Thirty-six hours after dropping his date off at her apartment, Bradley Goldman was on a video call with his dating coach, breaking down the events of the evening.
For one thing, he told the coach, he had chosen the wrong venue for someone on the autism spectrum — a bar of the Sunset Strip hipster variety, so loud and overstimulating that he could almost feel himself beginning to dissociate.
Mr. Goldman, a tall, rangy 42-year-old who works as an office manager, hadn’t decided in advance of the date whether to mention that he had been diagnosed with autism, or that he was working with a coach. So he deflected, and they found themselves, briefly, in a conversational blind alley.
“I struggle with how to disclose,” he said. “Do I say I am ‘neuro-spicy’? Or ‘neurodiverse’? Or do I disclose at all?”
His coach, Disa Jean-Pierre, was sympathetic. “You could just wait for it to come up naturally after a few dates,” she suggested.
Mr. Goldman thought this over. “I’m still figuring this out,” he said.
Nevertheless, it was a solidly enjoyable date, something he credited to the coaching he had received from a team of psychologists at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles.
He had avoided “info dumping” or making too many Jeffrey Dahmer jokes, and he had carefully observed his date’s body language to detect whether she was signaling openness to a good night kiss. (She was.)
“She was like, ‘I really want you to let me know you got home,’” he said. “So, that was that.”
Mr. Goldman’s results would be entered alongside those of 56 other human subjects on a spreadsheet marked “dating history updates,” part of a three-pronged randomized control trial. Over the coming months, researchers at U.C.L.A. will mine the data to identify which approach is most likely to help people with autism find love.
For mental health professionals to ask this question is new. Twenty years ago, when the U.C.L.A. psychologist Elizabeth A. Laugeson began developing the Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills, or PEERS, to teach social skills to people with autism, “nobody really wanted to touch” the subject of romance or dating, she said.
“This was the study that I could not get funding for,” Dr. Laugeson said. “Everyone was a little bit afraid of it.”
In the interim, the population with the diagnosis has swelled, including more people who live independently, work and attend college. It’s increasingly common for people to receive the diagnosis in adulthood as they seek help for challenges they face in daily life.
And attitudes have changed. It is difficult to disentangle cause and effect, but some of it has to do with “Love on the Spectrum,” the reality television show that follows adults with autism as they venture into the dating world. The show has turned out to be a surprise hit for Netflix, which has renewed it for a fourth season, and its charismatic stars have become celebrities and social media influencers.
Increasingly, Dr. Laugeson said, people understand that adults with autism may want romance and intimacy. The show “is kind of flipping the script on that, and allowing them to speak for themselves,” she said. “The struggles that autistic people are having in finding love are no different than a typically developing person.”
On a recent Thursday evening, the dating students arrived at the Semel Institute in jeans, board shorts, wraparound sunglasses and strappy sandals. One had competed in beauty pageants; another was packing for a trip to Europe. Many were settled in school or work. But they described dating as an area of particular struggle.
Jess, 29, an aspiring screenwriter who was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder four years ago, said a gap first opened up in high school, when her friends “started dating each other and everyone paired up.” She compared it to the moment in musical chairs when you find that you are the only one still standing.
“It was kind of like this big memo I never got,” said Jess, who asked to be identified by her middle name, for fear that revealing her diagnosis would damage her career.
The PEERS course had helped her analyze flirting behavior through the lens of social science. Lessons include “flirting with your eyes” — making eye contact and then looking away to gauge a partner’s receptiveness — and searching for signals that a conversational group is open to include new members.
Once she understood the purpose of each behavior, Jess said, it wasn’t difficult to imitate it.
“I add it to the list of things I need to be thinking about,” she said. “It’s all performing.”
Much of the coursework focuses on building comfort in conversation, or, as the coaches call it, trading information. A central skill is not panicking if there are extended silences. Hayley Ditter, 24, who had been on four dates since the course began, said this had proved valuable almost immediately.
