Ernie was twenty-nine years old and on a dating app for gay autistic men.
This was, in theory, a sensible idea. Dating apps were already weird enough without having to explain why someone taking six hours to respond to a message could ruin your entire afternoon. At least here, there was a reasonable chance the other person understood that socializing was sometimes exhausting and that eye contact was not a legally binding contract.
Ernie was level one autistic, which was apparently the official way of saying he could mostly pass for someone who knew what he was doing until he actually had to do something.
A message appeared.
Eric, 32: Hey, you seem very cool.
Ernie read the message.
Then he read it again.
There was nothing wrong with it. It was friendly. It was straightforward. There were no cryptic references, no inexplicable punctuation, and no apparent expectation that Ernie should somehow intuit what the sender was thinking.
A promising start.
He looked through Eric's profile. Eric was thirty-two, also autistic, and seemed reasonably normal, although Ernie was aware that normal was a somewhat unreliable metric when you were evaluating a stranger based on six photographs and a paragraph of text.
He decided to reply.
Ernie: You too.
He considered adding something else, then decided against it. There was a limit to how much pressure he was willing to put on a conversation that had existed for approximately forty seconds.
They exchanged messages for a while. Eric seemed nice. Ernie seemed to be managing the conversation without any major incidents. Nobody had misunderstood anybody, and there had been no need to consult an imaginary committee of experts about the appropriate use of an emoji.
Eventually, they said good night.
Ernie put his phone down.
That had gone well.
He wasn't going to get carried away. It was a conversation, not a marriage proposal. Still, it was nice to discover that talking to someone didn't always have to feel like taking an exam for which nobody had provided the syllabus.