[00:00:00] So hi everyone and welcome to this evening's webinar. I'm Hayley Green and I'm a research assistant at Autistica and I originally wasn't going to be the host for today's webinar, I actually will be presenting my research. But due to technical difficulties, I'm just going to be opening for today's [webinar].

Hopefully later on we'll be joined by Dr Michelle Newman, a research fellow at Autistica. For those of you who are new to us, Autistica is the UK's leading autism research and campaign in charity. We create breakthroughs to enable autistic people to live happy, healthy, and long lives. We do this through research, shaping policy and working with autistic people to make more of a difference.

A big part of that is sharing the latest research and evidence-based practice, which is what we're doing today. Our topic for today is exploring autistic and non-autistic relationships. This will be led by Vivien Southall first, and then followed by myself. Both of us will give our presentations individually, which we have both pre-recorded.

We will then have a live panel discussion before we finish this evening's sessions with questions from you, the audience. We wanted to share some information about the topic before we started. So, there is no agreed terminology for referring to couples with partners of different neurotypes. In this presentation, we will use the term neuro mixed and the term non-autistic for people not identifying as autistic.

The research presented in this webinar doesn't claim to be representative of all couples as every couple is unique. However, the research has interesting findings that contribute to the small amount of evidence available in this topic area, which can hopefully inform future directions to understand more.

Before we hand over to Viv, I have some webinar guidance to share with you. Live captions are available on Zoom by pressing the CC button on the menu bar, which for most people should appear at the bottom of your screen. Before we start, we also want to acknowledge that the topic today can be difficult for some people, so please listen at your comfort level. The webinar is being recorded so you can always watch the rest of the session at another time.

And if you need to speak to someone, please reach out to a trusted person or contact Samaritans by calling 116 123 or emailing jo@samaritans.org.uk. Thank you for listening. I'll now hand over to our speakers.

Thank you for joining us this evening. I'm going to be talking about my education doctorate thesis, which is entitled, “Which discourses underpin long-term autistic- and non-autistic romantic couples' understandings of their relationship as they live with and accommodate each other. A critical discourse study.”

I was a teacher in primary education for many years and then a lecturer in education at Plymouth University. I've been a relationship educator and still am. I was a carer for my mum with dementia and I'm currently an education doctoral student at Plymouth University. I can be contacted on viviensouthall@plymouth.ac.uk.

I'm married to a non-autistic man. We celebrate 38 years this year. We have a neuromixed relationship as I am ADHD, but in using the term neuromixed in this talk, I'm focusing on couples in which one identifies as autistic rather than the full spectrum of ASD. This study is particularly concerned with how neuromixed romantic couples understand and accommodate the differences.

I'm a volunteer for a tiny charity that offers one-to-one relationship education and I've been doing this since 2000. When running this service, I found that typical parenting courses were not appropriate for children with autism. Similarly, I found that when couples came to talk to me about their romantic relationship concerns if one of the couples demonstrated characteristics associated with autism, the normal relationship education curriculum didn't work for them.

Therefore, I started looking around for literature to help support couples with, in which one person identified as autistic and found that there was very little available. And what was available was often written from a standpoint of considering the person with autism to have deficits in their relationship skills that needed to be taught.

My research specifically considered neuromixed romantic couples but is relevant to all couples as the individuals in every relationship will have differences that need accommodating. So I started my education doctorate thinking that I would find out what successful autistic neuromixed couples do to make their relationships satisfactory and pass these tips on to other people. As I read, I began to be interested in people's unconscious understandings of living, from which [00:05:00] they make their decisions about how to behave. In my academic reading, the term discourse is used. In this sense, discourse refers to the unconscious assumptions we have about the way that society and the world works.

We refer to this as “common sense” and assume that everyone has the same understanding. So my research has been looking at the unconscious understandings that people have about how to do relationships when they first got together and then looking at whether these have changed as a result of living together and accommodating each other's differences.

I'm interested in subjugation and resistance. People can be subjugated by romantic relationship understandings. For example, not being willing to leave an unhappy marriage because they feel as though they have then failed or they can resist their, the understandings. For example, a couple may choose not to live together in the same house full time, but have two homes.

I wanted to know what understandings and expectations people had of romantic relationships. To do this, I asked four neuromixed couples to narrate the story of their relationships. Participants told their stories in a variety of ways as they chose. Mostly in an interview setting with a key question to start the conversation, but also written story form, a relationship handbook, using photos and mementos as prompts, email, or one of the couples illustrated their relationship with bookcases.

One bookcase being chaotic and busy as the non-autistic person expected their marriage to be, and the other being ordered with spaces as her husband expected their lives to be. Each participant gave me their stories individually and then again together. When we analysed the participants stories, we were able to draw out their understandings and expectations of romantic relationships and then see whether the reality of living together did not meet their expectations and cause tensions.

It was appropriate to use narratives to identify the understandings that are so deeply embedded in our thinking that we're not aware of them. I was not concerned about the accuracy of stories as I was looking at a deeper level. I was looking for ways in which the participants were subjected to their understandings of relationships, where they went along with these expectations and where they resisted them.

I chose participatory research for a variety of reasons. I'm not in an autistic, non-autistic romantic relationship, so I wanted participants to be able to challenge my research where I may have made incorrect assumptions. It was important that the couples would be engaged in the analysis process, but this is where the understandings were explored.

And where together we began to be able to see how their relationships have been restricted by unrealistic expectations and how they reframe their understandings of their own relationship.

The participants were engaged in discussions about how their stories would be presented in the final study. They were also shown the discussion document and asked to comment with their comments being incorporated into the final discussion chapter. I'm going to introduce you to the participant couples. Obviously, they've been anonymised.

Debbie and Charlie were in their late 30s, early 40s, married for over 20 years. They're white British. The male identifies as autistic. They have two children and they're both working.

Cilla in her mid-50s and Becca in her early 40s. They cohabit, they've been together for over eight years. They both have disabilities and are not able to work. They're white, British, and Becky was diagnosed as autistic as an adult after they met.

Queenie and Stefan are in their late 30s, early-40s, also married for over 20 years. They're white, British, the male identifies as autistic, and they have two children and both are working.

Freya and Toby are in their late 30s, they're white, British, the male identifies as autistic, and he works.

This research was an in-depth study of four couples. So I don't generalise. But I offer the experiences for others to reflect on and consider in the light of their own experiences and reading.

However, the in-depth nature of the study allows insight into the lived experiences of couples that broader studies don't achieve. There are suggestions for further research, but also I draw on this research process in my own practice with couples.

There were three phases to the research. At each phase, the couple engaged on their own and then again as a couple. Narration of their early relationship, narration of their later relationship, and then they engage in up to three analysis sessions with me. This process took over 16 months, enabling consistency in the narratives to become evident, as well as allowing the couples to reflect on their romantic relationship and the changes that have taken place.

From the enormous amount of data, I took just four main themes that all the couples returned to frequently to present in my thesis.[00:10:00]

I drew on both critical discourse inquiry and narrative inquiry to develop my analysis methodology. I developed a three-stage analysis methodology to ensure integrity to my work. I used Fairclough's three steps of description, interpretation and explanation as a framework, but then I drew on sociological theory to adapt and borrow from a range of research approaches.