“Sometimes I feel like it’s my fault because I’m kind of used to not knowing what to say next, but awkward silence — that can be just a normal part of conversation,” said Ms. Ditter, who graduated from U.C.L.A. in 2023 with degrees in anthropology and film studies.
Ms. Ditter had always done well in the classroom, but would miss, or misinterpret, the social signals that serve as guideposts to romance. Before signing up for the course, she had gone on a handful of first dates, but they never led to anything.
“I’ve never actually been on a second date,” she said.
Ms. Ditter said the coaching had also helped her identify “in real time” when someone was flirting with her, something she had in the past relied on her mother to spot. She has stockpiled a list of phrases — “I need to feed my dog,” for instance — that can facilitate a swift, graceful exit. She has posted a profile on Hinge and is gradually making her way through the 300 responses.
“Now I know the skills, and I’m ready to put them into action,” she said. “I hope to get my first boyfriend soon.”
A Crush on a Barista
Twenty years ago, research on the social relationships of people with autism painted a bleak picture. In 2004, a survey of teenagers and adults living at home found that 46 percent had no peer relationships at all outside prearranged settings; a 2012 meta-analysis found that only 14 percent of adults with autism were married or had a long-term intimate relationship.
But those trends are shifting, in part because a larger range of people are receiving the diagnosis. In 2023, when researchers at Boston University examined data from 220,000 U.S. college students, they found that 24 percent of students with autism were partnered, compared with 46 percent of nonautistic students.
Dr. Laugeson knew from her work with teenagers with autism that they were interested in relationships, but their efforts to express romantic feelings were frequently misinterpreted as stalking behavior.
Parents, she said, frequently told her the same story: Their teenager had developed a crush on a barista at Starbucks and parked there, offering “way too much eye contact” or “that big, wide, tooth-baring smile,” she said.
But when she sought funding for empirical research on dating, Dr. Laugeson found that her institutional backers — the ones who had enthusiastically underwritten trainings on friendship and career development — went quiet. Parents seemed nervous about the project, even if their children were adults. When she explored the reasons, she often heard “concerns about sexual safety, things like sexual assault,” she said.
Mark Stokes, an autism researcher at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, said he had run into similar roadblocks when he had sought funding for work on dating or sex.
Institutional review boards, which oversee research on human subjects, felt “there was a danger we would be talking about matters these people had never thought of, and it would distress them, because they would discover that they were being excluded and start to behave in inappropriate ways,” Dr. Stokes said.
He eventually gave up. “There’s just no point,” he added. “We don’t seek funding for it.”
In 2018, Dr. Laugeson got lucky. She was approached by Cara Gardenswartz, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles whose teenage son had benefited from PEERS trainings, and who offered her, for the first time, enough funding to design a full course on dating.
Around the same time, she heard from an Australian filmmaker, Cian O’Clery, whose documentary, “Employable Me,” had followed job seekers with a range of disabilities, including autism.
He was pitching something similar about dating to Australian public television, but, “for some reason,” he said, “it was this slightly taboo area.” PEERS was the only large organization he could find that addressed it. “They were definitely an inspiration in terms of seeing what could be done in terms of dating coaching,” he said.
Dr. Laugeson agreed to hold a one-day dating boot camp for “Love on the Spectrum” cast members in Sydney and became an informal consultant, helping Mr. O’Clery identify potential cast members when the show came to the United States.
But she had no idea, she said, that the show would be an “international sensation.” That only became clear years later, during the coronavirus pandemic, when Netflix subscribers discovered the show and — there is only one way to put it — fell in love.
‘Is It Too Late?’
As a movement builds around civil rights and equality for neurodiverse people, some advocates have criticized social skills training for encouraging people with autism to act as if they are not autistic, a practice sometimes described as masking.
“The social skills classes tell you what to do, but that’s like putting on a costume,” said Karen Lean, 48, an I.T. specialist who was diagnosed with autism in her 30s. For years, she studied and imitated these behaviors — “everyone expects you to do small talk, so you should do small talk” — and the effort, she said, left her exhausted and alienated.
