LOVE IN THE TIME OF AUTISM
Evan Mead is helping fellow ‘Aspies’ with one of life’s biggest challenges: dating,
A group of strangers sits semicircled in a downtown condo common room. They shift in their chairs, smiling tense and attentive, and steal glances across the hardwood floor at each other. Like any dating event.
But this isn’t a typical dating event. The young men and women here all have Asperger’s.
“I’ve never had a date in my life,” says Tori Durham, 34. Benny Lai, 37, wearing a purple Raptors T-shirt, asks: “Will you help us improve our social skills and learn how to get a date?”
Facing the group stands Evan Mead, flanked by several “sexperts.” A wiry, quick-eyed 24-year-old, Mead is a man with a plan. Diagnosed with Asperger’s at age 5, he now wants to help teens and adults on the autism spectrum get comfortable with romantic relationships, intimacy and “just hanging out” via a “dating day camp.”
“Forget Asperger’s, dating is awkward for a lot of people,” says Mead, his deliberate tone gusting calm into an uncertain room.
Launched this year in conjunction with a sexologist and a dating coach, his free half-day workshops invite “Aspies” to meet, mingle and trade social cues more easily. The participants hear from experts, share their challenges and play out exercises involving speed networking, positive thinking and facial expressions. That last one always breaks down in laughter.
In one activity, participants pair up and sit facing each other in a row to describe who they are.
“I love gadgets, I hate clothes shopping,” says Durham. She explains she has a soft spot for animals, both her German shepherd and “cats trying to fit into spots that they can’t.”
Symptoms of Asperger’s vary widely, but often include a lack of social intuition, obsessive interests and trouble reading body language.
Getting a date — with someone on the autism scale or otherwise — isn’t so much the end goal as validation that Mead and others can start down the road to romantic intimacy.
“It’s just chatting,” he says, his cadence flat but his lips smiling. In the building on Queens Quay hosting the session, Mead speaks with fluid confidence and openness about his own struggles with the socially obstructive syndrome. He scopes his statements broadly, then zooms in to the relevant point.
Instead of simply noting some participants are running late, he says: “In the case of this being the fourth-largest city in North America, we have traffic to deal with, because both of our sports teams are doing really well and the Jays just started a game right across the street from us.”
At one point Mead interrupts a dating coach during her discussion on social etiquette, then catches himself — “an example of etiquette there,” he notes wryly.
Laughing about his former nickname, Michael Jackson — earned in high school due to his “groovy hair” — Mead reveals his casually precise memory. “He died seven years ago next month and we’re still talking about him.”
His mind moves at a fast clip in a group setting, but he’s at ease. It’s a level of social comfort he’s worked hard, and long, to attain.
‘Imagination on loudspeaker’
Raised in the heart of Richmond Hill with his younger brother, Cameron, Mead struggled through much of his childhood, despite receiving plenty of professional support in the classroom and the clinic.
“Things had to happen on time,” says his mother, Lori Bateman.
If she was late getting home from work, “every minute that I wasn’t there he grew more anxious.”
That led to meltdowns. Until age 12, Mead had trouble computing why events and activities, even small ones, might not match up with the daily schedule. “Then frustration would build around not being able to express himself fully,” Bateman says.
She remembers when she first learned Mead had Asperger’s. A caregiver had suggested the family see a specialist after watching him interact with other 3-yearolds. He paced constantly and flapped his arms — two of several early indicators.
The formal diagnosis came two years later. “I was kind of stunned. I didn’t know what to say . . . When you’re a new parent and you’re hearing it for the first time, it’s not even on your radar.”
There were bright sides to his condition, too, with scenes familiar to any young family. Only more intense.
“I woke up in the morning, every morning, 6 a.m., to a question about the Jurassic period,” Bateman recalls. “He was so brilliant and versed in the areas he was really interested in . . . It was delightful. It was like watching his imagination on loudspeaker.”
Mead would focus on one thing “obsessively,” his mom says. For years, their lives revolved around train shows, the nearby GO track and CN lines.
They never missed a CNE air show. Often Bateman or Mead’s father — the couple separated when he was young — would head to the airport to watch the planes take off. “It would amuse him for hours.”
Mead’s conversational skills, however, were stunted. The concept of a back-andforth didn’t register.
“I had a hard time even looking at people . . . I was too nervous to talk to girls,” he says.
Mead became “closed off” through much of high school. He was teased about his reticence with other students.
“There were times when I’d have to hug my mom for five minutes straight just to go into the classroom.”
Social cues came slowly through incidents he filed away in his memory, referencing them as needed like an index. He recalls his best friend, Nick, pulling away in Grade 3, “a tough learning experience.”
“He just stopped wanting to play with me. I’m not sure if he was embarrassed or if we just grew apart. You don’t know.”
After struggling through three years of isolation at the “bottom” of the complex pecking order that is high school, Mead came into his own in Grade12. Supportive teachers in creative writing and communications technology courses helped him find his passions, particularly through a comm-tech filmmaking assignment.
“I got to be around people who actually like talking about movies . . . I also got the courage to ask out a girl for the first time in my life,” he says. “She said no, by the way.”
Though he had “trouble accepting that” and has yet to go on a date, Mead has continued to pick up social nuances such aseye contact, smiling and hygiene.
“I’d just like to say that everyone here smells great,” he tells the day-camp crew with a grin.
Now Mead, a burgeoning filmmaker who pays the bills with a day job in sales at HMV, hopes to spread the word beyond his community on just how hard it is for people with his condition to foster romantic relationships — just like everyone else, only more so.
On shift, he harnesses his love of multimedia to engage customers on topics from audio technology to syncopated beats, rather than smooth-talking or aggressive sales tactics.
He’s also partway through shooting a documentary, Awkward Love, to showcase the relationship challenges facing adults with the disorder.
Dating can seem like a distant mirage or “a shiny sports car,” prized but perpetually out of reach — “or I guess in today’s case, a Tesla,” says one of his doc subjects onscreen.
“Intimacy can be difficult for people like us, because we have a tough time showing our emotions and talking about our emotions,” says another.
Particularly acute in people diagnosed, Asperger’s symptoms can be “prominent in so many other people,” Mead notes.
“The most off-base stereotype about people with Asperger’s syndrome is that we’re stupid socially and we can’t read a lot of social cues.”
He says he’s sometimes blind to certain indicators such as eye contact or crossed arms, but research backs up his argument, with studies highlighting the wealth of empathy many Asperger’s “sufferers” possess.
“Another stereotype is that we’re all nerds. There is some truth to that; we are extremely smart, and many people with Asperger’s are very, very brilliant,” he says, eyes twinkling as his mouth moves from smirk to full-blown smile.
“Still, it’s nice for us to look someone else in the eyes, and see them looking back.”
“I had a hard time even looking at people . . . I was too nervous to talk to girls.” EVAN MEAD