I read through the transcript three times. First, I looked to describe the stories, thinking about themes, asking questions about meanings, similarities and differences. Then I looked to interpret them, looking for assumed understandings, repetition and intention of the narrator.

Finally, I began with the participants, where possible, to explain the stories, asking what the narrative is trying to persuade us of. And how are people positioned forming identities? How are understandings and ideologies conformed to or resisted? Similar questions were asked about the photos and mementos.

I won't go into my methodology fully here, but would be happy to talk to people at a later stage about any of it, if anyone would like to.

As there were just four couples, and as the analysis was not a formal process, I did not feel comfortable talking about findings from my research. Instead, I liken the research and analysis process to being in a garden. We meandered together through the couple's relationships with them guiding where we went.

We looked at some aspects of their relationship in more detail than others and went backwards and forwards in time. We mulled together about the dynamics of their relationships and the impact of society's expectations on them. We then developed understandings of how their relationship has developed and changed.

The couples drew on particular discourses to understand their relationships. The Western romantic relationship discourse was drawn on by the heterosexual couples. This understanding of romantic relationships permeates many areas of our British culture and the wider Western culture. It's seen in books, films, arts, TV and other media.

It's the common ideology that we'll find that one that special person who's going to be our soulmate that we'll be in love with and be loved by for the rest of our lives. This ideology is changing, but at the time my couples met was dominated by predominantly heterosexual relationships, in which the male as a prince takes the leading role in courting his princess.

The heterosexual element to this ideology has undergone significant change in recent years as we have expectations of permanency. The long levity nature of the discourse is supported and perpetuated by the state for neoliberal reasons, through support mechanisms, and tax and religion.

The evangelical Christian relationship discourse is similar, but has the extra dimension of being that sexual intimacy should only occur within marriage and also that the male is expected to take on the lead role spiritually, financially, and leading the family in faith. Women have a more subservient and serving role. The ideology was shaped by Victorian society where Christian church dominated the national moral stance and politics.

However, when analysing the data for these formal discourses, it was possible to see how the individual's historical family narratives also unconsciously underpin their understanding of relationships, often causing clashes.

An example of this is seen in my study where Queenie's understanding of marriage is that they'd stay together forever, whatever. She also had a feminist discourse. But when Stefan didn't respond as she expected in her relationship, perhaps in expressing love or needing some space from her, she would return to her understandings as a child in an abusive family, and feel unloved, as she believed she didn't deserve to be loved anyway. Her romantic beliefs and her feminist stance were overridden, by her historical family narrative.

An unexpected thread between all the stories was that the non-autistic women had all been brought up either in abusive backgrounds or very restricted religious backgrounds. This led each of them to explain that they did not have much self-confidence before meeting their partner.

Those from abusive backgrounds wanted to find partners who were stable and consistent, factors that were missing in the adult relationships that they saw in their childhoods. This is a pattern that I've come across a number of times since starting my study when talking to neuromixed romantic couples.

Expectations about gender was also bound up in these understanding of romantic relationships. Scylla and Becky had both been in previous heterosexual relationships in which their romantic discourses formed the relationship ideals. They rejected these ideals in the same-sex couple relationship. They described a predominant gay [00:15:00] understanding of relationships, which they called the gay scene. But they were clear in rejecting this model of how same-sex relationships should be done. They created their own understanding of how to develop their relationship that was independent of other models.

When analysing the couple's relationship narratives, it was possible to see the tensions that arose in their early relationships. before they knew about autism. For the heterosexual couples, the lived experience of their relationship often did not meet the romantic expectations from the Western romantic discourse or the Evangelical Christian romantic discourse.

So looking at expressions of love. In considering the heterosexual relationships first, each of the autistic men carried out the significant romantic gestures expected of them by their then girlfriends. They were slow to initiate the relationship and needed prompting, but that was overlooked by the initial attraction.

They all carefully organised proposals. For example, Charlie took Debbie out for a meal, got down on one knee and proposed, and he'd arranged for flowers to be brought to Debbie. He found it all excruciatingly embarrassing to do this in public. All of the weddings were very traditional church weddings, with the women in princess-like wedding dresses and the men looking handsome in suits.

Charlie in particular knew how to celebrate Valentine's Day, etc. And Stefan made great efforts for a 40th birthday. All in all, there were plenty of times when the women felt loved, as they lived out their romantic expectations. However, there were also significant romantic gestures that were missing.

Compliments, flowers just because, surprises, and discussions about emotions. It's possible that the men followed the romantic scripts that they'd picked up from common romantic understandings seen through films, etc. They knew what they needed to do to propose, that Valentine's Day shouldn't be ignored, and that big birthdays require special treatment, unlike insignificant birthdays. But when these socially prescribed scripts were not available, the men were unable to make romantic gestures. And there are fewer of these scripts for married couples.

As for discussions with emotional content, none of the autistic men were keen on these, but the women saw them as essential for emotional support.

The women felt confused. Both Queenie and Freya lacked self-confidence from their childhoods, and the lack of expression of love just confirmed to them that they were not worthy of love. Debbie had been feisty in becoming independent of her parents, and she found that she felt controlled when Charlie gave her presents, as well as disappointed when he didn't meet her emotional needs.

Charlie was receiving mixed messages: “Show me you love me, but don't control me”. The men loved their wives and wanted to make them feel loved, but they didn't understand the unspoken expectations.

The men all valued time with their wives. This was the way in which they felt loved. Before children came along, they were able to spend a lot of time together, but this diminished after becoming parents.

This was something they all found difficult, but they accepted, and they look forward to when the children have grown up and they could have more time together again. This is contrary to the findings of other research in which the autistic person craves time alone.

Becky and Cilla had fewer expectations of each other's expressions of love. Cilla gave Becky some flowers when they first met, and they both liked to tell the story that ends with Becky waving the flowers around and having no idea what to do with them. Becky has been a tremendous help to Cilla, offering physical and organisational support at her own cost, and this gives Cilla confidence that Becky must love her to do this for her.

And Becky appreciates little tokens of effort that Cilla makes to show love, such as notes.

Debbie, Freya and Toby, drawing on the evangelical Christian teaching, all had an unquestioned expectation that men should lead the household. Charlie didn't have this expectation. He did not see this inequality in society around him, and he expected that his relationship with Debbie would be equal in responsibility.

Debbie was disappointed that he didn't leave the family, especially in organising their finances. She felt that they were failing and felt like an outsider in the church. However, as she and I considered her narratives, we could see that her fear of being controlled and then let down, as she'd experienced as a child, meant that actually she didn't trust Charlie to take care of the finances, but felt more control, more confident when she was in control. Her historical family narrative was in tension with her relationship ideology, causing unhappiness without her understanding why.

Freya's husband, Toby, tried but was not able to lead the family in the way that they both understood Christian expectations, which caused them both tension [00:20:00] and feelings of failure.

