Wellp. I wasn't sure this day would ever come, but here we are, and it's thanks to one of my pastors at church. He asked me my opinion of the show in a "I want to learn more" kind of way, so I looked into, well, this. I'm reviewing a TV show called "Love on the Spectrum." It's an exploration of dating and love, featuring an entire cast of autistic people from the UK.
Full disclosure? I don't really enjoy this kind of show. I feel like this sort of thing isn't really television material, and putting a camera on it is bound to make it even more awkward and painful than it already was.
I am pretty sure my feelings on that latter statement are 100% accurate in terms of what happened here. Keep in mind that most people on the autism spectrum have at least some kind of anxiety problems. Usually a full-on diagnosable anxiety disorder. Now put a camera on them. Now, guess how well they're going to function?
To be fair, the worse they are at communicating, the better the spectacle, at least to a point. In terms of understanding the real autistic humans, though, this isn't really a good way to do it. Maybe it's the only way some people can get inside our heads? But it makes me shake mine, frankly.
All of this, by the way, is before we even get into the pitfalls of "dating" and the absolute poisonous garbage we're fed about there being "one true soulmate" we have to find in the nearly 8 billion humans on Earth.
When the participants in this show were asked, their definitions of an ideal partner ranged from, "I would like the moon and the stars on a silver platter with platinum cutlery, please," to "I would like someone that cares about me for me, rather than uses me for whatever they can get out of me." Very rarely was there a happy medium there. Often the criteria were superficial (appearances), with no apparent understanding of what makes a long-lasting relationship work. While they seem to have avoided participants that just scream, "I'm so lonely and what I need to fix myself is a partner!" at the camera, I still got that sense from many of the participants.
This isn't terribly surprising, to be honest. Pop culture has no idea what makes a relationship work in the long term, because it isn't concerned with that. It's concerned with having the most stunning, heated, passionate romance phase, and the rest of it be damned.
The thing is, that's not what any of these autistic people were looking for. No one going into this (to my memory) said, "yeah, I'd just like to have some fun with new people and see where stuff goes." Autistic people, being more isolated than most, tend to fall prey to the mentality that we'll somehow be normal if we just find a partner. So there's a fundamental mismatch there between the theme of these dating shows and what autistic people actually want.
Relatedly, the participants kept going on about a wanting to find a "spark" with the people they want to date. I'm honestly not sure what this means, but it's potentially a load of rubbish, to borrow a British phrase. Sometimes you find that spark later, after you've become friends with a person for a long while. I never personally experienced love at first sight, and I'm more than a little dubious that it exists, but even assuming it does, it's not an indicator that you'll be able to make a relationship last.
My general experience with dating was typically not "I'm going out clubbing to find someone to date!" It was more, "I'd like more friends please, and... huh, we seem to be getting on quite well. This one is maybe dating material, actually." Which I think is maybe an approach that serves autistic people better overall. If you can be good friends with someone, the chances that your relationship will survive years are significantly better than, "oh, that one looks pretty and we have something in common, let's try!"
Why yes, I am rather opinionated and withering about pop culture and dating, why do you ask?
I've been married to my spouse for nearly 4 years now (we dated for an additional 4 years prior to getting married), and at this point most of our relationship has not been the stuff the books and movies and songs all love to talk about. It's been hard work and compromises and piles of communication and working things out. We have a lot of things in common, and that helps a lot, but what's kept us together isn't that. It's that we're both willing to listen to each other, value the other, and are willing to expend the significant amount of effort it takes to communicate our wants, needs, and feelings.
Maybe that's well beyond the scope of the show, since it is a dating show. But the name is "Love on the Spectrum," not "Dating and Maybe Marriage Proposals on the Spectrum."
Anyway... I did not enjoy this show. I have enough of a sense for body language and awkwardness to be made incredibly uncomfortable by the body language of basically everyone the camera was pointed at. It was like watching awkward teenagers, only instead of a scene or two in an otherwise enjoyable movie, it was the whole thing. I actually couldn't suffer my way through even a single episode without having some kind of distraction going so I didn't focus as much on the excruciating awkwardness.
