416 - Neurodiversity and the Benefits and Challenges of Non-Monogamy (with author Alyssa Gonzalez)
Welcome, Alyssa!
Alyssa Gonzalez is a biology Ph.D., professional speaker, and writer. Her fiction uses science-fiction and fantasy elements to explore social isolation, autism, gender, trauma, and the relationships between all these things. She writes at The Perfumed Void (the-orbit.net/alyssa), on the subjects of biology, history and her experiences as an autistic ex-Catholic Hispanic transgender immigrant to Canada. She has also written a book about polyamory from a neurodivergent perspective, Nonmonogamy and Neurodiversity, which she discusses today on our show. She lives in Ottawa, Canada with a menagerie of pets.
Throughout this episode, Alyssa covers the following points:
Her process and journey of writing Nonmonogamy and Neurodiversity.
Why we see so many people who identify both as neurodivergent and non-monogamous.
The traits of neurodiversity that might make non-monogamy easier for neurodivergent people, as well as those that might make it more difficult.
Rejection sensitivity dysphoria, alexithymia, and stigma in particular on the side of making non-monogamy more difficult.
What are reasonable accommodations for a neurotypical partner to make for a neurodivergent one versus what might just be tolerating bad behavior or neglecting one’s own needs.
Stigma and tropes that exist around neurodiversity and how those show up in non-monogamous spaces, as well as the most effective actions people are taking to make spaces affirming.
Find more about Alyssa on her website, alyssacgonzalez.com, or on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we are talking about non-monogamy and neurodiversity with author Alyssa Gonzalez. Alyssa is a biology PhD speaker and writer. Her blog, The Perfumed Void, explores the subjects of biology history and her experiences as an autistic, ex-Catholic, Hispanic, transgender immigrant to Canada. She is the author of Nonmonogamy and Neurodiversity, which just came out in February, and explores polyamory from a neurodivergent perspective. Alyssa, thank you so much for joining us on the show today.
Alyssa: Oh, it's an honor of privilege and delight to be here.
Dedeker: Oh gosh. All three at once.
Emily: I feel like we could have a whole nother talk about the ex-Catholic part. We have another show called Drunk Bible Study, where we talk about the Bible and a lot of different things and ex-vangelicalism and stuff like that.
Alyssa: That sounds like a lot of fun.
Dedeker: It's basically, at least for myself, that's how I work out my own religious PTSD, but again, that's a conversation for a whole other time. Alyssa, we've had many different neurodivergent guests on the show, both people who openly identify that way, people who identify using different terms. The term neurodivergent covers or seems to cover a really wide spectrum. It seems to have many different definitions and applications sometimes depending on who you talk to. Can you explain what you mean when you say neurodivergent?
Alyssa: It aims to cover as much of the grand spectrum of neurological difference as I could speak to informed way in this book. People who've read it have already told me some spaces I missed. Sorry about that.
Dedeker: Of course.
Alyssa: The official definition of this term is essentially any nameable or even unnameable difference from the neurotypical baseline. It ranges from obvious inclusions like autism to maybe a lot less obvious ones like depression. Because it's such a big term, it often changes a lot between different users. I've aimed at a variety of mental states that usually are things that once a person has them, they can expect to keep having them. They're not things people grow out of or cure. Most of them aren't even diseases. I've thought about it as this shared community of people who see how the mainstream works from the brain function perspective and think, "That does not fit me."
Dedeker: I'm wondering, do you have examples of some of the most obvious things that would stand out to someone as like, "Oh, that doesn't fit me"?
Alyssa: My own perspective is coming at this as an autistic person and big, big one for me is many situations I will come to a person with a matter-of-fact statement and they will immediately digest it in their head into a dense slurry of nonsense because they don't hear matter-of-fact statements. They hear statements that are prefaced by a whole bunch of additional content about what my relationship to them is and what subtext I might be trying to deliver about where our relationship stands and how it might change in relation to what action they take based on what I just told them and all this other stuff. Very often I'm literally just telling them that there's a thing in the sink or the plumber's going to be here soon or whatever.
Dedeker: You can see how this can complicate relationships.
Alyssa: Exactly. That's one thing that can come up a lot that tends to reinforce to people whose brains work like mine that the rest of the world does not work like my brain does.
Jase: Can you tell us a little bit about the process of writing the book? I guess maybe start from what inspired you to write this book.
Alyssa: Well, being approached by the publisher was a very good start.
Dedeker: It's very inspiring.
Jase: That is correct.
Emily: Excellent.