And Freya didn't want to lead either. Queenie was quite happy to take the lead in her family as it became evident that Stefan was not able to organise the household. All of the men were very happy to carry out tasks assigned to them. and did not have gender expectations for these tasks. Becky and Cilla organised their relationship and home around their abilities and skills.

All the non-autistic partners felt as though there were times when they had to take on the role of mother, carer, or teacher. Cilla was happy to do this in exchange for the many ways in which Becky supported her. But Debbie, Queenie, and Freya all resented this at times, but to different degrees. This is borne out by other research by Wilson.

I wonder if the autistic partners find it more difficult to plan and organise household management tasks than non-autistic people. But research would need to be carried out in neuromixed couples with a female as autistic to consider this further. Other research suggests that running the household is often the responsibility of women anyway, according to Cudson Martin.

The Western romantic discourse assumes communication as a primary way in which couples are intimate and meet each other's emotional needs. Each of the research couples valued and recognised the importance of communication. Toby found communicating with Freya and everyone else very difficult and this became a major concern in their relationship.

All of the others talked a huge amount and attempted to understand each other. However, they did have barriers to communication. Use of unspoken cues when non-autistic partners employed tone or implied meaning led the autistic partner to complain that people should say what they mean. There were times when each partner had different assumptions about the meanings of words and these needed to be checked.

The autistic participants also got upset when their partners used language which implied that autism was a deficit rather than a difference.

The autistic participants all found expressing themselves verbally, particularly in relation to emotions, difficult, which left the non-autistic people feeling rejected and making them even less confident in themselves as being loved.

There was a significant difference in the way that the autistic and non-autistic partners dealt with conflict. The autistic participants were aggrieved that their non-autistic partners would be very emotional when there was conflict. Sometimes the non-autistic partners were upset with something outside of the home, but they would come home and take it out on the autistic partner by criticising them and getting cross with them for something unrelated. They were illogical in applying their frustration.

The autistic partners expressed that they could feel unloved at these points. They usually dealt with conflict by removing themselves from the situation until they'd processed their own thoughts and emotions. Or their partner would calm down. There's an assumption that the way that non-autistic people deal with stress by being touchy with everyone is normal and it's okay.

But this may need to be challenged in a neuromixed romantic relationship. Perhaps the non-autistic person is deficient in not being able to focus their stress on the issue that is causing it and not being logical. However, there were also times when there was stress between the couple but the autistic person again withdrew from the high level of emotion, leaving the non-autistic person feeling rejected and frustrated as nothing could be resolved or changed.

Autism can be characterised as lacking in emotion, according to Davidson and Orsini, who challenge this. The autistic participants in the study expressed deep emotions, which they often struggled to deal with one male participant saying, “I seem to understand my emotions and being vulnerable as something negative rather than a positive step to challenge myself and grow.” And later he added, “Even my own emotions are outside of my comfort zone. They're part of me, but I can't deal with them”. Their partners recognised that at times they'd hurt their autistic partners and had upset them.

Two of the couples got together whilst the autistic male was at university.

Stefan and Toby had university friends Freya, their non-autistic girlfriends, joined their social circle. They assumed that friends were important to their future husbands. Charlie had just returned from living abroad so Debbie thought that accounted for his lack of friends.

After the heterosexual couples had been together for a few years and had children, it became apparent that the autistic men did not require many friends or opportunities to socialise, in contrast to earlier impressions. All of them expressed that they just enjoyed being with their wives. Although emotional connection was important to them, their wives offered as much as they needed.

The non-autistic women had all assumed that they would socialise as a couple with other couples and families, and had gone through a process of grieving this, then resisting their expectations and feelings of not being included in social groups, as they found new ways to socialise without their spouses.

Becky and Cilla both have disabilities [00:25:00] that take up a lot of time to organise around, so Becky being overwhelmed with socialising is just seen as one need amongst many that they negotiate and accommodate.

So we've looked at some of the tensions. In the panel session, we will consider how the couples have come to reframe their relationships in the light of understanding about autism, and how they therefore have managed the tensions that I've described here.

Hayley: Thank you for joining us today, and thank you, Viv, for sharing your research. It was very interesting.

Today, I will be presenting the research I did as part of my Masters at Staffordshire University, before I joined Autistica. As a research assistant in my master's research, I explored how couples where one partner is autistic and the other is non-autistic maintain their romantic relationship.

During this presentation, I will discuss why I did this research by design choice and touch on some of my findings before joining Viv in a panel discussion for a deeper dive into our findings.

I have used simplified language throughout this presentation as it can be quite lengthy to describe a couple where one person is autistic and the other is non-autistic.

Therefore, I have used the capital letter A to symbolise the autistic partner and NA for the non-autistic partner. I couldn't find an agreed definition to describe these types of couples. After speaking to the autistic community, I decided to use the following terminology of neuromixed couples referring to couples with different neurotypes within the relationship.

I considered also how to define romantic relationship maintenance and use the following definition: An ongoing process throughout the relationship of actions, activities and thoughts on an that sustain the goal of the couple's relationship, whether staying together, having a satisfying relationship, or other outcomes.

In this context, it was important how the couples viewed themselves in their romantic relationship. I wanted to be transparent and share the reason why I got involved in this research, which I shared with each of my participants. On a personal level, I am autistic and in a relationship with a non-autistic person.

We have a healthy relationship and my partner is incredibly understanding and accepting of my autistic identity. But like any couple, we have experienced challenges while being together. For us, this was things like moving in with each other, which really triggered my dislike of change, despite how much I wanted to live with my partner.

When I looked for resources that might help with challenges, we felt there were no options, but when there were options, they were focused on the deficits of the autistic partner, which can promote the idea that the autistic partner is the problem. At the time, I was doing my masters in applied research and decided to research how A and N/A couples can maintain the romantic relationships in the hopes that future understanding can lead to an improvement in the resources available.

In the past, it has been widely believed that autistic people don't want romantic relationships. This is based on the attitude of others towards autistic people, that difficulties, such as socialising, means they would not want a romantic relationship. This is a myth and more research has found out that most autistic people do want a relationship but can struggle with starting one and maintaining it.

Healthy and satisfying relationships are important for all people. Autistic adults have a lower quality of life than a general population and it has been found that a positive predictor of quality of life for a sample of 370 UK autistic support and being in a relationship. More needs to be done to understand how autistic people can initiate and maintain romantic relationships to improve their quality of life.

A special interest group on autism, sexuality and intimate relationships highlighted this when they found that a top priority for future research was how to support healthy and satisfying romantic relationships. These priorities were helped to helped to be set with the voices of autistic people. So, can a relationship work when partners have different neurotypes?

Double Empathy Theory suggests that those with two different neurotypes experience difficulties interacting with and understanding one another due to differences in the way they experience the world. This could suggest that people of the same neurotype, such as two autistic people, may find it easier to understand and interact with each other.

Stransdale found in their survey that autistic adults found that participants with A partners were more satisfied with their [00:30:00] relationships than those with NA partners. So does this mean A-NA couples relationships can't be maintained? When I began my literature review in 2022, I found that there was a lack of research into how A-NA relationships can be maintained.

