Assortative Mating

I know this is a sensitive topic for many people. I apologize in advance if you feel that I’m sensationalizing, hijacking or diminishing anyone’s experience as neuroatypical. These are just my observations, anecdotes, and personal experiences. I’ve never been diagnosed but am fairly certain I fall somewhere on the spectrum and can assuredly say my partner does. Mental illness, genetics, nature/nurture are all topics that fascinate me and I have a wealth of observational/personal experience with all three.

My father’s side of the family is riddled with mental health issues. He was diagnosed as a schizophrenic (misdiagnosed in my opinion) and battled mental illness the majority of my life. My Dad had more good days than bad in my younger years with a progressive decline over time. Memories get tainted, but I remember him most fondly, strong as an ox, smile on his face, before life seemed to beat him down. He was a dichotomy to me, indestructible superhero, teddy bear, role model, but over time….a man who gave up on life. He seemed to quit on us. I’m not sure I ever forgave him for that. We all have to be tested in order to know our limits and what breaks us. Some of us keep getting up, soul bloodied and find reserves we never thought we had. My mom never gave up on him. What gave him the right to quit on us?

I never really knew what was wrong with him until I was a teenager. It was a silent ghost that haunted us all in the house. Something we never spoke about and quietly swept under the rug. He was put on a variety of medications over the years and with every medication a different set of side effects and personality emerged. Life really was like a pharmaceutical box of chocolates, we never knew who we were going to get. Years of appointments, medications and exhaustion led the man in charge of his care to choose shock therapy as a viable option. My father wasn’t violent, he would not hurt another human being, not a danger to society. He was more likely to give you the cash out of wallet if asked, easily conned and manipulated by a sob story. Watching shock therapy, dehumanize a loved leaves an imprint on you. Imagine watching people with truly awful bedside manner stick a cattle prod into your Dad’s brain as if he were a lab rat. I’m sure I’ve warped this memory in my mind because I have a hard time making peace with it. You can watch “One flew over the Cuckoo’s nest” or “A Beautiful Mind”, to get a visual. The stigma attached to mental illness is well documented. His struggles in life along with a wealth of anecdotal stories about myself and family members led me down a path to the idea of Assortative mating. Meaning that individuals with similar phenotypes mate more frequently.

Because of my father’s illness, I have a severe aversion to the psychiatric community. As a result, you’d likely have to blackmail me or get a court ordered mental health evaluation to talk to or see a psychiatrist. The one time I met his psychiatrist I had an instant dislike for him. I was young, but he seemed like a prime example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It was also at a time in Canada when it would have been really difficult to assess any disorder he might have accurately given a lot of cross cultural differences. Asperger's wasn't even a blip on the radar at the time. I can’t even say what my father suffered from. He’d been in the system for so long. Chronic mental fatigue? Exhaustion due to consistent misdiagnosis. A system working against him, making him prone to paranoia? I know there is an intrinsic value in therapist/psychiatrist do, but I’ve seen so many adults and children quickly categorized under a specific umbrella disorder to “manage” their behavior. It’s such an easy fix.

Take a little bit of borderline personality disorder, or mild schizophrenia, maybe Asperger syndrome and toss in assortative mating. Bake at 350 F. What kind of concoction results? I shelf the idea for a time while making scones, going to soccer games and life keeping me busy. Then I step back and observe the behavior of my children and it continues to gnaw at me.

My background is in the sciences. I’ve been around a lot of engineers and scientists in my life. Some in my family, some friends and colleagues. I even married one. A lot of them seem to have a similar set of traits. Mildly obsessive, tunnel vision, flawless attention to detail, socially awkward, classic ‘geek’ syndrome. In high school chemistry there is a classic example of the energetic frequency of atoms in three separate beakers. The first beaker is under little stress and the atoms move about freely, in the second beaker the atoms collide more and more, and the third beaker is under considerable stress, atoms vibrating at higher frequencies, and in constant motion resulting in energetic collisions, chain reactions. The third beaker is basically neurotic and having a tantrum. This collective energy seems to trip off a “Butterfly effect”. One person’s bad day spills over into another leading to unintended consequences. This is my analogy for how I feel around certain people, situations, and large crowds. Through many conversations over the years this seems to be a good analogy for how a lot of introverts and neuroatypicals function in the world. Being around angry, needy or energetically wound up people makes me physically ill. It takes days of solitude to dissipate the feeling. I’m acutely aware of when people are lying, misdirecting and telling me what they want to believe or want me to believe as opposed to the truth. Much introspection over the years coalesced into my own pet theory. When my daughter was born, a switch went off in my head and several things started to click.

