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A few years ago I had the pleasure of going on about a dozen dates with an autistic woman who will not be named herein. I had chased her on and off for three years up to that point, and was quite excited that she’d begun to reciprocate. Being autistic myself I thought we would be effortlessly compatible. Instead it was like seeing myself from the outside, something I cannot do unaided, for the first time in my life.
At once, many mysteries of my interpersonal life were solved. Before, I understood I had some qualities people commonly find mildly unpleasant (Outward coldness, insensitivity, difficulty giving comfort). Little stuff that’s not enough of a problem in itself to comment on, until the constant low level irritation builds to a breaking point. Which, from my perspective, seems to come out of nowhere.
What I didn’t understand until then is what it’s subjectively like to be on the receiving end of those behaviors, or why anybody sticks around in my life in spite of that. At last, it made sense. This lovely young woman was, and is, a bright shining star, unlike any other in the night sky. Creatively brilliant in a way she could only be, because she is a deeply insular autist. Any outside influence on her ideas would only make them less unique.
The inside of her mind, insofar as she let me glimpse it, was intoxicating. A new, different, refreshing, yet deeply proprietary mini-universe. As if she’s inwardly a nation unto herself, with its own language, currency and history. A walking, living, breathing ‘bottle world’, or wainscot society, which she is both the creator and queen of.
Though I’m told I share this quality, I quickly came to understand why that fascination is not enough to keep women in my life in a romantic capacity. Not that I left the young lady in question of my own accord. She’s on to bigger and better things now, making no bones about the fact that while she liked many things I could offer her, romantic commitment was off the table. I was thus spared the conundrum this article is about because there was never any danger she would catch feels and be changed by my departure.
She is now just the same as she was before we met. Evergreen, always new, yet paradoxically unchanging in that aspect. Steadfast in being exactly herself, unquestionably, incomparably and unshakably. But I was not so lucky as her, in past relationships. It has been the work of many years to understand why the same pattern seemed to replay over and over, as usually my exes would not clearly explain why they were leaving.
It’s quite like the dynamic between Enid and Seymour from the film “Ghost World”. First, she becomes enamored. “What a fascinating, beautifully strange person I’ve discovered!” She notices some disagreeable idiosyncrasies, but ignores them. Still in the honeymoon phase, believing they’re not a show stopping problem. Then over time, something changes. She grows disillusioned, and increasingly distant. Then comes the talk about seeing other people. I promise to change, to which she says she doesn’t want me to. A very confusing response, until recently!
The seeming inevitability of this cycle is so frustrating because of how hard it was, as an autistic man, to overcome my social deficits. Painstakingly building myself into someone who satisfies all the criteria needed to even make it to the point of having a romantic relationship. Fool that I was, I thought that was the finish line, when instead it’s where the really hard work begins.
I apparently had what it took to attract some of the women I was after, and indeed though I am plain I have dated some inexplicable stunners. I wondered for some years if I was hypnotizing them, not understanding what I was doing to bring them in, or why it worked.
But I could also tell I needed something else to make them stay, which I didn’t possess or understand. What I kept coming back to was their insistence that I not change. That they wanted me to stay myself, just…not with them anymore. Not that they want for me to be alone, exactly. Rather, happy with someone else who is not them, that they might hand off the hot potato and be done with their turn.
I imagine it’s something like dating Willy Wonka, hence the title of this piece. He’s just this deeply fascinating, weird, quixotic little man. He lives in his own micro-world entirely of his design. You cherish the rare opportunity, like Charlie and the other visitors, to step into his world.
At first, it’s magical. A privileged feeling, to be let into someplace so insular and secret. Everything is so different from anything you knew before. It’s refreshing. There’s an intoxicating invigoration, and with it, the illusion that you’ll never tire of this bizarre micro world, or its eccentric creator.
Fast forward a year. You’re living full time in the factory. It’s fully demystified, you’ve seen every room top to bottom. You drank from the chocolate river even though the fat German kid drowned in it. You tasted all the fruits on the wallpaper. You turned into a blueberry, and back. You tasted every mushroom, flower, fern, boulder and so on in the indoor park where everything is made of candy.
It’s all still made of candy a year later, and will be the next year. You’re quite tired of candy by now, but you put on a show for Willy, who never tires of it. He’s always delighted when he finds you in that room. “Everything is candy!” he remarks with sincere wonder every time, as if it ever wasn’t. “Hehe, yep. It’s aaaalllll candy.” you tepidly reply.
He doesn’t want to discuss anything not candy related. He does that performative doddering old man routine followed by the spritely, acrobatic somersault every time you or anybody else meets with him. It was never an act, per se. He genuinely can’t not be that way.
Besides this, with the honeymoon phase over, many of the red flags you ignored at the start become harder and harder to ignore. He let a kid drown in chocolate to make a point about greed. Oompa Loompas are live-in slaves with Stockholm syndrome and he doesn’t see anything wrong with that arrangement.
He possesses a flying elevator capable of rapid free travel anywhere on Earth, and he uses it to impress a kid and his grandpa rather than saving lives. Like how Doc Brown invented a time machine, and proceeded to use it to ensure his buddy’s life turns out well, rather than preventing the holocaust.
This world has many men like that in it. Often with small armies of dazzled followers ready to make excuses for their deficit of humanity, because they’re brilliant. If they don’t wish to reflect, to critically self examine, nothing in their life forces them to. More voices in their ear tell them they’re always right, to ignore the haters, etc. than tell them the opposite. It’s easy as pie to believe the voices telling you what you prefer are the correct, truthful ones.
I suppose I should be thankful I don’t have that luxury. When I fail, there is no safety net made of sycophants to cushion my fall. It hurts every time. Pain is nothing but a lesson, yet it also changes you in ways you don’t control and maybe don’t want. That change is what my exes were afraid of and why they wouldn’t tell me what they didn’t like about me.
Because who I am is as much the qualities they dislike as the ones they liked. To allow me to change myself into who I would need to be for them to stay, would be to destroy the beautifully strange little man who once captivated them so. Likewise with our poor heartsick hypothetical lover, Willy Wonka. He is the subatomic particle one cannot learn the attributes of, without also changing those attributes by the act of measurement.
Willy and you want very different things by this point. Above all, Willy wants to make things work. He’s willing and eager to change, to fix whatever you dislike. But if you tell him what to fix, he’ll stop being Willy Wonka. Humanity would then lose one of the rare and many splendored gems from its crown.
You need to live outside the factory though. Need, not want. You need to have a life that does not revolve around candy. You need to date someone who doesn’t react to a drowning by having his slaves sing a rhyming song about how it was his own fault.
But more than anything else, you need to ensure that the pain of losing you doesn’t destroy his whimsy, that others who come after you may still enjoy it. After all, there still needs to be a Willy Wonka in the world after you’ve gone.