Now, Ms. Lean works as an instructor for HEARTS, or Healthy Relationships on the Autism Spectrum, an online course that includes modules on issues like boundaries and breakups — but steers clear of social skills, which, she said, function mostly to put other people at ease.
“No amount of training or drilling those skills like eye contact is going to solve the problem of feeling anxious, sensorily overwhelmed, uncomfortable in your own body,” she said. “There are a whole bunch of things that can’t be solved by trying to inject into a person a list of things to do to make other people comfortable.”
The PEERS staff members, acutely aware of the discourse around masking, begin every lesson with a “neuroaffirming pledge” underlining the value of authenticity and emphasizing individual choice. They take care to avoid characterizing behaviors as good or bad, instead using language like “socially helpful” and “socially risky.”
The participants weren’t particularly worried about masking. “It’s teaching us how to thrive in the world we live in,” said Jess, who, in her 20s, was so intent on mastering social skills that she competed in (and won) beauty pageants.
“I’ve never had an issue with masking as a concept,” she said. “People will say, ‘I don’t want to mask, I want to be my authentic self,’ and my attitude is: Great, I’m going to mask, and I’m going to have a career.”
Coaches said that some participants in the dating course had arrived with such deep scars from social rejection that a small boost of confidence could be life-changing.
“It’s not always easy to get through the lessons, because there are experiences in our group that are painful,” Gabby Slater, the study’s coordinator, said. “I think there’s a lot of loneliness out there.”
Samara Wolpe, a postdoctoral fellow at the PEERS lab, recalled a participant — still in his early 20s — who approached her to ask, as she put it: “Am I already too far gone to be learning this? Am I already too far removed from society? Can I get back in there? Is it too late for me?”
She reassured him that it was not. He was skeptical. He lived with his parents. His clothes were disheveled, he said. His hair was shaggy. “Those are things that are fixable,” Ms. Wolpe told him. The following Thursday, he showed up with a fresh haircut, and news: He had matched with a woman on an app. And he had asked her out.
“He needed someone to tell him that this was possible for him,” Ms. Wolpe said.
Between half and three-quarters of the subjects have gone on dates during the training course, which ends on Thursday, Ms. Slater said. At a farewell gathering, coaches will name the participants “most likely to flirt with their eyes” and “most likely to be a good partner.”
They will all undergo a battery of psychological tests — among them the Test of Dating Skills, the Dating Anxiety Scale, and the Social and Emotional Loneliness Scale for Adults — at three points in time to measure how, if at all, the experience has changed them. The results will be published next year.
The participants’ ventures into the dating world are rarely as dramatic as those on reality television, Dr. Laugeson said, in part because they are taught to view rejection as a normal part of dating.
“This is something we all struggle with,” she said. “I’d love to date Bradley Cooper — that would be great. But I don’t get to date everyone, right? And everyone doesn’t get to date me.”
Mr. Goldman was debriefing with his dating coach, Ms. Jean-Pierre, chatting so easily that it was difficult to know which one of them was doing the coaching, when a text from the woman he had taken out to the Sunset Strip bar appeared on his phone.
“I did have a nice time but, full transparency, I’m not feeling a genuine connection I want to pursue,” she wrote.
Mr. Goldman decided to take a beat before he responded. He was excited about a trivia night in his neighborhood; he had likes backed up on Hinge.
He briefly examined his feelings and realized he didn’t care.
“I appreciate you letting me know,” he texted back.
Then he turned back to Ms. Jean-Pierre.
“You realize, well, sometimes it has nothing to do with you,” he said. “It was a fun night and, you know, I would do it all over again.”
Read by Ellen Barry
Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.
Ellen Barry is a reporter covering mental health for The Times.
The post The Real-Life Dating Boot Camp That Inspired ‘Love on the Spectrum’ appeared first on New York Times.
