Neurodiverse Relationships and Trust
I recently came across the statement that a Neurodivergent's “love language” is Trust.
Now if you’ve been living under a rock and don’t know what love languages are, it’s a system of how different people express love to the people in their lives. The five identified “languages” are Words of Affirmation, Physical Touch, Quality Time, Acts of Service, and Receiving Gifts. This is not a post about that, but there are plenty of resources online if you want to look it up.
There’s been content circulating in recent times about ‘Neurodivergent love languages’ which is quite good, looking at some additional ways a Neurodivergent person might express their affection - Infodumping, Body Doubling/Parallel Play, Support Swapping, Deep Pressure, and Penguin Pebbling (more info here: https://careclinic.io/neurodivergent-love-languages/).
Getting back to the idea of Trust as a love language, I would disagree that it is a ‘love language’ in itself. Rather, I’d say that Trust is the foundational requirement for a healthy relationship to flourish - it’s the umbrella under which love can be expressed. And it’s intrinsic for the survival of a Neurodiverse relationship.
See, a lot of Neurodivergent people have “learned” that showing others our true selves is often the quickest pathway to rejection. What is ‘learning’? At a base level, ‘learning’ is the acquisition and retention of knowledge for future application. It is the ability to comprehend that x + y = z, and to later apply ‘y’ to ‘x’ to get ‘z’ because we know that is the formula for a successful outcome.
People learn all kinds of things. We learn mathematics. We learn to spell our own name, to tie our shoes. We learn how to boil water and make soup. We learn that socks and sandals are a combination to be mocked. We learn that humans make mistakes. We learn that touching a hot stove hurts. We learn that love hurts.
And what do we do with that knowledge? We retain it for future use. We use math to sew and cook and create. We use appropriate tools to avoid physical pain. We use social cues to avoid emotional pain. We learn to exercise caution in relationships, because we know they can fail. We avoid circumstances that have harmed us in the past.
It can be hard to unlearn things. Because in fact you never ‘unlearn’ something - it’s always there, embedded in our brains. All we can do is add to, overwrite, amend and adapt the knowledge we’ve gained through past education and experiences.
Neurodivergent people ‘learn’ early on that we are different, that we don’t quite fit in, that some of the things we do are odd or ‘quirky’. We learn because we are told that our whole lives will now be a series of masks and pretending to be "normal", a pretension that will often demand every resource in our bodies and leave us exhausted for days, weeks or months. We learn that our emotions and natural responses to things are unregulated and unacceptable.
Some of us only know that we are different, but never know why. A lot of us end up choosing to shut down, to shut the world off, or to seek out other neurodiverse people for our primary social circles. Some of us give up on finding love, on finding acceptance, indeed, on even finding a place for ourselves in this world at all.
This is why it is absolutely necessary to know that when we do open up, when we do choose to trust another human enough to let them through our defenses, that we’re not inadvertently subjecting ourselves to yet another instance of being othered. That we’re not going to experience ridicule, condescension and disdain just for being ourselves. Because we are weird - and we know we’re weird - but we don’t want to have to mask around the people who should accept us at face value.
I’ve got a particular stim that past partners have made fun of me for doing. I’ve been called weird for talking to myself and made fun of for instances of involuntary echolalia. I’ve been coerced into social occasions because my partner hasn’t understood my battery is way too low. I’ve been forced into conversations I didn’t have the energy for just because I didn’t want the other person to be upset. I’ve been patronised by partners for failing at a task they thought was easy. I’ve been dismissed by partners during moments of vulnerability, because they didn’t understand how the things I was being exposed to could pose a challenge for me, because it didn’t for them.
Of course, there’s always going to be misunderstandings, and the need for communication lines to be kept open and flowing to combat those misunderstandings will always be present. Humans are always going to find other humans weird. But we need to know that the people we choose to spend our most intimate moments with are not going to judge us for being weird. We need to know that they’re not going to fetishise our quirks. We need to know that they’re going to be supportive, no matter what.
If we feel like we are being othered or forced into situations where we will need to mask around a potential partner, it only creates barriers to the fostering of that relationship, or even brings the premature conclusion of what could have been a potentially good partnership.
I was chatting to a guy a few years ago who wouldn’t stop bombarding me with messages. He said all the wrong things, through no fault of his own, and I didn’t have the words to be able to tell him. He finally started hurling passive aggressive phrases at me until I blocked him. (Interestingly, he still follows me on Instagram!)
I was dating someone during an intense period of stress where my ability to be verbal was wildly fluctuating, and he didn’t understand that sometimes an emoji or meme was all I could manage, even after I summoned enough spoons to tell him that. He laughed off my meme-speak as an ‘attempt to be funny’ and kept trying to force conversation. Needless to say, he didn't last long either.
Another person I met was fairly “mainstream” - normal job, normal style of dressing, typical cishet "guy" interests like pub rock and footy. He constantly commented favourably on my alternative style of dress, my alternative hair, asked me to take him to a goth club some time, etc. He said he’d never met anyone like me and it was “cool” how I was so “different”. Yet whenever I tried to deepen our connection and share some of my challenges on the spectrum, he either didn’t want to or was unable to understand that the very thing that made me ‘cool’ in his eyes also presented barriers he would have to acknowledge in order for us to take things to the next level.
Even recently, I had brunch with someone who really wanted to meet me, and the conversation kept cycling through me sharing something about myself and then having them question why I had said or done this, why didn’t I just do that instead, etc. It was exhausting and as a result I didn’t give this person a second date.
So assuming I even have the spoons to be able to navigate the hurdles necessary to form a significant connection, I now have a huge amount of trust-trauma, a kind of trust bankruptcy if you will, and no desire to ‘be myself’ around a potential partner only to have that backfire in my face again.
But the feeling of being loved and supported unconditionally is amazing, when you can achieve that with someone. When you feel you can be your most authentic self with someone, you have the confidence to let them laugh with you, because you know they’re not laughing AT you. And when you know the person you’re with isn’t going to judge you, that you don’t have to monitor every word or action, that you don’t have to live every moment self-consciously, that you can be as weird as you want and let your freak flag fly and they’re not going to walk away - now THAT is pure magic.
So I guess the TL;DR here is - Trust is not just a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have. Especially for Neurodivergent people who are often operating on a deficit of trust. Because a lot of us have had the world telling us we’re weirdos from the moment we were born, and it’s so refreshing and soul-restoring to sit confidently in a relationship environment that celebrates our weirdness as uniqueness, without judgement. It’s like being able to breathe fresh air again, after being underwater for far too long.
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