In time for Autistic Pride Day 18 June:

   
Why do people congratulate somebody? Asperger’s sufferers often do not
understand this. I asked myself:

  “I’ve
won the lottery, so why additionally congratulate me? If congratulation is
something positive, why give it to someone who has just been lucky already?”

    Hence, we feel awkward and perhaps even
annoyed and disturbed by being congratulated, because it is a social
interaction that we feel uncomfortable with and that feels like an ‘unfair distribution of niceties’.
Congratulations are especially stressful because they usually occur close
together in time, like on birthdays for example, a day that many of us dislike
partially for that reason.

   
After many years, something helped me to understand what congratulations
really are. As an active established academic, I am not at liberty to disclose
what that something was, since we do not live in a free society, but I should however
stress that it was crucially my own rational analysis that revealed it to me;
no therapist or friend told me, no teacher or parent. I will now tell you more
about how rationality often fails to make up for the “lack” of a more natural,
unquestioning adoption of social norms and various “deficits” in affective or
cognitive empathy that may or may not be the true problematic of Asperger’s
syndrome.

   
It is not true that a congratulation is simply an expression of respect,
or a confirmation about that the one who congratulates me on my achievement or
accomplishment has noticed my success, which is a socially important proof for
how intelligent or hard working I may be, how valuable. That is only part of
it, but exchange of status information cannot be the essence of congratulating
behavior, because as such it would often be indeed embarrassingly silly:

  “Why
would a colleague congratulate me on my promotion when the new title is right
there on the office door?”

   
Notice that this interpretation in terms of a ‘confirmation of status-change’ is a second way of approaching this
particular social interaction rationally, and it is much better, more
sophisticated than the ‘unfair distribution of niceties’ above. Indeed, it is
perhaps already beyond the grasp of surprisingly many people. Nevertheless, although
this description points to an evolutionary source of the behavior, the
hypothesis easily fails to go on and grasp any “deeper feeling” that might be
correlated with a sincere congratulation. That is an intellectual failure
because feelings can be described as evolved, too. The social is not trivial.

   
What is still absent here is something that we on the autistic scale
have a problem with: Love. Yes, I mean
the strong word “love”, as I mean precisely that irrational, hard to justify feeling
that makes sincere love to be love and thus difficult for the rational,
rationalizing, justifying mind. A sincere congratulation is an expression
of love, a gesture that is supposed to tell me that the person is “happy for
me” and does not envy my good fortune; that the congratulating coworker for
example is still on my side. Perhaps he thinks that he deserved that promotion
more than me. However, he cares about me as a person that he knows and enjoys
working with, desires to reaffirm this protective bond without doing so driven
by mere calculation, and this love,
although it is not as strongly coupled such as the love of a mother to her
child, is still stronger than the fact of his being upset with the situation.
This is what the sincere congratulation really means, because without this
aspect, it is in too many situations quite inexplicable, especially with congratulations
on mere luck that cannot count as an achievement. Missing the sincerity, they
feel insincere.

    Without
that love of friendship, congratulations are insincere, a mere acting out of good manners, but I here emphasize
the sincere congratulation, because that is what I want to render acceptable to
the Asperger’s mind. How much congratulating is hypocritical or insincere? This
is hard to quantify and measure. However, many people with Asperger’s syndrome may
think that almost all or even all of it is. Again, this is an opinion, a
feeling, because there is no agreed upon measure for sincerity. This negative
feeling is another reason why they do not like these social dances. Many
despise insincere behavior, because such is yet more difficult to understand than
honest gestures, and perhaps because insincerity hurts especially Asperger’s
people more often.

   
Asperger’s moralist dislike for insincerity does not imply that we are incapable
of being insincere. On the autism spectrum, one often seems more sincere or
frank, even blunt and insensitive, because one may not apply insincerity where
society demands that insincerity be applied, such as when answering “Do I look old honey?” or congratulating
the superior. Whether that makes Asperger’s more sincere is questionable, and
quantifying such should include any insincerity that they apply elsewhere. Those
instances may simply be missed by the observer, especially with the high
functioning, intelligent cases.

    I
am focusing on the sincere congratulations, partially in order to emphasize
that I feel that such do exist. I have perhaps underestimated the importance or
predominance of sincere congratulations, perhaps even due to a dismissal of
sincerity as a reaction to having failed to perform this function sincerely
myself, a face-keeping rationalization if you will. The reader may well be able
to notice strongly now how my own thinking is symptomatic for that label
“Asperger’s”: In absence of a reliable quantitative measure, a clear mutually
agreed upon definition of “sincerity”, an assessment is not made confidently.
This can be described as a failure and suffering
a shortcoming, namely that of successfully reaching for a socially endorsed
norm and going on with life. In my case, I choose questioning and
postmodern paralysis, while a campus shooter succumbed to revenge for what he
feels is insincerity all around, disregarding and finding excuses for his own
insincerity.