This child was born alert. I mean, look you in the face, overstimulated, trying to speak to me alert. At the time we thought we had spawned the anti Christ. Insert the usual stories of sleepless nights, frustration, days blurring together, exhaustion, shouldn’t be driving, insanity. She has since turned into a very normal, empathetic, kind, preteen angsty little shit. My son was similar except he talked very late and was physically very agile at an early age. Late talkers were the kiss of death at the time, when all parents were utterly paranoid about autism. He is prone to categorizing everything. Military precision in most of what he does from folding clothes to making his bed. Mild physical tics that at one time I thought might be Tourette’s. He too, luckily has transitioned into a lovely young person who is experimenting with cussing and the word “boobs”. No, I’m not a hypochondriac, an empath for sure, observationally (I think i just made up a word!) astute and heavily prone to pattern recognition. The internet can be a very dangerous place for self diagnosis or diagnosis of your child but, so can the office of a psychiatrist. Tomato, tamata. Pick your poison.

With my daughter, I scoured the internet looking for a solution as to what made this child tick and how I could help her. I looked at my husband, our family histories, our extended families and I kept coming back to Asperger syndrome. I stumbled upon this article with a year of her birth:

Two new theories of autism: hyper‐systemising and assortative mating — S Baron‐Cohen

The idea came to me when I read about the disproportionate number of children diagnosed on the autism spectrum in Silicon Valley. Mostly boys. Apparently Asperger’s is still more difficult to diagnose in women/girls for a host of reasons. The causes are still unknown. Everything from parental, maternal age, environmental factors, and genetics playing a factor. I won’t even entertain vaccinations here. Vaccinations save lives. Period. If you’ve ever traveled and witnessed the lengths women will go to give their children every advantage over diseases that should have been long since eradicated, you’ll understand my disdain for the topic.

So what about spectrum disorders? For thousands of years, humans have been picking their mates in a Darwinian fashion. More random than deliberate. This seems to run very contrary to our current state of affairs. I myself would have had an arranged marriage if our family had stayed in India and had it suggested to me growing up. It just wasn’t in the cards, I had other plans. This type of self selection must have ramifications for the genetic population. Then throw in the expression of these genes based on the environment they are birthed, it’s a crap shoot. Sure, we have traditionally married/procreated within our own race, tribe, and social class but there was much more variation in attributes that both parties brought to the table. Marriage is an institution that traditionally favored men and still is in many parts of the world. People didn’t self select by occupation, education or intellect. That is increasingly more common across the globe as the world becomes more egalitarian.

It’s my belief that all kinds of people ‘fit’ you at different points in your life. Probability would state that the chances of two people meeting and falling in love because they have an affinity for another, mentally and physically or heck maybe even genetically are infinitesimally small. It makes me wonder if attraction somehow happens on a cellular level. I’ve known my partner for twenty-five years, twenty years of marriage. We’ve been best friends, partners in crime and each other’s punching bags, contemplated divorce, wondered whether long term monogamy was realistic in a eighty year life span, regrouped and found each other again. I see something in this man. I’ll always sense something in my husband beyond conditioning, habit, pheromones. Did we seek each other out, smell each other like animals in some primal way? I’m not talking about sexual chemistry but true compatibility. Did that then result in children who have similar propensities and traits?

All of these categories that fit me or my family are necessary evils to help me communicate to others who I am and how I feel. Indo-Canadian, American, Introvert, HSP, Empath, Neuroatypical. Labels also neatly placed upon anyone very much pit us against each other. We can use them to enlighten or unite or vilify. Spectrum disorders seem to seductively melt into the spectrum of mental illness which then escalates into a lifelong battle of belonging or finding a niche or voice. A struggle to be seen beyond the box you tick off. My barometer and checklist for a mate and co parent along the countless families I’ve encountered over the years still perplexes me. Why do we chose who we chose? My choices resulted in two humans who are funny, compassionate sometimes a raging pain in the ass, defiant, sensitive and can be extremely high maintenance. Watching my own children and countless others would imply that there indeed may be a link between assortative mating and autism. Correlation doesn’t mean causation but where there is smoke….

And now to embrace the crazy. When I’m happy I bake. Since yesterday was a very productive day and I love food, particularly breakfast foods: Go forth, break bread. These are the best scones I’ve ever made. Use almond bark for icing and add orange zest, up the sugar to 1/2 cup of icing sugar. Sooooo good. Enjoy!

https://www.justapinch.com/recipes/bread/sweet-bread/cranberry-white-chocolate-chip-scones.html