Today I watched Autism in Love, an interesting documentary about autism and love. It follows a few people with various degrees of autism: a couple that gets engaged during the course of the documentary, a man who is married but loses his wife to brain cancer by the end of the film, and a young man looking for love.
It is an interesting look at love because with autism there are challenges in expressing oneself as well as comprehending how others are communicating to you. Their cues for and signs of love are hardly verbal so people with autism sometimes have to rely on other aspects.
Pictured here the man who eventually proposes to his girlfriend, explaining his formula for love. L + P + 2T is Looks + Personality + 2 x how he or she treats you. He continues to explain that how someone might be ugly but scores high overall because he or she is a nice person. You want all of the people filmed to have meaningful relationships but you see the frustrations. In one moment the girlfriend of this man is explaining very soulfully how necklaces are a shield for her and instead of engaging further into the conversation, he reminds her that the weather is on and would like to watch it.
The man who loses his wife is the least communicative. He visited his wife regularly during her hospital stay but never really had a full conversation with her and later explains very practically that he cannot love her after she is gone because she is not there. It is painful to watch but at least you know he lived and loved.
The young man is the one you are most concerned about, and hope he will find someone to share a life with. In one part he explains about how he does not see women anywhere, and he says (to show how dire the situation is)...
It's like I feel like if someone came up to me and said "Would you want to go to a woman's prison for a week?" I'd probably say yes. "Would you go to a woman's jail for a week and be the only man there?" I'd probably say yes.