    The
‘upon-mere-luck congratulation’, which seems undeserved because it is expressed
without there being a true achievement, is inexplicable without love. Therefore,
it is often seen as insincere, and so it is unsurprisingly the most disturbing
congratulation to those who have difficulties with interpreting and giving expressions
of love. Moreover, the misinterpretation of upon-mere-luck congratulations as upon-achievement
congratulations can lead to a misunderstanding, namely the congratulation is
felt to be an insult. Why? Well see, I similarly am not proud of my
nationality, because I did nothing to actively achieve it. Therefore, receiving
congratulations after having won a lottery feels similar to an accusation of
overly proud patriotism:

  “You
congratulate me, but this is no achievement, and you treating it as one,
especially if perhaps feeling obliged to congratulate me because you feel that
I mistakenly think it is my own accomplishment, that means you think I am naïve.
But I am not one of those who pride themselves for windfalls, who inherited
riches yet look down upon the poor, or despise the slow of mind as if anybody
earned their own IQ!”

  And
here you see again that the Asperger’s sufferer, who often is called blunt and
without feeling, is actually sensitive, hypersensitive! He may be asocial in
certain ways, but often not in the sense of being unconcerned with the social.
Often, he is obsessed with the social, that source of his most terrible pains.

   
As said, because it is to do with love, namely a person expressing that
she “is happy for me”, the issue is difficult to understand. I did not
understand what “happy for me” could possibly mean:

  “How
can somebody be happy for me at all, how can anything feel ‘for me’? My feeling
is mine, his is his – I can never feel his, except in the sense of affective empathy.
Empathy is feeling ‘with me’, not ‘for me’. And why would he be happy about my
promotion ‘for me’ if not for himself?!”

  So
what does it mean that he is happy for me? It is misleading language but most
likely has the following positive interpretation: It means that the person
signals that he wishes me well rather than bad, and quite generally wants to
express thus that he is a friend on my side. He expresses that he is happy ‘for
my happiness’, because I am, because that makes him happy – and this precisely is ‘love’ in its
apparent uselessness, in all its threatening irrationality, in all its
uncontrollability whether outside or inside of me. Because if sincere, there is
no intention necessary about that your congratulating behavior strengthens a
useful social bond, us. And so, I can congratulate my colleague on his
retirement, although his retirement even means that he no longer collaborates
with us.

    You congratulate me now after my lucky win,
this may mean partially that there is no envy in you, because envy quickly
turns into wishing something bad should happen to me, in order to compensate for
your relative loss or to punish me. This
would be the opposite of love, as ‘love’ implies that one wishes well for the
loved, and basically for no good reason, for no other immediate gain but the
reward that loving itself can give in terms of feeling good – that is why I use
the word “love” here, because that is what love is for, that is its evolved
function also in case of strong motherly love. But moreover, now after my
lucky win, this timing is simply a good opportunity to show love. After all,
and an Asperger’s sufferer can feel empathy with this aspect for sure, it is
always and for almost everybody a somewhat embarrassing social interaction to
congratulate, even although there is an opportunity as an excuse. You should
neither smile too little nor too much, else it may come across as insincere,
and so on. Surely one cannot blame anybody for feeling completely out of place
by simply going up to a coworker at some random time and saying:

  “Hey, I
just wanted to tell you that I am on your side and got your back, you know, I
think we have a positive relation going here buddy.”

 
That indeed would be precisely something that an autistic caricature
like Sheldon of “The Big Bang Theory” would come up with, in order to settle the timing of such expressions of love. I
could well imagine Sheldon dropping a line like:

  “And
by the way, I told you before that my scheduling calls for this friendship
confirmation session every first of the month, so you should not have taken
your day off yesterday!”

Source: thumbpress

    I
conclude that especially the ‘upon-mere-luck congratulation’ offers an excuse
and has thus become the opportunity to effectively do a “friendship
confirmation”. It possibly evolved from a mere exchange of status information
about merited achievement, because it is usually anyways fuzzy how much
achievement there was actually involved and how much sheer luck or even
cheating participated.

   
Extroverts have few problems with any of this, because they simply
behave in these situations and feel ok doing so. There is less difficulty
experienced with expressing love and interpreting expressions of love through
the behavior of others. Persons on the high functioning, weakly autistic
spectrum, such as those being labeled with Asperger’s, have difficulty
precisely with the correct expression and interpretation of what is expressed
by others. It is very wrong to say that
they do not love. In my estimation, they love their coworkers more than the
coworkers ever love them back, because they often do have a place in their
heart for their coworkers for example, which often are the few people they
interact with, but the coworkers also misinterpret and think that the
Asperger’s sufferer knows no love, and so it is the people around us who indeed
give less and less love back in return.

And so we are indeed the loveless, but in
the sense of that we are the unloved lovers.