I mostly found research that highlighted the challenges, often focusing on the deficits of the autistic person and how their non-autistic partner supports them. Studies generally only included the views of one partner and also sometimes recruited non-autistic partners from support services. This disheartened me and has created quite a bleak picture of the A-NA relationship.

These are some of the disheartening findings I found. Things like negative stereotypes of autism, internalised stigma that autistic people face due to the mistreatment of non-autistic people in the past, loneliness and a lack of emotional support for non-autistic partners, And the list goes on.

I was really interested in what A-NA partners can offer one another. Some studies I found suggested that autistic people may provide positive traits for a romantic relationship, such as reliability, loyalty, and steadiness. Non-autistic people can also help autistic people with socialisation and communication, as found in some studies.

Some studies have also researched the factors that facilitate the relationship of A-NA couples. Factors included sharing and similarity, respect, communication and working on the relationship, the support and care that couples had for one another and the strength-based roles of each partner.

There is a lack of research on how A-NA couples can maintain their relationship and when they do they are small sample sizes. There are also difficulties in finding professionals who understand autism or have experience or basic understanding of neurodiverse couples. This means there is a lack of resources that are evidence-based to help these couples should they need it. For my research, I decided to take the perspective of autism as a difference rather than a disorder and to focus on the strengths and experiences of both A and NA partners.

This was to help improve evidence-based understanding for professionals to support healthy A-NA relationships and improve quality of life. I was also interested in the emotional wellbeing of A-NA couples. This is because emotions can be experienced differently for autistic people.

Autistic people may experience meltdowns or shutdowns, which are a reaction to extreme distress, such as from sensory overwhelm or anxiety. A meltdown can include a range of behaviours, including crying, self-injury, shouting and other outward signs of distress. A shutdown is when someone becomes zoned out and unresponsive to the environment.

Healthy romantic relationships can improve the quality of life of autistic people. It was interesting to find out if any strengths of A-NA relationships can help with difficulties such as emotional overwhelm.

Based on my literature search and my personal interests, I chose a research question. What are the experiences of relationship maintenance for neuromixed couples regarding support, strengths, challenges, and emotional wellbeing?

I had three objectives as part of this research question. The first, the strengths A-NA partners bring and the support they offer one another. Secondly, any challenges they face and how these are experienced and dealt with. And three, experiences of emotional wellbeing. In designing my study, I considered my approach carefully to answer the research question. I decided for the research question to be exploratory as couples experiences are extremely varied in nature.

And as I was leaning towards conducting interviews with couples, I realised that I would not probably interview that many couples and didn't want to generalise all my findings. I took a qualitative approach to understand experiences and used semi-structured interviews so I could set some questions to ask to meet the research objective, but also to allow flexibility for exploration of the research topic and for anything that the participants themselves brought to the interview.

I decided to conduct paired interviews to explore the experiences of both partners and their collective relationship and also allow both voices to be heard, which I felt has been missing in a lot of previous research. [00:35:00] I wanted to ensure participants felt comfortable throughout the research process and also that I felt prepared and comfortable as a researcher.

When designing my study, I used Autistica's research toolkit to ensure interviews were accessible and inclusive. If you would like to see this toolkit, the link is at the bottom of the page. I designed the interview questions to be clear and literal and sent participant documents that only included relevant information and limited colours to prevent sensory or information overload.

I also asked participants about their preference for identity first or person-first language when referring to autism and used this throughout the interview. Participants could also opt to fill in a participant wellbeing form to share any adjustments they may need for the interview, such as taking breaks.

I also sent interview schedules with a list of the core questions that would be asked to the participants before the interview. I felt this was important so that the participants could be prepared and ask any questions if they would like to, or even ask for a question not to be asked at all if it was sensitive or likely to cause them distress.

Seven core interview questions as part of my semi-structured interview schedule. These seven questions were asked of every single participant. Things such as, what strengths does your partner bring to your relationship? What are your views about being in a neuromixed relationship? What are your needs in a relationship? If any, what are the challenges you have been through together during your relationship?

These questions were mapped onto my three objectives to explore strengths, supports, challenges, and emotional wellbeing for how A and NA couples maintain their romantic relationships.

Other key parts of my interview schedule included providing a definition of meltdowns and shutdowns. When I felt it was appropriate during the interview, and then asking after this description, if it's something that either of them had experienced during their relationship, and if either of them had experienced a meltdown or shutdown, how they had managed these as a couple, and how they had made them feel.

I also included the question, what is the best part of your relationship, to give them a chance to focus on the positive aspects of the relationship. If I felt the interview had become a little bit more negative in the environment. I also asked icebreaker questions that were designed to enable me to understand the couple a little bit more, such as how they met, and how long they had been living together, if they had been living together, if they had children, pets, etc.

So, who were my participants? Overall, I had five couples take part in the paired interviews. All couples had one partner who self-identified as autistic, and one partner as non-autistic. One non-autistic partner self-identified as having ADHD.

I felt it was important to allow the participants to self- identify their neurotype. This is because waiting lists for diagnosis are long, and there may be many adults in romantic relationships who have not yet been diagnosed with autism. Four out of five couples indicated that they were living in North America. For I have found in previous literature that some of the research that has focused on the facilitators as well as the barriers of maintaining an A-NA romantic relationship are conducted in Australia. So I felt it was a strength that I recruited participants from North America.

Not all participants disclosed the demographics in the demographics form. This was optional to complete and not an important part of my research objectives as I wasn't willing to generalise findings to all couples’ experiences.

All participants have been given pseudonym names. When I analysed the interview data, I used Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, or IPA for short, as it can be quite difficult to say. I used IPA to explore the unique experiences of each couple, while also identifying similarities across couples. I did this by looking at each interview transcript in turn for each couple.

I delved into their life world and their own experience as it was uniquely experienced for each couple. After doing this for each couple, I then moved on to look for themes across all of the interview transcripts to explore any similarities in the way that A-NA couples maintain their romantic relationships.

The themes I found were [00:40:00] understanding and acceptance, connection, communication, Support with two sub-themes of support within the relationship and support outside of the relationship and personal space boundaries. While just looking at these, you might think that these themes probably relate to any couple, regardless of if they have different neurotypes.

There was unique ways in which these themes worked within the couples.

A and NA couples spoke about understanding and acceptance in the context of understanding and accepting a neurodiverse identity. When Constance was asked, what was the best part of your relationship? They replied with, “I think acceptance, because in my previous relationships, I felt like it was too much to ask for acceptance for who I was or am.”

Other components of understanding and acceptance for this theme included reflections on how understood and accepted partners felt. And challenges in understanding and acceptance. And also how partner neurotype was not important to some of these couples. Colin, who is not autistic, spoke about how they think neurotype is not the single determinant of relationship health and quality.

And that their partner's neurotype is 100 per cent of who they are. And they love their partner because they are their partner. I won't be going through all of my themes in depth as we only have a short time to cover in this presentation and we'll be delving further into these findings during the panel discussion and the Q&A session.

However, I wanted to include the slides just so people can see for themselves how these themes were broken down. For example, for connection, these include shared interests partners had, their value alignment, quality time they spent together, their compatibility. These help to maintain the romantic relationships.

