The story of the Jilted Autist

It was not really unexpected, but when it came, it took me by surprise. 

I like information and facts. It's good to be aware of things, they say. But for me it's just a way to live. Whenever I feel lonely or insecure or angry and irritable at nothing in particular, I like to pick up a book (usually nonfiction) or switch on a documentary, suspend all thought, and expose myself to a steady stream of information, which I lovingly soak up and file away in this row of gleaming, off-white cabinets neatly labeled with red marker pens, that I can actually see in my mind. So it doubly hurt when I realized I hadn't stayed abreast of the fact that she was slowly moving away from me.

When she sent me that "Dear John" letter, telling me how she wanted to move on in life, and how she had realized that I wasn't really the right person for her, I was so shocked that I decided to switch off all thought and the only things that registered on my mind as I read along, were the typos and grammatical errors.

The second thing that struck me was the sheer lack of logic in what she had to say. Why does she say she likes me and then go on to say that she finds it hard to be with me? Also she says she has no problems with being friends with me. Then why this long letter? Does it just mean that she will still laugh and joke around with me but not let me kiss her anymore? She says I am not the right person for her. That might be true. I am a good and intelligent man, but I've read different women sometimes like different things, and the list of things can change with time and circumstance. But what if I let her, even helped her, find some sort of man that she can love and go to bed with, why can't she still care for me a little bit, on the side? Should I perhaps suggest this solution in my reply?  Since she knows me so well, and I didn't want to leave her just yet, that should be easier than me having to find another girl that I could get used to.

I read the letter once more to see if I had missed anything. And this time it somehow made me insanely angry.

There was this tone of condescension, of my being devalued and discarded, that I had missed earlier. It was all dressed up very nicely, but it was clearly designed to be a slap on my face, perhaps velvet-gloved, but still a slap alright.  "Dear John" letters usually are that way, I knew that. And why the hell were there so many references to my condition, and how that made things difficult for her? My condition made it difficult to sense emotions in speech or body language.  She had worked out a clever way to get around this.  We had some private hand signals that were supposed to show the kind of emotion we felt - happiness, anger, jealousy, love ( she used this one a lot more than me, I now recalled), and we had even finetuned some subtle improvisations on the gestures to get across degrees and shades of  feeling.  She was a sign language instructor at a school for hearing-impaired people. That helped. In fact I thought her sensitivity to disabled people made her fancy an Aspie like me in the first place. Her letters to me would be generously sprinkled with emoticons to help me get her sense better. But this one had none. Was she perhaps careless? Or too excited or distracted ?  It was however a gross violation of the code of communication between us, and she had mocked my condition. This was an emergency. I needed to vent my anger before I took it out on some poor inanimate object and lost some money!

I decided to google to see how jilted lovers were supposed to react. There were sensational reports of  men shooting their cheating wives with their lovers.  Many spurned lovers in Asia seemed to like to throw acid on the girl's face.  Some got back through blackmail and threats.  But what is a normal, non-criminal man supposed to do? I did not want to kill or maim her and go to jail.  Besides love was less important than someone's life I figured.  There were no sensible answers on the internet as to what a sane man was supposed to do. There were plenty of helplines where women could go to, both after jilting and after being jilted, but not so much seemed to be on offer for men. There definitely seemed to be a strong case for helplines for men though, given that some of them were reacting violently.

Before I gave in to some violent impulse, I thought it wise to write to an agony column, explaining my situation, how I wanted to vent my anger, and also my very logical solution that I wanted to suggest to that girl.  The agony aunt wrote back saying that my plan was absolutely hopeless, and that being jilted leads one to this kind of delusions.  But at least she said my thoughts were very understandable and natural in people in my situation.  I just needed to keep busy with other things and get over it. That sounded like good advice. Also she had not made any snide references to my condition. Maybe I would have liked her letter even more if she had put in a few emoticons.

So I took refuge in some Baroque music...Bach's fugue was my favorite for the day.  Music, after information, was what appealed to me most. I could keep listening to the same piece of classical music over and over again.  Even abstract notes seemed to form images in my head. I felt a lot better after that. I did think of her many times intermittently after that day, and even started and woke up a few times in my sleep with a strange empty feeling in my chest, but never again felt very strongly about it. Being autistic and not having too much emotion helps at times.  I also thought that the agony aunt's mail was very nicely worded, and tried obtaining her email address because I decided I liked her and she could be my new girl friend, but the newspaper people never gave it to me.