Alyssa: Big part of it is having the intersection of the words on either side and in the title. I've had to confront a lot of realities about existing in both of these spaces. As a result of existing in both of these spaces and being a reasonably clever and observant person, I like to think, I noticed a lot of stuff. Both made this life more challenging for me but also made it feel like I couldn't possibly be any other way. The things that make my brain weird, so to speak, also make me and others like me unusually well-suited to the demands of being polyamorous. It didn't feel like this insight was already out there and laid out in the way that felt sensible to me. This was my opportunity to get this perspective into people's hands, and it felt important to do that.
Dedeker: Now, you mentioned earlier that after already having published the book already some people have reached out to you to say like, "Oh, you missed this or you missed that." This seems like it might present a unique challenge in that overlapping identity, where you said that neurodivergence covers this huge spectrum of different ways that that presents and shows up for people. At the same time, the practice of non-monogamy also covers this huge spectrum of how people interpret that and practice that. It seems like it's just setting up for inevitably someone to be like, "Wait, you forgot about X, Y, and Z." How did you tackle that without writing a 6,000-page book?
Alyssa: Having a hard word count to start with, then I had to prioritize very hard. On top of stuff that I missed simply because I did not have the fullness of this entire topic in my brain at the time, there's stuff that I had to cover more briefly than someone else might have in a more focused book. The big thing I tried to do is that the names that are given to the various forms of neurodivergence are the products of their time and place. Asperger's syndrome is a big one that is no longer considered a valid diagnosis. People that receive that diagnosis can call themselves whatever they want, but it's been folded diagnostically into the autism spectrum. It is no longer given as its own thing, but both people still exist.
The reasons that they got a diagnosis still happen to them. I tried to sort this in particular based on the reasons that someone might read this book. The fact things about themselves that might cause them to recognize themselves as neurodivergent or that might present as challenges or opportunities within non-monogamy. I also find that ADHD and autism overlap a lot. I don't think science is done nailing down the lines between these yet.
Lots of things get listed in online resources as the ADHD experiences that feel autistic to me and vice versa or only seem to happen when people feel both of those words apply. It's just that morass would've been utterly pointless for me to dive into directly in this book because it would not have been useful to categorize it like, this is the ADHD section and this is the borderline section, and so on. That's not why people come to a book like this. There are challenges and experiences that are individual that might lead someone to get one of these names but aren't the essence of them. I started it with these symptoms and not diagnoses in mind, so to speak.
Jase: To go along with that, could you maybe tell our listeners a little bit about what they could expect from the book if they go pick it up, which I'm sure they're all rushing to go order it right now, but is this more of an intellectual exploration of these topics? Is it more practical advice? What can people look forward to with the book?
Alyssa: There's plenty of practical advice in here, albeit brief. A lot of it will feel to readers more like these are the kinds of things you can look for in much greater detail than I could have covered somewhere else. I hope this is a very validating read for neurodivergent readers because we get a lot of negative messages about any possibility of finding love in this world. The idea that we could not only find love, but be at the center of a grand constellation of love with far more participants than exist in the average monogamous couple is a rather odd idea for so many of us, and I don't think it should be.
A great deal of this book is devoted to challenging that, to making sure that neurodivergent readers understand that not only is a polyamorous existince-- possible for us, but it can work better for us than the alternative. There's personal backgrounds in here about the perspective that I come to this topic from and how I've lived the realities it discusses. I endeavor for people who read this to come out fully convinced that even if it's not necessarily the right life for them, that it's a life that a lot of us can have great success in and can be well suited to. That it's also not something that is challenge free and that there are potential areas of difficulty and there are resources for dealing with those. Practical advice, memoir, just exercise and validation, all of the above.
Dedeker: We are going to dive into the specific areas that you highlight as ways that non-monogamy may be easier for neurodivergent folks versus the areas where it may be more difficult. I first wanted to talk a little bit about the landscape that I know from my perspective, especially since I started working with clients individually five, six, seven years ago, whatever it was, that there's a lot of neurodivergent people within the non-monogamous community. That Venn diagram overlaps a surprising amount.
Our researcher, M, who worked on this episode, dropped in our show notes this really interesting research study that showed that autistic individuals specifically were more likely to report being non-monogamous or open to non-monogamy compared to a neurotypical control group. Now, that's just one flavor of it, right? We don't have that same research study for people who are ADHD. Like you said, some of that gets a little bit difficult because the lines on these things are starting to get a little bit fuzzy. I was wondering, from your armchair sociologist/actual biologist perspective, why do you think that we see so many people who are neurodivergent being drawn to non-monogamy?
Alyssa: I find there's this magnetism of strangeness that neurodivergent people inhabit almost continuously. The things that are normal often don't make sense to us. People that feel okay, not normal get very defensive about that fact. Once we're at a point where just the basic realities of existing in a space whose rules they got to decide doesn't fit, it's very easy to start looking around for alternatives that actually do feel right and mesh with us. It comes very naturally to neurodivergent people, especially autistic people. I think this is a broader experience that once normal extensively demonstrates that it's not for us, so it's hard to feel beholden to it anymore.
