Ask autistic adults what makes dating hard and masking comes up before anything else. Not the conversation itself, but the running effort underneath it: monitoring your face, rationing your interests, working out how long you can keep it up. It is the sort of thing a dating site ought to be able to describe with numbers from its own members, so we are asking ours.
What we are asking
Three questions, put plainly to members of Autistic Dating.
How much do you mask on a date with someone who is not autistic?
- I mask heavily for the whole date.
- I mask for most of it.
- I mask at the start and less as the date goes on.
- I rarely mask.
How tiring do you find masking on a date?
- Very tiring, and I need recovery time afterwards.
- Somewhat tiring.
- Not particularly tiring.
Does it change when you know your date is also autistic?
- I mask significantly less.
- I mask somewhat less.
- About the same.
- I feel more anxious, not less.
What you will get when there are answers
A percentage on its own is close to useless, so you will not get one on its own. Every figure published here will arrive with the number of people it came from, the window the survey was open, and the raw count sitting behind it. Anyone answering will have chosen to answer, which skews things, and we will say so on the page rather than in a footnote. Nothing gets weighted or adjusted to look neater. If a response option attracts too few people to mean anything, it stays as a small number instead of being promoted into a headline.
Why we are bothering to explain this
Autistic adults spend a good deal of time having their own account of their experience revised by people who do not share it. A dating site that manufactures statistics about them and puts them on a chart is doing a version of the same thing, with better graphics. Masking and its costs have been studied seriously by researchers who did the work properly, and there was never any need for this site to produce a private set of numbers alongside them. When our own members have answered, you will be able to trace every figure back to what was asked and who answered it.
Status: survey in preparation. No results collected yet. When there are results, this page will carry the respondent count, the dates the survey ran, and the raw figures behind every percentage.
Related reading
- Should you tell your date you are autistic?
- Writing an autistic dating profile
- The autistic dating guide
Correction
An earlier version of this page showed survey figures, a response total and several percentage breakdowns, that were sample content created when the site was built rather than member responses. They have been removed, and the survey described above is the replacement.