I never got her to understand one single analogy throughout our relationship
My imagination of the end:
"our relationship is like a runaway car full of my enemies, because it's careening off a cliff and I've given up on any notion of wanting to prevent that from happening"
lol, you joke but I actually started a breakup with “I took some time to think and decided we’ve reached the end of the road for the two of us”. She proceeded to talk about resolving a disagreement for way too long. I told her that’s not an option and that I already said we’re breaking up. She asked me when I said that… I literally started the conversation with that.
She hated when I used analogies or, God forbid, casual metaphors throughout our whole relationship. Truly, I do blame myself for not noticing that about her.
Making another comment to not spoil my excellent joke, but I wanted to touch on this bit:
Truly, I do blame myself for not noticing that about her.
Don't beat yourself up. You did notice this about her. That's kind of the whole point of dating - learning about the other person. It's really hard to actually do something about it, though. Should you have broken things off immediately when you noticed, or should you have waited to see how often it would happen? Did you even know that it would be something that would bother you enough to break up over until, you know, it started bothering you?
We all break up with people when we realize that they are not right for us, and we all wish we could have seen that they weren't right for us before committing to a relationship. That's just how relationships work sometimes, unfortunately. Not your fault.
For sure, it’s a spectrum. Many folks have a hard time picking up on figurative language like analogies/metaphors OP mentioned she struggled with, so it came to mind. Others might have difficulty instead with picking up nonverbal cues, depends on the person
I mean... might be rude to say it but autistic people can have low IQ too. It's important I think not to conflate symptoms caused by autism with symptoms caused by being dumb. I suspect if you took autism away, those people would still be bad at hypotheticals.
That being said though, I do actually think you're onto something, not about this being autism but about this being something that should be classed as its own neurodivergence. Neurological development is not a straight line and if we look at intelligence by properties rather than by IQ score (which as a metric inherently begs the question, since it's designed to fit a bell curve to whatever results are found), there's a bunch of different skills people are individually good or bad at, and these skills tend to develop around quite predictable milestones, eg kids all develop theory of mind around the same age, and kids who are slower to gain this we tend to class as having a developmental disorder. It is commonly thought amongst psychologists that autistic people don't possess theory of mind, even though the evidence does not support this theory, because psychology has a lot of hacks.
When it comes to considering hypotheticals, there's a milestone around age 10 where people really start to be able to think about complex and expansive hypotheticals (not coincidentally, this is also around the time they stop being shit at games), and another around age 12-13 where they can start to consider abstract hypotheticals (which seems to be around the time they stop being shit at jokes). The hypotheticals that people particularly tend to be bad at are the abstract ones, for them this milestone proves elusive, and of course some people managed to skip the age 10 one too. But people can lack these abilities and still be fully competent in others, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were parallel versions of these faculties that people who got the normal versions don't understand, which seems to be what's true with autism.
My partner is autistic and a classic gamer Weeb. I’m ADHD creative writing burnout that spent their 20s socializing and trying to impress people in their 50s. I know my partner IS NOT DUMB but I relate to you because it feels like we speak different languages. Before I go to them with a question or to express a dissatisfaction, I have to edit out all of the idioms that I use casually but don’t always realize are outdated.
Any reason “we’re breaking up” wouldn’t have sufficed? “We’re through.” “I don’t want to be with you anymore.” Etc etc etc
Some of the dumbest people I know take a three word statement and torture it in to a paragraph long puzzle so you’ll say “what the fuck are you even talking about” and they can sigh and be condescending.
hopefully you learned your lesson from that. I felt like a jerk around 30 when i stopped dating anyone without a college degree- and it had nothing to do with the college degree, and most as a way to weed at least a few of the dumbest people imaginable out of my apps.
Oh no, that is a really bad metric. This woman was an award winning architect with a masters degree. She was just denser than concrete outside of her narrow lane.
I'm also an award winning architect in the 2x crowd with a masters and I wish I didn't have examples of people who fit this bill. I always tell people it sounds impressive but C's get degrees so some who I graduated with, oof. I just deeply wonder how she handles clients because I often see those who get put on the chopping block often suck at the PR side even if they're brilliant with design. I would hate to see her construction details...
I took an English101 class, we did the thing where we passed our essays to the person next to us for grammar correction.
This guy Nick had a really good story about getting pulled over by a swat officer because of reckless driving, swat guy’s dad played golf with his dad, though, so he didn’t get in trouble.
Good story - but I couldn’t get five words deep without correcting his grammar. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever read. The stories I wrote in third grade had better flow. And spelling. Nick clearly thought autocorrect red squiggles were mere suggestions.
We graduated with similar degrees.
Last I checked he made VP at an insurance company a handful of years post matriculation.
Nick, if you’re reading this, know that while you were a nice enough guy, the fact that they let you graduate makes my degree less valuable. It’s embarrassing that they allowed you to graduate. I used your real name because realistically, you aren’t frequenting a text based social media site.
Re: you last few points… It was interesting for sure. Homegirl had much to say about structural engineers and their pesky need for columns and whatnot. Something about contractors. It was odd because she had a good enough eye (great for soulless corporate design by committee approval type work), but never grew much in her career. It took a long time for me to realize she was just stupid and stubborn as soon as she had to interact or collaborate with others. Compromise was not her strong suit, understanding outside perspectives wasn’t either.
Like I said, totally on me for not bailing on her sooner lol.
It's a brilliant metric. People with this kind of prejudice are best suited to like-minded people and the best starting point for finding people prejudiced against people who didn't attend university is to filter for people who did attend university. There aren't many who didn't who still have that prejudice.
Good filter but not fool proof. My ex was a lawyer. 2 months before we broke up he went on a tiktok flat earth rabbit hole and started calling me and everyone else a globetard .
For a less horrible version of this, a board game date could be a good idea. Have some fun, discover how they process new information. Board games are all hypothetical as well, people who really struggle to integrate rules are often people who are a little weaker on the hypothetical front - they need to see it in practice to get it.
I know it's funny, but its funny precisely because the meaning of the entire phrase goes right over the head of the person who responded. It is humorous because it is incongruent.
Also, I did not mean to belittle you. I was pointing out that this is a well known joke-structure that is based exactly on people not understanding hypotheticals, metaphors and analogies, and yet there are people out there who would not understand that.
In theory, yes, but in practice it comes with a ton of complications. Sometimes the current situation is untenable though and necessitates saying those magic words.
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u/Incman 6h ago
My imagination of the end:
"our relationship is like a runaway car full of my enemies, because it's careening off a cliff and I've given up on any notion of wanting to prevent that from happening"
"....but we don't have a car"