People might exceed to whatever amount of peer pressure they have to in order to function in society, but actually feeling invested in it, putting effort into sticking with norms that don't make sense and don't fit. We are a lot less likely to do that than neurotypical people, I think. Alternative lifestyles of basically every sort are absolutely chock-full of neurodivergent people. In addition to not being terribly invested in a normal that is not serving us, we're much more likely to encounter a weird thing and think, "Yes, this feels amazing." Not, "That's weird. They're going to think I'm weird iff I do the weird thing." Normal wasn't prepared to treat us kindly in the first place. We have no reason to spend our time with it.
Dedeker: That's funny because I feel like five or six years ago reading an article that somebody wrote, making a very similar argument about why there's such an overlap between geek culture and polyamorous culture or non-monogamous culture. Really basically identical argument that once you've already found a way to live relatively comfortable outside of normal, it's not quite as scary with other, quote-unquote, "not normal things."
Alyssa: Exactly. There are so many things that get defended just because it's what's ordinary. It's the way things have always, except not really, have been done. It's standard. It's a heuristic. It's easy because we can rely on a whole pile of assumptions going in. A lot of neurodivergent people almost literally did not get the memo and those assumptions, it doesn't fit. It doesn't feel right. Once you're not adhering to any of that, it's very easy to just keep poking and looking and continuing to craft a reality that feels a lot better, even if it's profoundly strange by anyone else's perspective.
Emily: You alluded to this a little bit before, and also you discuss it in your book, but you talk about the fact that there are traits that those who are neurodivergent have that make non-monogamy potentially easier in some ways. Can you discuss what some of those traits might be?
Alyssa: Probably the top of the list, since we can probably re-title every podcast about relationships "Communication," and it'd be accurate, is a lot of us have a variety of traits in how we communicate that are helpful when conversations can get tense and emotional and can no longer rely on obvious heuristics as short cuts.
Emily: You said you were very direct, and that makes a lot of sense to me that being direct would be something that would be very helpful in a lot of situations so that you don't have to think about all of what's going on internally, the minutiae, but more just this is what it is. I'm telling it to you straight.
Alyssa: Exactly. It's not even just for autistic people necessarily, although it's probably the most over-represented group that sees the word neurodivergent and thinks, yes me. It's like if someone is dealing with cPTSD or something, there can be very different reactions to emotional topics that lead to a different approach to communication that can be useful when the topic is tense and so on. Necessarily expect someone who's actively suffering to also be a very effective communicator, but the same tools that can help someone who has that condition can be very helpful when someone is having a conversation where a lot of old heuristics don't apply.
Jase: As you were talking about that, what came to mind for me was I could see an appeal of this is a way of doing relationships where more explicit communication is front and center. That makes sense to me, so I want to do more of that. I can also see that being in a way, you're entering a type of relationship where the people who are doing it are really trying to learn to be more clear in their communication. It's almost like by dating in polyamorous, non-monogamous spaces, you might be more likely to find neurotypical people who've done the work to try to be more explicit in their communication in a way that they might not have otherwise done if they were allowed to follow a lot of the defaults.
Alyssa: I expect so.
Jase: It's almost like you have a better pool that way.
Alyssa: Can confirm dating pool is much, much better for me. Polyamorous.
Dedeker: Yes, it's funny. In my practice, I would say the people that I work with, probably 95% non-monogamous or some flavor of relationship weirdo. I do get the occasional person who knows that they're monogamous and it's not necessarily default monogamy. They're like, "Yes, I've tried a bunch of different relationship styles and I know that I want to be monogamous, but I want to not play games. I want to communicate honestly with people. I want to sit down by our second date or third date and have a clear sense of what are we both interested in."
Those are the people that I find have a lot of frustration because it's like Jay said, it's like they're trying on this other way of being so explicit and matter of fact, and front and center with communication, but still dating in a very traditional playing by default, mostly monogamous dating pool. That's when I see this biggest culture clash taking place.
Alyssa: One of my dreams is for people like that to learn and memorize the phrase polysaturated at one. Once people start talking like that, I don't think that the actual social institution that is monogamy really has a hold on them anymore. Even if they don't feel capable of sustaining more than one relationship.
Emily: I love that idea. You can take all of the amazing things about polyamory and wrap it in monogamy to a degree, but it's not. It's like going past that and going further, especially with communication practices being as specific and explicit as they need to be in non-monogamy. That's really cool.
Jase: I actually was just having a conversation with my hairstylist, with my barber this morning because she asked what I was doing with the rest of my day. I said, "Oh, I'm recording a couple of podcast episodes." She asked, "What's it about?" I explained some things. She was asking questions and I mentioned how I haven't had any long-term relationships since the end of 2019. The response she gives, which is pretty common when I get, is that, "Oh, so you're essentially monogamous?"