And when connection wasn't helping to maintain the romantic relationships, partners spoke about how working on the relationship to regain connection was important.

Most participants spoke about their differences in communication style. They said how their differences in communication style that could be attributed to having different neurotypes can be a source of challenge and how adjusting to different communication styles for something that helped to resolve this challenge and how effective communication can then prevent and resolve challenges in their relationship.

Nisha spoke about how in a lot of mixed neurotype relationships, that can be a burden of one person having to bridge the miscommunication gap as they spoke how important it was for both partners to work together to improve their communication styles with each other. Communication can also prevent and resolve challenges as being able to tell your partner their needs, such as, I'm "overwhelmed, I need to leave and go home", can help prevent any challenges and maintain the relationship.

Support within the relationship. This was broken down, very practical support, such as having different strengths that some people refer to being due to their neurotypes. For example, the autistic person may be better at planning, but the non-autistic person was helpful when the autistic person needed to make a phone call.

Also how a safe space can be supportive, and also emotional support they receive from their partners. For participants who had experienced meltdowns and or shutdowns. They talked about how their partners have helped support them. Some examples included having an understanding from their partner that they might need to stop an activity that is triggering the meltdown or shutdown, or allowing their partners to retreat during the shutdown and giving them space, using alternative forms of communication or not communicating at all, or not introducing more sensory and information overwhelm.

Constance, who is autistic, spoke about how they're not for everybody, especially with the meltdowns and shutdowns. That's like a lot for people. It's good that he can support me, especially during those times. I'll speak more later during the discussion about support outside of the relationship, but here you can see the couple spoke about how relationship counselling, access support, and more awareness and understanding in wider society by professionals can help maintain their romantic relationships.

Personal space boundaries was another theme I found that actually seemed more important for the non-autistic partners than the autistic partners. Non-autistic participants spoke about how they managed their [00:45:00] wellbeing, such as free taking space, having space to enjoy their own hobbies and having independence outside of the relationship to meet needs such as socialising and enjoying their interests. Autistic people also had boundaries around their personal space, such as for managing their emotional wellbeing during the shutdown.

There are two key takeaways that I think are important to consider from the research I conducted. The first one is that understanding and acceptance is crucial for maintaining an A-NA romantic relationship.

As all neurodivergent partners express the importance of their partner understanding and accepting their identity, and this included the partner who had ADHD.

The second key takeaway is that support outside of the relationship needs to improve. For example, one of the partners spoke about how there's no meaningful evidence for how to support an autistic person during a meltdown or shutdown, leaving the couples to work out their own ideas and strategies for how to deal with their emotional wellbeing within their relationship.

Thank you so much for joining today and listening to my presentation. If you have any questions about my research or want to get in touch, you can see my email at the bottom of this slide.

Michelle: Thank you so much. So I must apologise and introduce myself. I am Dr. Michelle Newman. I'm a research fellow at Autistica. As you will have gathered, we have had some technical issues this evening but we are here now. So, thank you very much to Viv and to Hayley for pre-organising those presentations for us.

So what we're going to be doing now for the next 20-25 minutes is we've got some panel questions and a discussion that I'm going to be hosting for Vivien and Hayley to go through.

And then we have got some questions that have already come in, but if you do have more questions, please do drop them in that Q&A for us. And so I'm going to kick off by asking, how do the studies complement one another?

Hayley: So I'm happy to go first me and Viv have spent quite a bit of time like, discussing and exploring how our studies are different and similar. And basically, I think the main thing as far as how they complement each other is how we both use paired interviews when researching autistic, non-autistic couples.

This hasn't been done very much in the past research, and often only one of the partner's views would be heard, and I felt like our research gave a good opportunity for both voices to be heard, so the non-autistic and the autistic perspective together.

We also talked slightly different approaches, so I analysed my interview data using interpretive phenomenological analysis, which I'm so proud of saying that aloud because it's such a tricky word. So I was interested in the experiences of the couples in their particular life world, and the unique aspects of each couple, but also after considering the unique aspects of each couple, looking at similarities across all of the couples, but I know Viv took quite a different approach.

So I was interested in what makes people behave the way that they do, and so that's why I was looking at the discourses, their understandings of relationships, what they were expecting. And how that made them behave in the way that they did and respond to each other in the way that they did. Great.

Michelle: Thank you. So my next question for you both is how did the couples overcome or accommodate their differences? I wonder if that came up much in your conversations.

Hayley: It did a lot. This was probably one of our key things that came up in our conversations. So for my study specifically I found the theme of understanding and acceptance was probably the most crucial theme for maintaining the neuromixed relationship and overcoming differences.

And so all neurodivergent partners expressed how important it was for them, and that their neurodivergent identity was understood and accepted. And when there was challenges with understanding and acceptance, there was actually more challenges present in the relationship to them. And these were often overcome by the non-autistic partner learning more about autism, so David's sorry, not David, his, David's partner spoke about how they asked David to watch more videos and do more research about autism, and a lot of their relationship issues disappeared because he had more empathy to understand autism.

My non-autistic partner with ADHD actually also reflected on how in previous relationships he would mask disguising his true identity so that he can fit into his relationship and when he wasn't masking, the person he was in a relationship with didn't like him as much and he really appreciated that in his current relationship he didn't need to [00:50:00] mask and he could just be himself and be understood and this was much more beneficial for his wellbeing.

And then just going off on a tiny bit of a tangent, and then I'll definitely let Vivien speak, is that it comes back to the double empathy theory. So the theory suggests that people of different neurotypes might find it difficult to interact with each other, and this might hold some truth, but there is a risk of assuming that people of the same neurotype are better off in a relationship together.

One autistic partner spoke about how they had experienced mistreatment from both autistic people and non-autistic partners in the past, and that neurotype, somebody of the same neurotype, doesn't mean that their relationship is going to be better or worse for them. So overall, I think Stigma and attitudes that people of the same neurotype belong together can have implications for the relationship that people have the potential to experience.

So overall understanding and acceptance is a massive way to accommodate difference and is incredibly important so that people of different neurotypes can have healthy, satisfying relationships. Okay, that's enough. I'm going to let Vivien go.

Vivien: So mine is similar. So people had expectations of what romantic relationships would look like.

For example, that there won't be any arguments because you don't argue if you're in love with each other, or that you're going to be told that you're loved a lot or whatever it is. And when the expectations weren't met, they thought the other person was just being difficult. And so there were lots of tensions as they didn't understand why they weren't getting on.

But, once they discovered about autism, because my couples didn't realise, because they had all been together for kind of 20 years, they didn't realise that they were autistic. Once they had children and the children began to get diagnosed, then they began to look at each other and think, okay, so actually I think that's part of us as well, part of the males in three of the cases and one female.

And at that point they were able to think, hang on, the way we've been living our life, we're trying to live our life, it doesn't work weird. Us as a neuromixed couple. So they were able to reframe the way that they understood relationships. So they were able to resist the expectations that they'd had and say, actually, we're not going to live our lives like that. We're going to live them differently.