I actually had this same problem when watching Atypical, another show featuring an autistic person. Though I didn't have the problem when watching Temple Grandin, the HBO movie about the famous autism self-advocate and PhD of Animal Sciences. Is it because this show and Atypical both play up the awkwardness for the sake of spectacle? I'm not sure.
Are the autistic people in the show genuine? Yeah, probably. I'd say you're getting higher anxiety versions of each of the people presented, and there's probably some "I must perform for the camera, rather than be myself," because almost all humans do that when a camera is pointed at them. Typically you need special training to not act like an idiot when a camera is pointed at you. However, autistic people tend to be pretty genuine overall.
My favorite moment in the series was in the 4th episode when Olivia was asked what it's like to be a girl on the spectrum. She replied: "Extremely difficult, given that there's no girl criteria, it's only boy. So you get assessed on how male you are."
This is especially true in the UK, where the "hyper male brain" theory of autism is predominant. Even in the US, though, the criteria and understanding of autism is based on our historical understanding... which is to say, mostly male children. Autistic girls need not apply, even though we have difficulties and strengths too. It is, frankly, quite irritating. Longtime readers will probably recognize why:
I am not male. I am not particularly female either. I am me, which is not "a boy brain shoved into a girl's body." My gender is "bugger off with those teensy little gender boxes you want to put me in, thanks." This isn't an uncommon state of mind for autistic people, which brings me to my next point.
Mostly, this show focused on cisgender interactions: straight male-presenting people attempting to date straight female-presenting people. When it comes to autistic people, we tend to have more complex gender identities, and are often bisexual or pansexual. So merely showing "apparently a guy" dating "apparently a girl" is a very specific choice on the part of the producers. And not one that's very realistic these days. Honorable mention goes to the single bisexual girl that went on dates with a boy, and then later a girl. Still, that's the rule, not the exception the way they portray it.
Also, I know this show is set in the UK, and people are predominantly white there, but autism absolutely affects people of all skin tones. There was one autistic guy of Chinese descent in the show, and that was about it. No people with heritages from India, the Middle East, or Africa. This show was not a good representation of the spectrum in that regard. That failing is pretty typical in modern media, but it still bears pointing out because hey guys, people of color exist and are relevant to these discussions! Please stop ignoring them because it's easier to put white cis guys in front of the camera.
Lastly, the show focuses exclusively on dating between autistic people. There are no neurotypical people dating autistics at all. This is not how the real world works. In reality there are many more neurotypical people than autistic people, and while we may find partners among our own, statistically it's likely that we will also date non-autistic people as well. So it seems a bit separatist to me to just show autistic people dating autistic people.
I did appreciate that they brought in various kinds of supports for the autistic people, including some kind of dating counselor, speed dating options, activities, and workshops. The advice given seemed remarkably simplistic (find common interests, conversations should be 50-50, expand on things brought up in conversation), but I guess you have to start somewhere. They also wouldn't show the bulk of these workshops, simply because of time constraints. So I fondly hope the advice was more thorough than just these things, but even having that amount of help is better than, "we're going to set up dates for you and point a camera at them, have fun!"
Watch This Show If
You like dating shows and don't mind incredibly awkwardness. This is pretty much a dating show, they just threw autism in there because it's novel and coming into the public consciousness. This show isn't a good way to understand what it's like to live with autism, but at least the people in the show are probably fairly close to how they're shown. Autistic people tend to be exceptionally genuine, but you only see so much of them in the context of dating. Especially this kind of superficial dating. I disapprove of the type of show, its definition of love, and its handling of the subjects involved.
This kind of show does not portray anything like how my dating went, as an autistic person. Nor does it portray anything beyond the popular culture "romance" phase of relationships. Additionally, the show pretty much only covers white autistic people, almost entirely cisgender, and almost entirely heterosexual dating. This is not representative of the autism spectrum. Not even in the UK.
Basically, this is a faintly autism-flavored dating show. Emphasis on the dating show. It's overall positive about the participants and only slightly condescending, but as introductions to autism go, there are about a million better places to start.
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