Emily: Besides Dedeker. Yes.
Jase: Right. They're like, "Oh, you're essentially monogamous right now." My response is, "I guess, but I don't feel that way because that's not how I'm thinking about the relationship and not how I approach it." Sure, I've been on a couple of dates in the last few years, but it's that it's different, though. It is almost maybe more like I'm polysaturated at one rather than it being monogamous. There's just a different feel to how I would be thinking about the relationship.
Alyssa: Once a person is prepared to not go on some fiery rampage when their partner starts dating someone else, I don't think monogamy is the right word for that anymore.
Dedeker: Interesting.
Jase: Yes.
Dedeker: Yes. Interesting rubric. Yes, I had to think about that a lot because I had a big breakup at the beginning of 2022 and basically spent about a year in that, quote-unquote, "essentially monogamous phase," and really grappled with that a lot, of, "I'm not monogamous." Again, the way that I think about it, like the conversations that you and I had, Jase, talking about people who are hot, or what we're thinking about the next time we're starting dating again. Again, all these things that to me don't read as typical monogamy. I don't know, it's so funny how language starts to collapse and become less useful in that regard.
Alyssa: That was one of the big things for me that was a great opportunity for me once I realized non-monogamy was an option. That was a tremendous challenge before then because it was one of those very normal things I could not wrap my head around, which is just, I grew up in a Cuban American community in Miami and bombastic displays of jealousy are the sixth Cuban American love language.
?Emily: Oh, boy. Goodness.
Alyssa: That was just not something I was able to give anyone I dated in high school because as long as the time that I was actually spending with the person was continuing to fulfill me, I did not care what else they were up to. It felt weird that whatever else I was up to mattered to them and I could just utterly could not wrap my head around it. To this day, it's something that I file in weird stuff the neurotypicals do in my brain. Just could not fathom that something I did when they weren't even in the room that didn't affect them or have some indication that I had some awful value as a person or whatever, it would somehow jeopardize the relationship, utterly alien to my psychology.
I think feelings like that are a lot more common in the neurodivergent space than anywhere else. Even just this sense that things can be relatively neatly compartmentalized that way that relationships simply are what they are and it doesn't necessarily change all my other relationships if I meet a new friend on the bus or start kissing this person that I've already been talking to for a long time or anything like that. It is in the polyamorous space and in particular neurodivergent spaces, I find that this perspective feels most comprehensible to anyone besides me.
Dedeker: Well, to back it up and talk about other things, other baffling behavior that neurotypical people do. I want to talk about flirting, which you do spend some time talking about in your book. Now, what blew my mind and also was a great comfort to me, is you mentioned that it's scientifically established that actually, most human beings are bad at figuring out when other people are flirting. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Alyssa: The study I read was flat-out worse than 50% odds. It would've been better if everyone just inverted their diagnosis of the other person's behavior.
Dedeker: What? Oh my gosh.
Alyssa: Still not good, but better than what they were doing.
Jase: Was this about someone evaluating if they themselves were being flirted with or watching two other people and guessing if they're flirting or not?
Alyssa: Evaluating other people's interactions with them, I believe, was the study.
Jase: Wow. Worse than 50%.
Emily: That makes sense to me that they're really bad at it. Yes, I feel like I'm bad at it.
Dedeker: I'm assuming that this means, I guess the classic problem that I guess all of us have, which is are they flirting with me or are they being friendly? Basically, that's the marker where people across the board just cannot tell the difference.
Alyssa: Yes, and there's all these stereotypes in the lesbian community that, "Oh, she's just so nice. We moved in together six months ago. Is this a date?"
Dedeker: How do you find that showing up? Because especially in non-monogamous spaces, there's a lot of complicating factors at play. Not only do we have the fact that in a lot of non-monogamous spaces, there's a lot of neurodivergent people who maybe interpret flirting/ friendliness in different ways combined with, in non-monogamous spaces, there is often a little bit of this weird, "Well, is everyone technically available? Or are these people being nice?" I guess I'm wondering how do you see people rectifying that, working through that? What are the main challenges that you've noticed?
Alyssa: Everyone's got their own solution there. I find in practice, if someone is being very oblique and passive and I don't have some other reason to be invested in whatever they have going on, it's very easy to just let them do that, and if they want something from me, they can figure out a more effective way to get it or not.
Dedeker: You mean someone who's being mysterious and, I don't know, I guess the stereotypical, quote-unquote, "hard-to-get," sort of approach.