They also had to bring in their historical family narrative. So those issues, what they're expecting from the way that they were brought up came in as well. And the hurts, those kinds of things came up. Something would go wrong and somebody would feel unloved because they'd been unloved as a child.

So those things needed addressing. So really it's once they understood about autism, they understood that they were different, then they could respect each other and they could resist the things that had disappointed them before and think, okay, we can just do it differently.

Hayley: I think that was such a key similarity that looking at autism as a different And not doing things the way others would expect in society and understanding and accepting each other for how each other are and reframing their understandings was, I think, such a key similarity for both of us.

Michelle: So my next question that I've got is, are there any examples of how the couples did overcome and accommodate these differences? I think you both slightly touched on that, but I wonder if you've got anything else to that's specifically about how they overcame these differences.

Vivien: Okay, so I'm going to talk first on this.

So, the first aspect of tension I talked about was about expressions of love. Once they found out about autism, began to learn about it, the non-autistic person knew probably not to expect spontaneous expressions of love. There aren't scripts for the everyday ways of how to behave. And so they began to realise that they needed to ask for what they wanted.

If they wanted to have a cuddle, they'd ask for a cuddle. If they wanted flowers or something, they'd say it'd be nice to have some flowers sometime soon. They would give clear steers. And they found that quite difficult at first. So some people felt like if they really loved me, they would just do it, which is part of the old discourse that they got, the romantic ideas.

But, for the couples who managed or the individuals who managed to work their way around that and just think that's just the way it is. I just need to ask and accept it when it comes. That's fine. The other thing was that they understood each other's love languages and how they received love.

So for one autistic man, he liked to hold hands and his wife didn't so much, but she went with that because she said if he wasn't asking to hold my hand, I knew I'd know that he doesn't love me. So that's the way he does love. So that's the way we'll do it. What really interested me was that all of the couples all of the autistic people really valued time with their spouse, which went against other research.

So they [00:55:00] really liked the intimacy of going out together. And when they first got married, they found it more difficult once they got children, because the time was squashed. So they had to talk about that as a couple and, and work out how much time they would spend together.

But they also really look forward to the future when the children have left home and retirement and stuff, and they can spend lots of time together again.

And then we talked about positioning and roles. So, the male lead in the household, was just an expectation that came up from the couples that I'd got. Not everybody would have that. But again, it was something the men didn't do that, or the autistic people didn't do that. And so that caused disappointment against what they were expecting. So they had to work out how they were going to do that together. And the men were very happy to just be asked to do things.

They were very happy to have roles. They had no... they seem to have absolutely no gender expectations, so there was never an idea of I don't do that because I'm a man or anything like that. They're happy to do anything, but it did need to be negotiated. And obviously, scheduled tasks were easier than unscheduled tasks.

Becky, the autistic lady in the gay relationship, She did a lot of organising when they first got together, but that was acknowledged that, to some extent, that was masking. But because of their disabilities, she has had to carry on doing that. So she does do the organising, but it has a huge impact on her.

And then she has shutdown episodes when she needs to withdraw and get space to be able to cope again. Hayley, did you want to say something on that?


Hayley: Yeah, so just going back to the positioning roles you were talking about. So, one of my favourite quotes. Not quite, because I've not got it right in front of me, but one of my favourite comments that one of the autistic people said was that they positioned their roles around their strengths and they had completely different strengths from one another.


So they were talking about how complementary they were to their partner, and how these differences, it didn't matter that there was differences because they were overcome by supporting each other with the best strengths. So things like the autistic partner was really good at organising, so she was planning everything for them and her partner was much more sociable, able to support her when going out in public spaces or making a phone call, anything like that.

I think the main thing for accommodating And it comes back to autism as a difference rather than a disorder, that the autistic people had a completely different way of communicating than their non-autistic partners, and they spoke to their partners, a lot of them saying, ‘I need, things to be more literal I don't like subtexts or metaphors. I want you to say things as they are for me’, but there was also reflections that the non-autistic partner would never be able to completely replicate exactly what the autistic person needed. And actually that was okay, that they needed to learn how to meet in the middle with the communication styles and adjust it basically in a way that works for both of them.

Vivien: I found that, and also they had to learn to ask for clarity if they thought there was any miscommunication. And also laugh at eachother, I suppose, for using nonverbal language when that wasn't gonna be interpreted. But there was a lot of frustration with things like that. They also communicated about planning, so there was a lot of sitting down and talking about what was gonna happen in the long-term future, in the day, in the week ahead, that kind of thing.

Most, my couples really valued communication, and a lot of them talked a huge amount in order to make sure they they did understand each other. And they talked about understanding each other's language really and sometimes they didn't understand the words, they needed clarity on what they meant by particular words.

One of my couples did struggle with communication and that has been a problem to them, and that, that's an ongoing problem, which is difficult. And we also talked about socialisation. The non-autistic people in my study socialised outside of the home because they wanted to socialise more.

They worked out between them that was a method that worked well. There was some guilt with that sometimes, but they also realised they had to let their partner know in advance where they were going, when they were going, how long they were going to be out for. There's some difficulties with not necessarily getting back at exactly the time that they said they were going to get back, and maybe needed to leave that a little bit more vague.

Okay. And that the autistic partner, except Becky, just got their socialisation needs from their spouse, which was a lovely thing. And there was also some social coaching. So the autistic participants really valued going out with their partners and their partners leading in social events and picking up conversations and being able to be witty.

They'd all chosen, they'd all chosen partners who were [01:00:00] extrovert and that the partners had chosen people who were steady. So they chose those things in each other. So they really valued the help and also their partner interpreting the situation for them and saying, “Yeah, I know that this is what this person said, but this is what they meant.” Which was they found really useful.

The person…so the non-autistic person sometimes found that a burden. So again, that was something that needed negotiating or it needs re-scripting. So they sometimes would think of themselves as a mother figure. But that might be a discourse thing again.

If it changes to become actually that's what you do as a partner, then it becomes an okay thing to do.

Michelle: Thank you both. And I can see that there's lots of personal experiences and comments coming into the chat. So thank you everybody that's adding to that.

So it's great to hear some things about what people are doing about overcoming. Were there any particular factors that you found help to maintain relationships?

Vivien: Yes, again, I'll start with this because I'd only got four couples and it was a really deep experience for them. Saw them for hours and hours. I've got some really interesting stuff and I went in without any expectations. So I saw what came out. So one of the things that came out of it is probably the same for all couples was how important a couple identity was.

So. In rejecting how they'd expected to be as a couple, as a romantic couple, how a couple should be, they formed their own identity of how they were. And that might be completely different to other people, but they said, “This is who we are, this is how we're doing marriage, and it works for us. And that was really important in helping them to get through difficult times and to look forward to the future as well. So it made them much more resilient.

They also rehearsed positive memories. So there was, and some of that was really conscious. So they went over the positive stories, the things that they've done in the past, things that have happened that have been really good and how good their relationship was.

And they again, and they looked at photographs, they had photographs and things, and they drew on those really consciously. To, again, get through the times that are a little bit more difficult to remind themselves that there are good times ahead, even though it's sometimes difficult.

