Back around maybe 2019, I posted a thread here about missing flirting after getting married and transitioning from a male-dominated career to a female-dominated graduate program. A lot of the advice centered on finding ways to flirt with my husband and I struggled to explain why that felt wrong. I got offended/defensive and the thread got pretty heated. It was honestly the main reason I stopped spending time here.

Anyways, I recently found out I’m Autistic. So the rigid thinking about the definition of flirting and interpreting any comment about my relationship as a criticism, taking everything personally, not being able to explain myself… All makes sense.

And turns out, I didn’t miss flirting. I missed masking with ease. Apparently, it’s way easier to mask as the coquettish co-worker than it is to mask while navigating new social dynamics and trying to form genuine connections on top of juggling a demanding academic course load. At the time, a poster was accused of being sexist for suggesting that men and women have different communication styles. I don’t think it’s sexist or misogynistic to acknowledge that men and women are socialized differently and that women can have more subtle and complex social dynamics (that are especially hard to navigate as an Autistic woman).

As for the advice to flirt with my husband? Why would I “flirt” (aka mask) with the one person I felt intimately comfortable with to unmask and be myself? A lot of the advice was literally to role-play with him–put on a mask over your masking! But I didn’t have the words for that.

While I admit that I didn’t react well, I still think it was pretty unhinged that the admin/mod used my IP address to make a hyper-local snarky comment about visiting our neighborhood bar to get hit on, and Wendy popped in sharing my website donation history to imply that I was a Trump supporter.

I don’t think I realized how much that stupid, inconsequential online thread really impacted me. But, looking back, I think it’s really representative of my experience as an undiagnosed Autistic woman. So I come back here to share maybe as a way of processing and acknowledging that the way I felt in that thread is sort of how I spent a large chunk of my life feeling in real life. And now I have some insight into why. But it doesn’t erase the hurt.