Alyssa: Exactly. I've got lots of things that if a thing is hard to get, it'd better be freaking worth it, and if it's being hard to get right from the start, I don't know that yet, so they're going to need another strategy. More than that, I find if there's ambiguity I can ask and if the other person is neurodivergent enough, they'll appreciate me resolving the ambiguity for them by asking, which is another thing that the neurotypicals should really get on. If I step up how overt my behavior is in step with theirs, usually goes pretty well for me.
Sometimes I actually have to tell someone I'm not interested, but usually, I can just not respond to whatever they're doing and they'll get bored and leave, but this is all deeply complicated by all sorts of other intersections. I think men have a very different experience of all of this than I do, especially men who are conscientious about how women sometimes react to people larger than them trying to get intimate.
Dedeker: Yes. That sounds like something that we've talked about on the show before.
Jase: The flirting thing is interesting and also a little concerning because something that I was just talking about recently, I think a couple of episodes ago, is about being out as non-monogamous in the workplace and how that's an area where I try to be extra careful to basically come across as a completely non-sexual person at work because I don't want someone to interpret my non-monogamy as meaning, oh, I'm on the hunt all the time. I'm especially aware of that as a man because there is that like if anyone thinks that that's where I'm coming from, even if it's because of nothing I've done and now that I know or how badly people evaluate whether someone's flirting or not, I'm like, "Oh gosh, I got to step up my game in that area."
Alyssa: If you hadn't been called into HR or had coworkers mysteriously disappear, you're probably fine?
?Dedeker: Gosh.
Jase: Well thanks. I think I've been doing okay so far, but it's one of those things.
Dedeker: Well, but, Jase, okay, but what the science says is like people are just really bad at interpreting whether it's flirting or friendliness, how do you step up your game there? Become also a completely non-social, non-friendly kind of person, just zero human interaction, no smiling.
Jase: I think that's probably the way to go.
Alyssa: I know one area where ambiguity seems to especially crop up is casual physical touch, especially when there's a bit of a culture clash happening there and someone from a very touchy culture suddenly deals with all the closed-off northern European-descended folks in this part of the world. Doesn't have to be that way, and honestly, a nice trick is to just assume the other person is not flirting unless you're receptive. Then they just have that be the first step in your heuristic, if you're not interested, they're not flirting, period. Then they can try to get through that if they want, but I find that that tends to dissuade people pretty fast.
Dedeker: In your book, you also mentioned that a lot of neurodivergent people value independence on autonomy and this may be something that helps make something like non-monogamy a little bit easier. It is interesting because I do think when I think about, quote-unquote, "non-monogamy culture," independence and autonomy feels like one of the many pillars of non-monogamy culture. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Alyssa: Definitely. One of the foundational experiences of being a neurodivergent person is having our perspectives consistently minimized in popular spaces. We're weird and they're not, and therefore if there's some manner of disagreement or difference of interpretation or difference of emphasis even, it's a default that we have to figure out how they work, but then figuring us out is optional at best. That if there's a space whose rules are still being decided and we see them one way and they see them another way, we're lucky if they acknowledge that we said anything at all, let alone allow any part of the space to not work the way they want it to.
The result is that a lot of us just aren't used to the things we want mattering to other people. We all have stories about the state of the spaces we control being under constant scrutiny by neurotypical parents and teachers. People deciding that notes aren't allowed to be messy or whatever, even if it works for the person who's taking them because, I don't know. Results in a lot of us growing up and not really experiencing until we are stuck living in one-room studio apartments somewhere as students, that's when we finally actually have control over the circumstances of our lives in any way that matters, and that can be a very hard thing to give up.
In a standard relationship escalator monogamous model where one of the steps is you merge households with the other person at some point, and suddenly their thoughts on how the space you live in is supposed to be organized have to matter, or else they're just moving into your space and that's not fair to them either. This can be very challenging to navigate because it can feel like losing all of that hard-won autonomy all over again. Not to say that people like me don't successfully cohabitate. It's more that this is part of the challenge of that kind of life. Certainly, they can decide not to cohabitate or to have a designated space that is just yours in a relationship that happens to have only two people in it, and so on. All of it is possible to navigate without opening a relationship.
In a model where every detail has to be individually hashed out because none of the old heuristic supply, this is a much easier conversation to have. In a model where there's multiple people that are supposed to have equal claims on a person's heart, it's a lot easier to justify not living with any of them because living with all of them would be a lot more logistically challenging, and they might have their own things going on. It feels a lot easier to handle as a neurodivergent person than I think it would otherwise because of all these intersecting factors that end up coming into play here.
Jase: Yes, I think to go with the explicit communication thing, culturally within non-monogamy, there's more of an understanding that we're not going to assume our living structure is going to look one way, and that it's something that will be discussed whatever we end up deciding. That does make sense that just even knowing that I'm going to be talking to people who realize there are options and there's other ways this might look makes a lot of sense.