The last thing that I found really interesting was self-confidence. So, the autistic women, the non-autistic women particularly, all said they've got low self-confidence. But by the time they, and then their confidence dropped before they understood about autism, when they felt that the whole relationship was failing, it dropped. Once they found out about autism, they understood each other differently. And they understood that their partner was committed to them, really loved them, was never going to leave them as a stable, all those lovely characteristics that go with autism. Their confidence really rose. And yeah, and it just enabled them to do all sorts of other things as well, and to feel very secure in their relationship.

Hayley: Yeah, I think that was similar to me, especially when couple autistic, and my partner. Sorry, I will refine my words. My autistic participants and the participant I had who had ADHD were talking about how important it was to be able to unmask in their relationships, so coming into their own being themselves.

And actually how that was raising self-confidence within the relationship to I think most of my themes are pretty much kind of showing like protective factors on how to maintain a relationship. So yeah, like personal space boundaries, which was. specifically important actually for the non-autistic partners and was more important for the autistic partners in the context of if they were having a shutdown, they needed to have a safe space to be able to do that.

I think one of the most important things I think I found from my research is how there needs to be more support outside of the relationship as well as within it. So, partners spoke about how they supported one another, which is a protective factor, so spoke about the emotional support they gave each other for meltdowns and shutdowns, or they were able to tell their partner if they were overwhelmed in public and they were able to go home.

But one person spoke about how there's no scientific understanding of how to manage meltdowns and shutdowns. And as a couple, they've had to try lots of different things. And I think that support outside of the relationship could be a really crucial protective factor, having more research and evidence-based understanding of managing meltdowns and shutdowns in adulthood.

Some people also expressed how external stressors were a massive challenge for them. So things going on outside of the relationship, like stigma, or views about neurodiversity, sexual and gender identity was impacting on them in a way that they had no control over. It was outside of themselves.

So I think, yeah, just overall more research and better quality services would be an amazing protective factor for couples in the future.[01:05:00]

Michelle: I think there's some really a lot of the comments and that I can see coming in and the questions that are coming in are definitely resonating with some of the comments that both of you have picked up in your research, which just demonstrates obviously how important this is a topic.

And so, this…my final question for the panel session relates to I can see a question that came in from Aisling which was talking about what has come up in terms of advice and recommendations.


So, I wonder if either of you have any recommendations for future research and how might this feed into resources and support for neuromixed couples?

Hayley: So yeah, obviously more evidence-based understanding in meltdowns and shutdowns for sure. One of my participants actually was working in mental health services which was really interesting to hear her perspective of how she thought. therapy could improve for autistic people, and not just autistic people, the autistic and non-autistic person in therapy, and they came up with the state an example of if there's an incompatibility of needs.

So the autistic person might be hypersensitive to touch, but their non-autistic partner's love language is physical affection. That's a conflicting need. And if a therapist says you need to let him cuddle you because that's how he shows love, that's overlooking the needs of the autistic person. So how important it is that therapy understands both aspects and the whole dynamic that is going on for those couples.

Vivien: Yes. I started off thinking I was going to write a book or, something with tips for how to do successful relationships if you're in a neurologically mixed relationship. But when I researched, I thought, no, it's deeper than that. I think it's about understanding. If we understand each other, like we've been saying throughout really, then you can have, you can live with each other much more successfully. So this idea of understanding where your expectations come from I think it's really important because we can assume that something is, somebody's being really difficult or that the difficulties are to do with autism or something or not being autistic.

But actually, I think a lot of it's to do with expectations. And if you can dig down and find out why you think your marriage or your relationship should be going the way that, you think it should, why do you think that? Then you can question those assumptions. Think, yeah, why do I think that actually there's no good reason why I do. It doesn't have to be like that at all. We can do it very differently.

So I think, for, in terms of therapy, it's really getting down to why people have those expectations and are they, do they want to change them really? And how could they change them and how can they live differently together and understand each other differently?

In terms of future research. Somebody asked the question about had I looked at couples where the female was autistic, and the male wasn't, I only did four couples looked at four couples, because I spent so many hours with them. That's all I can imagine. And a lot of research is very, it's just questionnaires and things that cover a lot of people.

So I knew I wasn't gonna be able to generalise, but I wanted to look really deeply for couples to find out how their relationships work. And unfortunately, because of different, there was an issue in terms of Autistica's mailing list for ages, so I couldn't advertise through there. So the couples I got, the three were heterosexual with the male as autistic, got my gay couple, so I was pleased to get a gay couple.

I did have a consultancy couple who, where the woman was a female. And that was interesting, but obviously I can't draw on their research, but that's something I really would, I really think that's important because Some of what I say might be to do with gender, and if I'd have got couples where the female was autistic, I would have been able to see a little bit more whether some of the issues were to do with gender or to do with autism.

So, and the other thing I felt I'd like to see is more research with, other cultures. I live down in Devon, so, it's very white down here. And I would really like to see what other cultures discourses are and expectations of relationships and how they play out in people's autistic couple relationships.

Michelle: I think there's some really good points that you picked up there, actually, which are about some of the challenges in research and psychology research that we really do struggle. We've had questions come in actually about Art talking about those sample sizes and it's really, I think that's such a key thing that you've said about how we can ask surveys and you can get a lot of people to answer surveys, but actually definitely like the value of the work that you and Hayley have both done how deep you ou can go into examining [01:10:00] that and following it up with that, and that is actually one of the reasons why I think we have those small samples. But actually, that doesn't mean it invalidates the research. It's actually what you guys have had come out I think it's just really important.

And I think there's another point just to pick up with them in here as well, as I think, there's a lot of conversation here that you both talked about mental health, actually, which really resonates with the Autistica Goals about actually thinking about mental health and therapy and support for autistic people that works with the needs of autistic people rather than it be in general with everyone. So I think there's some really important points there.

Okay. Have either of you got anything else to add before we go to some of the questions that we have had that have come in from our audience today?

Vivien and Hayley: No.

Michelle: Okay, brilliant. So, we have had some, a lot of questions, some really great questions and we don't have enough time to go through all of them, I don't think, today, so I do apologise, but we might try to answer some of them afterwards and add them to there. But, so some of the questions that we've got come up is, one of them was, hopefully a really quick question we had near the start was for you Vivien was, when did you conduct your research?

Vivien: So I'm doing it now. I'm doing the write up at the moment. I'm guessing that the question was to do with the expectations of relationships seeming quite old-fashioned. I think one of the things, I've realized is that expectations change quite quickly. over the years and also the, the different places.

But we have this general idea of what relationships are and our expectations and they come through films and media books. So, it's the kind of stuff we see there. But what I was looking at was the expectations that the couples had. or the individuals had when they first got together.

And they will have formed those a lot in their teenage years and in their early twenties to some extent. And the, these have been together for a long time. So this was 20, 30 years ago, which is probably why they seem dated. I was, I'm not drawing on what is, it's what they were drawing on when they formed their ideas.

Michelle: Thank you. There were some questions actually about the age ranges that both of you had in your groups.

