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Expanding the Scope of the Double Empathy Problem
It currently feels a bit one-dimensional.
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The Double Empathy Problem has been a hot topic in the hellish dumpster fire of autism and neurodiversity discourse for quite some time now. Broadly, it makes a hell of a lot of sense and I’ve experienced this to a degree for myself. There have been a few of my fellow autistics where there has immediately been an inexplicably strong and encompassing interpersonal chemistry that erupted like fireworks on the 4th of July. There was even one instance where this connection with another person was so powerful in fact, that I mistook it for a potential case of romantic and sexual attraction (I’m aro-ace) and ended up dating said person for about six months, ending up confused as to why the physical part of our relationship never panned out.
I have also dealt with plenty of interactions with allistics where both parties ultimately came away feeling as if two separate conversations in different languages might as well have taken place. However, I have also started to get a hunch that some key ingredients might be missing from how the problem is typically described, possibly turning off some people to the idea who might be on the fence, which is also foreshadowed by the…