Alyssa: It's also a nice cover if you're avoidant and traumatized and doing your level best to save Polysecure for later in your reading list.
Emily: I feel like that's the second time I've heard that this way. Not yet. Later. That makes sense.
Jase: Yes. We're going to go on to talk about some of the challenges that come up with neurodivergence and polyamory. First, we're going to take a quick break to talk about some ways that you can support this show. If you appreciate this kind of content getting out there for free and want to help, spread the word and keep this going for everybody out there. Take a moment to check out our sponsors if any seem interesting to you, and to join our communities, we'd love to have you there.
Emily: We're back. Additionally, in the book, on the flip side of things that we were just discussing there, can you talk a little bit about the aspects of neurodivergence that could make polyamory more difficult? Specifically things like rejection, sensitivity, dysphoria, alexithymia, and stigma, things along those lines.
Alyssa: Absolutely. For all that, I think non-monogamy and neurodiversity are a match made in whatever place put peanut butter and jam together. It's definitely not all sunshine and roses. In any environment where people are doing a lot of potentially tense interpersonal interaction, any challenges a person faces there can become magnified. For someone who deals with alexithymia and has trouble identifying other people's emotions or especially their own, conversations that deal with difficult emotions become a lot more difficult. For people who react very strongly to any sensation of rejection and have brains that reach immediately to the idea that this is a wholesale referendum on their value as a human being.
Continuing to flirt with new people after you found your first one is an especially fraught experience. Entering into challenging relationship dynamics that can create a variety of new and unexpected emotions can also be quite challenging. Both of these situations can greatly complicate even ordinary life for a person that isn't transgressing any, especially exciting, cultural norms. In an environment where you're already doing things that heuristics don't apply to and that involve a lot of emotions, it is especially important and helpful for a person to try to get a handle on those.
The challenge that doesn't get enough attention in my experience, especially compared to those, is the idea that sometimes even for neurodivergent people, societal heuristics can be comforting. For a lot of us, the general way that normal society operates can be deeply unintuitive, even confusing. There can be things that are very difficult for us to wrap our heads around. In an environment like that, when someone gives us a nice, tidy definition, such as when you're in a romantic relationship, you do these things with that person.
If you do these things with that person, that means this is a romantic relationship. When you're in a romantic relationship, if they do these other things, that means they don't want to be in it anymore, and so on. It's this large series of definitions where if the world is very fuzzy and confusing in your mind, having nice, tidy definitions to lean on can be very comforting. Same as someone who's just learning a field of math for the first time can be, what the function does near infinity is what you call its limit. What the function does at very high numbers is what you can call its limit. You can recite that to yourself over and over again while you're in your Calculus 1 course trying to figure out the rest.
It doesn't completely apply. There's lots of asterisks. There's a whole course and then Calculus 2 after that. In its place, it can be very comforting. Part of the point of not being monogamous is that you're going to deconstruct all of this and rebuild something brand new for yourself. While you're busy taking everything apart that you previously understood, you're left with very little to work with. That can be frightening.
That can create a situation where you don't actually know what it makes sense to expect from other people and for a community that gets taken advantage of, mistreated, and psychologically abused as often as ours, an environment where you have no idea what the correct way to do things is supposed to look like. That can be frightening, and that can have some really unpleasant consequences.
Dedeker: I know we talked about this ages and ages ago, but I do think that's the weird way that non-monogamy can really open already vulnerable people, open them to more opportunities to be misused and abused because of the fact that so many of us are-- some of it is flying by the seat of your pants. Some of this is like we're figuring it out as we go along. We end up in a situation where I didn't receive any social scripts for figuring this out. I don't know how to have a conversation with my partner about the safe sex practices that I have with somebody else. We end up in so many situations where we're all trying to figure it out.
If someone comes in to say, "Well, I've got it figured out. You just do this. I've been non-monogamous for 10 years. This is what you're supposed to do. I know how to do it right, and you don't know how to do it right. If you just follow what I say, then it's going to be okay." There is that like, if someone comes in with just enough confidence and maybe a not great motive or not great sense of self-awareness, that yes, it can create, I think, really devastating consequences in relationship.
Alyssa: Oh, yes. There is so much room for bad actors to say, "Actually, even though I'm never on time for your dates, but I'm always on time for my dates with this other person, the fact that you're getting jealous of them means you're doing something wrong." Nonsense like that. A person has to have a really strong sense of what the correct way to do things is supposed to be, at least in relation to them, in order to properly fight back against this kind of thing. When you're midway through deconstructing everything you thought was correct before, it can be a very tricky time.
