study that I could not get funding for,' Dr Laugeson said. 'Everyone was a little bit afraid of it.'
In the interim, the population with the diagnosis has swelled, including more people who live independently, work and attend college. It is increasingly common for people to receive the diagnosis in adulthood as they seek help for challenges they face in daily life.
Reality dating show a surprise hit
And attitudes have changed. Some of that has to do with Love On The Spectrum (2022 to present), an American reality television show that follows adults with autism as they venture into the dating world. The show has turned out to be a surprise hit for Netflix.
Increasingly, Dr Laugeson said, people understand that adults with autism may want romance and intimacy.
The show 'is kind of flipping the script on that and allowing them to speak for themselves', she said. 'The struggles that autistic people are having in finding love are no different from those of a typically developing person.'
On a recent Thursday evening, the dating students arrived at the Semel Institute. Many were settled in school or work. But they described dating as an area of particular struggle.
Much of the coursework focuses on building comfort in conversation – or, as the coaches call it, trading information. A central skill is not panicking if there are extended silences.
Twenty years ago, research on the social relationships of people with autism painted a bleak picture.
In 2004, a survey of teenagers and adults living at home found that 46 per cent had no peer relationships at all outside of prearranged settings. And a 2012 meta-analysis found that only 14 per cent of adults with autism were married or had a long-term intimate relationship.
But those trends are shifting, in part because a larger range of people are receiving the diagnosis. In 2023, when researchers at Boston University examined data from 220,000 US college students, they found that 24 per cent of students with autism had partners, compared with 46 per cent of non-autistic students.
Dr Laugeson knew from her work with teenagers with autism that they were interested in relationships, but their efforts to express romantic feelings were frequently misinterpreted as stalking behaviour.
Parents, she said, frequently told her the same story: Their teenager had developed a crush on a barista at Starbucks and parked himself or herself there, offering 'way too much eye contact' or 'that big, wide, tooth-baring smile', she said.
But when she sought funding for empirical research on dating, Dr Laugeson found that her institutional backers went quiet. Parents seemed nervous about the project, even if their children were adults.
When she explored the reasons, she often heard 'concerns about sexual safety, things like sexual assault', she added.
Equality for neurodiverse people
In 2018, Dr Laugeson got her break. She was approached by Dr Cara Gardenswartz, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles whose teenage son had benefited from Peers trainings and who offered her, for the first time, enough funding to design a full course on dating.
As a movement builds around civil rights and equality for neurodiverse people, some advocates have criticised social skills training for encouraging people with autism to act as if they are not autistic, a practice sometimes described as masking.
'The social skills classes tell you what to do, but that's like putting on a costume,' said Ms Karen Lean, 48, an information technology specialist who was diagnosed with autism in her 30s.
For years, she studied and imitated these behaviours, and the effort, she said, left her exhausted and alienated.
Now, Ms Lean works as an instructor for Hearts, or Healthy Relationships on the Autism Spectrum. It is an online course that includes modules on issues like boundaries and break-ups, but steers clear of social skills, which, she said, function mostly to put other people at ease.
'No amount of training or drilling those skills like eye contact is going to solve the problem of feeling anxious, sensorily overwhelmed and uncomfortable in your own body,' she said. 'There is a bunch of things that can't be solved by trying to inject into a person a list of things to do to make other people comfortable.'
The Peers staff members, acutely aware of the discourse around masking, begin every lesson with a 'neuro-affirming pledge' underlining the value of authenticity and emphasising individual choice. They take care to avoid characterising behaviours as good or bad, instead using language such as 'socially helpful' and 'socially risky'.
The participants were not particularly worried about masking. Coaches said some participants had arrived with such deep scars from social rejection that a small boost of confidence was life-changing.
Ms Samara Wolpe, a postdoctoral fellow at the Peers lab, recalled a participant – still in his early 20s – who approached her to ask, as she put it: 'Am I already too far gone to be learning this? Am I already too far removed from society? Can I get back in there? Is it too late for me?'
She reassured him it was not. He was sceptical. He lived with his parents. His clothes were dishevelled, he said. His hair was shaggy. 'Those are things that are fixable,' Ms Wolpe told him.
The following Thursday, he showed up with a fresh haircut, and news: He had matched with a woman on an app. And he had asked her out.
'He needed someone to tell him that this was possible for him,' Ms Wolpe said.
Between half and three-quarters of the subjects have gone on dates during the training course. They will all undergo a battery of psychological tests – among them the Test of Dating Skills, the Dating Anxiety Scale and the Social and Emotional Loneliness Scale for Adults – at three points in time to measure how, if at all, the experience has changed them. The results will be published in 2026. NYTIMES