Heartbreaking Redux
May 31, 2006 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
If you missed Nightline’s Echoes of Autism: Paul in Love last night, an article by ABC correspondent Jon Donvan, Love Complicates Life Even for the Autistic, contains an overview of most of the Nightline segment. Both it and the article are about Paul DeSavino, the 36-year-old autistic man featured in Echoes of Autism: Paul in Love. Donovan notes, “The idea that autistic people love the same everyone else is new to experts”; Paul has fallen in love with an older woman, the director of the job-training program he is in.
The beginning and the end of the Nightline segment show Paul and his mother, Marlene DeSavino, at Carnegie Hall, where Paul is to perform Chopin’s Prelude #4 on the piano. He is unable to focus and afterwards tells his mother about his being in love. While watching Echoes of Autism: Paul in Love, I wondered if the segment’s original focus was to be Paul’s performing at Carnegie Hall, but the “love and autism” angle developed into the main one.
Paul, like me, is in his late 30’s. He towers above his mother, as I suspect Charlie will do some day. Paul keeps a photograph of his first love–one of his teachers–beside his bedside.
So does Charlie.
I know that autistic people can love.
My kids all showed that ability. One child became quite agitated (not in a violent way) when his father was away from home for an extended period of time. “Daddy’s coming home soon,” was our mantra during those times. (Single-parent household)
I know a local woman who got married I think last year. She’s autistic, he’s ADHD.
And, of course, my long-distance relationship happens to be with a young man who has a diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome, which we all know is autism.
Quite a lot of evidence……. “Daddy’s coming home” is one phrase that Charlie has down, for sure. He’s gotten so attached to his school teacher and some of the instructors I feel sad thinking about it, as he has less than 2 weeks with them. Happily, one of his former therapist just came back to work with him after she had a baby and he’s a happy guy this afternoon.
I think the idea that a person with ASD NOT being able to fall in love is a little absurd. I’m certain I can compile a journal (or blog) of evidence if I felt compelled to. But one of my favorites stories is this: On a recent visit to a former client Jamie (who calls me his cousin), he threw up his arms in the air and cheerfully announced “SquarGirl, your back!” we spent some time talking (he’s was about 12 at the time) and he showed me a photo of his “girlfriend” although I’m not sure SHE knew that she was his girlfriend. His mom told me that one day he insisted on bringing flowers to school, but didn’t say why. He gave them to his “girlfriend” and the teacher sent home a note asking how Jamie knew it was her birthday as they weren’t even in the same classroom together that year.
That would be some blog……. I am planning to make Charlie a photo album/memory book of his current teachers and instructors.
Not that he would forget them.
TiVo recorded that Nightline segment for me and I just watched it this evening. It really bothered me, and I’m trying to figure out why. I think it was the incredulous tone the journalist took when talking to the “expert” (psychologist? I’m not even sure.) – “Are you saying that they can actually feel LOVE?”, as though they were talking about rhododendron bushes or something. Is it really THAT hard to believe that autistic people are really just – oh, I don’t know – PEOPLE??
And then they kept making references to him feeling “his version of love” or “his kind of heartbreak,” as though by virtue of the fact that he’s autistic his emotions are lesser and are not the significant and real and momentous and earth-shattering seismic events that the REST of us feel.
It just felt offensive. And exploitative. You know, my heart has been broken. I have experienced unrequited love in my life. It was not my finest moment, and I certainly would not have wanted it documented and dissected as a “public service.”
I am not feeling my version of love for Nightline tonight.
I was very troubled by the tone of “they” (“they”) can fall in love too! Just like “us.” “They” have feelings too! Just like “us.”
I was glad to see the footage of Paul DeSavino, but not to hear that commentary!
Well, given that *I* am also *they*, I can say absolutely that I love. I am capable of love and of being loved. I love my dear, wonderful, capable, supportive, sexy husband with all my heart. I deeply, fiercely love my 2 children. In return, I am loved, cherished, and supported by their love.
It’s a good thing I found out I could love *before* I found about about asperger’s syndrome. Otherwise, I might have believed ‘conventional wisdom’ and have a life without love.
One wonders what kind of “love” the experts feel towards their “subjects”….