Jase: I've seen people use that against themselves as well. Either meaning, "Okay, I found something that seems true, and I've made a heuristic out of it." I've made a rule that I live by or think that I should do relationships by because this made sense in one context. Then in another, it doesn't. Your jealousy example is a good one there, of, "Oh, I was feeling all this jealousy before, that was my own thing to deal with. It was just because I was doing something different than I was used to." Then you're in a situation where maybe that jealousy does make sense, and that is justified, and that is motivated. You already came up with that heuristic, and that's a difficult thing for people to figure out.
What's that balance between, okay, I've got to figure out some new models of what good and bad looks like so that I at least have a sense of, "Is this a really shitty situation I'm in?" or "Is this okay?" and I'm just having a hard time. Balancing that with the fact that every situation is different. That is such a challenge.
Alyssa: Exactly. Especially for people like us where there's a long list of contradictory stereotypes we get subjected to, depending on how we're making the other person feel. Standing up for oneself in an environment like that can be difficult because there's always a stereotype ready for whether the door mattered or not. It's a lot to deal with. If one is dealing with a person where assuming good faith no longer seems appropriate, that can be a hard situation to be in and a hard one to get out of. It's important to me that people don't get to the end of this book and think everything is easy and that they don't get to the end and think everything is impossibly hard, but emerge with a reasonably clear impression of what it can be like and the fact that it's both possible and can be wonderful if things line up.
Dedeker: While we're on this subject, I think this falls in line with a question that we get all the time. I think it is because there's so many neurodivergent people in the non-monogamous community. Usually, this question comes from the neurotypical person who's in a relationship with a neurodivergent person. It's usually some version of, "What are the reasonable accommodations to make for my partner?" versus, "What is tolerating bad behavior or bad treatment or neglecting my own needs and boundaries?" Of course, that's a situation where it can depend on what's actually going on in the relationship. I guess I was wondering if you have any insight about that, especially because seriously, it's a question we get all the freaking time.
Alyssa: Much depends on which difficulties the person is creating and whether it feels like they're making an even slightly comparable effort to meet the other partner where they are. It is very easy for neurotypical people to just trample all over neurodivergent needs. That's society's default towards people like us. In this space, I think there's a very different impulse, precisely because non-monogamy tends to be full of people who at least try to be conscientious about the interpersonal difficulties and are aware of some of these other issues and try to lean the other way.
It is very easy for someone who is marginalized to try to wield that in really unhealthy interpersonal ways. This can go in every direction, and that makes it all the more complicated to sort out. I can't really tell anyone what treatment is going to work because there are so many variables from what access need we're talking about to what accommodations have already been discussed to what consequences are currently unfolding as a result of how this has been attempted before. Here's a common one. If your partner is ADHD and has a lot of trouble being on time for things, some things are more forgiving about being late than others.
Sometimes there are built-in consequences for screwing this up that that person is effectively inflicting on their partner by constantly being late for stuff. If they don't care about that, then that's a problem, regardless of how forgiving one is inclined to be of them having neurology that is relevant. On the other hand, you can alert someone early that a thing is coming up that they have to be on time for. You can figure out how early is uselessly early and not give you a reminder then. There are ways for people to meet each other where they are in these matters.
It won't always work because humans are awful, chaotic creatures that refuse to have the digital precision I wish they did. Others, I get very particular about my schedule at home, and I get squirrely when I can't cling at the specific schedule that I want to cling on. I have learned that sometimes I have to skip a weekend because people insisted on putting things on both days in the dang weekend, and I can't spend one of them dealing with all the cat hair in here. In general, I find neurodivergent people are used to accommodating neurotypical people because that is what this world assumes.
There are so many more of them. We went ahead and let them make all the rules for some bloody reason. In a relationship, it has to go both ways. I'd be lying if I said I was perfect at that, even though I just wrote a book about relationships.
Dedeker: Clearly, writing a book about relationships makes you perfect at them. That's what everyone should know.
Emily: That's a total lie. We're not either. I guess I was curious, for yourself, is it easier to date people who are also neurodivergent just simply because you're coming from a shared to a degree set of experience?
Alyssa: I think I have to go three or four layers of metamours deep before I find a neurotypical person in my extended polycule.
Emily: Got it.
Alyssa: I have never had dating success with a neurotypical person. We tend to figure out that within about 15 minutes of meeting each other that it is not going to work. We can tell when the other person is just on the wrong wavelength, so to speak. I am amazed that anyone makes that combination work.
Emily: In extension of that, you mentioned in your book the stigma and tropes that exist around neurodivergence and the way that you see those things showing up in non-monogamous spaces. Can you give our listeners an overview of what that looks like?
Alyssa: Unicorn hunters love manic pixie dream girls. Holy hell.
Emily: Sure. Got it.
