When I was younger, I used to worry that I didn’t do romantic love correctly, because it only made sense to me when it was half fictional.
I feel like this is common for autistic people, actually – the idea that our special interests and our deepest desires for other people occupy some of the same brain circuits. Finding a new special interest feels a little like falling in love to me, and falling in love feels like finding a new special interest. But fiction isn’t a special interest, in itself – it’s more like an overarching framework through which all my special interests emerge.
(Read the full post on Substack)