Hayley: So actually a lot of mine I think were in their 20s, so I don't have, I can't completely back this up because everybody didn't fill out their demographic forms, but there was, I only had one couple who were in their 40s or 50s and had been married for quite a while. Interestingly, this was the couple who had more challenges in their relationship than the younger couples, and the younger couples seem to have much more like neurodiverse, or seeing autism as a difference rather than a disorder kind of views. But I'm saying that kind of anecdotally from what I understood from the interviews myself as being part of the interviews. Because it's such a small sample size that I can't, yeah, I can't make any generalisations.

Vivien: I could build on that though Hayley, so other research has said the same. And, and there's this spectrum really that and that my research bore out my four couples bore out that when people were using a positive and neurodiverse approach to autism, their relationship was stronger for one couple as their relationship deteriorated, they drew on a deficit discourse more and more.

And the research said, the research by this lady was Lewis said that is common. Using a deficit model leads to less satisfaction. In this case, I think they were using a deficit model because they were getting less satisfied. So, trying to use a neuro typical, sorry, a neuro, what am I saying? A difference approach helped with my couples.

Michelle: Brilliant, thank you. So my next question is this is a general question. So I've seen a real theme that's come up in the comments and the questions that's been coming through that a lot of people have been commenting about interrelationships and about change. And I wonder if either of you whether that conversation and that narrative about change and managing change came up much in the work that either of you did?

Vivien: Yes, I was really interested to see that comment. And I hadn't put that together about the end of a relationship being a change. But it did remind me something I hadn't been able to talk about some time that with my with some of the autistic participants when they met their partners, they fell in love with them.

They did want to carry on the relationship. They wanted to get engaged. They wanted to get married. They wanted to have children, but they procrastinated time and time again. And it was about change. It's not that they didn't love their partner. It's not that they didn't want that future, but that they were anxious that if they made that step, what they have now is good. If they made that step, maybe it wouldn't be, maybe something would go wrong. So I think that whole change is quite, [01:15:00] concern is quite significant.

Hayley: Yeah. So it wasn't a research focus for me to look at the end of a relationship and change more about the maintenance of a relationship, but it did actually come up organically in one of the interviews I was having.

The couple who were experiencing a lot of challenges when I asked them what is it that helps to maintain your relationship I asked the question because they were finding. Sorry, let me just process what I'm trying to say, just one second. They were really finding it difficult to find strengths and supports that help them in their relationship. So I just, asked them the straightforward question, “What does maintain your relationship?”

And they said that it's like a routine. The autistic person said it's a routine. They're used to it. The change is scary. And this is how they've been living their life. They know they're going to have food on the table. They know that they're safe and secure. So why would they make that change? And actually they weren't very, they weren't very well connected in a relationship. They were trying to work on a relationship to regain that connection. But I thought it was a really. Good reflection in relation to the question that Michelle's just brought out from the audience, that change probably is a massive part and has a big impact on relationships.

Michelle: Brilliant, thank you. I think, yeah, there's such interesting things that are coming out that a lot of people don't actually necessarily think about those factors as change. We see it a lot in other topics that we're looking at so thinking about employment, that aspect of change, that it's just, it seems such a kind of like standard point in life that happens, for example, coming to the end of working life.And yeah, definitely, I think, a concept of how people go about managing change and actually. Not making the change because it's easier to stick with it.

So this is a question actually, Hayley, directly for you that came in from Richard, which was did you consider using both paired and individual interviews so that you could have a look across that paired conversation as well as the individual viewpoint?

Michelle: I like this idea. I do actually think it's a very good idea. I didn't consider it. I considered either using individual interviews or paired interviews. I ended up choosing paired interviews due to ethics because it was a Master's study. Basically we felt it would cause less distress if both couples were prepared. sorry, both partners were prepared with the interview schedule. And that basically they wouldn't be having these conversations in the absence of their partner, so they wouldn't be left wondering what did my partner say during the interview, and there'd be no secrecy between them, they were prepared and there's no secrecy.

I did touch on the idea of a quantitative survey though and asking people to give answers to questions that I included in my interview schedule, but separately, and doing so giving an ID for couple, if that makes sense. So couple one, would have the ID 11 and 12. So basically, then you can match the two partners together and I can match their answers together, but they would have answered separately.

And it's less what's the word I'm trying to look for? It's less intimate than them having a personal conversation with an interviewer. It's just a questionnaire they filled in, so I explored whether that might be less distressing, but I was much more interested in qualitative research.

Vivien: You're muted.

Michelle: Yeah. Oh, it's going to happen once this evening because everything else is happening this evening! [laughs]

There were, there's some other questions that are coming up that, and one of them that I thought was quite interesting was, have you looked or is there any research that looks at the comparison across autistic and non-autistic relationships with other forms of neurodiversity?

Or an autistic and autistic relationship. So those different kind of characteristics of relationships, and where are there differences or similarities?

Vivien: Yeah, I'll take this. I think there are but obviously, there are different kinds of research. So, and often looking for things in a slightly different way, but they are out there. I've read various ones and there's quite a few similarities between ADHD and autistic relationships. But it's hard because they're all so different. It's hard to, yeah, I don't think about the strategy. It's hard to bring this to mind.

Michelle: And so one of my final questions that we've got is actually thinking about future work. I know, Vivien, that you touched on this actually thinking about the who in the relationship was autistic.

But I wonder if either of you have got any particular [01:20:00] thoughts on where you would like to focus your future research or your future work?

Vivien: Want to go first, Hayley?

Hayley: Yeah, sure. So, at the moment I'm working with Autistica as a research assisistant, so there is lots of projects we've got on the go at the moment. Michelle's nodding her head. Lots of exciting stuff going on. But yes, as a personal research interest, I would love to do much more relationship research. Maybe PhD in the future, I don't know. We'll see. But for now, I'm focusing on all of Autistica's Goals.

Vivien: And I think for me, as I said earlier, I think it would be really valuable to look at neurologically mixed relationships in other cultures, but in the Western world, because I've not seen anything really on that. And I think it'd be really interesting to see how those cultural understandings of life yeah, cause tension or don't cause tension. They might make, might make things easier in lots of ways in families where there's a wider family unit and more people involved. I don't know. I think I'd be really interested to find out more about that.

Michelle: Thank you ever so much. It is just after seven o'clock this evening. So, that's been amazing. Obviously, with all the technical difficulties that we've had this evening, but there's been lots of really good comments that have come through and I can see that people have taken quite a lot from this evening.

If we haven't answered your question or… hopefully we've managed to capture all of them in the questions we've done, but we will try to do anything we haven't picked up. Hopefully we will try and pick up later. This session is being recorded.

All that basically has left me is to say a big thank you to Vivien and to Hayley for this evening and for coping with everything that's happened this evening. So, basically for answering your questions it's been an absolute pleasure to have you both here.

Now obviously just as a reminder, we talked about at the start that we do acknowledge that some of the topics that we've talked about could be a bit difficult for people. So, if you do need to speak to somebody, please do speak to either somebody that is a trusted person to you or to contact the Samaritans by calling 116 123, or emailing jo@samaritans.org. Thank you ever so much for coming this evening and have a great rest of the evening.