Alyssa: The whole concept of a unicorn hunter feels like it's built around the idea that manic pixie dream girls exist. Manic pixie dream girls are a heavily sanitized version of someone's fantasy about dating an autistic and or ADHD person, mostly. For all the movies featuring manic pixie dream girls aren't usually about non-monogamy, they might as well be because the script is always the same. It is really dehumanizing to realize that someone is trying to squeeze you into some archetype they think is hot and doesn't seem to be terribly concerned about you, the person. That's probably the most common one. It's definitely the most heavily gendered one.
Jase: Certainly. Are there any others?
Alyssa: I think I mentioned four of them in here. The one that is perhaps the most personal for me is this idea that gets aimed at autistic people a lot that our emotions are fundamentally inaccessible to anyone else and that we're cold robotic, reptilian monster people. Therefore, we're too logical to be trusted with emotional intimacy, or obviously, we're into something as bizarre as non-monogamy because we're so weird and robotic and unemotional as if we're not signing up for dealing with so many more people's emotions this way. It's just contradictory in every way that matters.
At its core is the idea that if someone is neurodivergent, you can think of them as less human, and that'll make them make more sense. It's exactly that sickening. There's not really a way to deal with a person who thinks that way. If you're lucky, then having a friendship with you will help them realize that, no, you're an actual person. You're just different. If someone thinks that about people like you, and they haven't already reached the, but you're not like that stage and you're not going to get any further with them. I've dealt with so much of that. Every time I try to assert an unconventional need, I have so many memories of younger me having anything I wanted get dismissed with rhetoric along those lines.
Jase: To go along with that, to start wrapping this up, what are some effective actions that you've seen people take to either make more neurodiversity-affirming events in spaces like that, or even, maybe especially thinking outside of just non-monogamy, but even more generally?
Alyssa: Big one is in a big, noisy event, have a quiet room.
Dedeker: Yes. Amen. Thank you, please.
Alyssa: Just about every neurodivergence I can think of, from CPTSD to borderline autism, ADHD, a bunch more that aren't coming to mind right now. We all appreciate having a chance to get away from sensory overload or just not deal with people for a while or that last presentation was really emotional. We don't feel like crying in public, so we're going to take a break now. That space doesn't have to be the bathroom. Having just a nice, cozy place set aside somewhere for people to not be around the hustle and bustle of the event, whatever the topic is, is nice. Those red yellow green buttons people can wear based on what kind of interaction they're hoping for are great. Exactly what each color means depends on what that event is. Having that kind of immediate outward signal that is not nearly as easy to misinterpret as flirting is great.
Dedeker: Thank goodness.
Jase: When you were talking about the quiet space, the term crying kiosk came to mind.
Dedeker: I like that.
Jase: I feel like it's a thing you could maybe market to bring to events. They're like little individual-size soundproof booths that you can set up at your event. Little crying kiosks.
Dedeker: Can we make it more positive, though? Could it be like a comfort kiosk? Because you don't have to go and cry.
Jase: That's good.
Alyssa: I hear kiosk, I think those carts set up in a mall that have no shelter at all.
Dedeker: That's true. We need it to be more of a booth.
Alyssa: Maybe I just have the wrong picture of what a kiosk is in my head.
Dedeker: It could be a nice sheltered, comfy space.
Jase: A comfort cabana?
Dedeker: Okay, closer. A comfort, quiet cabana. Quiet, comfort cabana. We're going to work on it. Yes.
Jase: We'll figure it out.
Alyssa: The top-level thing that can be done to make neurodivergent people, in general, feel good in the space is establish a social norm where if someone is being harmlessly weird, you do not be awful to them about it. So much of the nonsense that neurodivergent people deal with is the fact that even people who say they don't have problems with neurodivergent people do not hesitate to make their negative opinion of weird people known. These are heavily overlapping groups. It's just a matter of them not already knowing that a person has a name for the kind of weird they are. The ordinary, mainstream thinking that if the kind of weird they are doesn't have a name, it's okay to make fun of them.
Jase: Weird can look a lot of different ways and be there for a lot of different reasons.
Alyssa: Exactly.
Jase: That's interesting to think about spaces where everyone's there together because they're all weird in one context, but then to be shitty to someone who's weird in a different way.
Alyssa: Exactly. So much of the nonsense furries deal with falls under this kind of category, I think, to say nothing of just how much overlap there is between us and that community.
Dedeker: Well, Alyssa, this has been a fantastic conversation. I so appreciate your time. Where can our listeners find more of you and where can they find your book?
Alyssa: You can find enough of me for a good macro dose at alyssacgonzalez.com, alyssacgonzalez.com. You can find my blog at the-orbit.net/alyssa, but there's a link to that at alyssacgonzalez.com. You can also buy signed copies of my book there. If you don't want to buy it directly from me, you can go to thornapplepress.ca and follow the links from there, but those won't be signed.
Dedeker: Right. It's very important.
Emily: Not as cool.