I love a romance character with a factual, no-nonsense approach to love and sex. One of my recent favourites is Stella, the female lead in , by autistic author Helen Hoang. I chuckled when she was too blunt at a dinner scene, and empathised when she struggled with sensory issues around her clothes. It was both painful and validating to watch her excel at work and become confounded by seemingly basic small talk.
Most of all, I loved watching the evolution of Stella tapping into her desire and learning how to communicate what feels good for her. Michael, her neurotypical love interest, was a wonderful example of an able-bodied partner who embraces all of Stella.
For the very first time, I saw someone a lot like myself reflected in the pages of a ‘happily ever after’. All this is helped, perhaps, by the fact that Hoang managed to include lots of gems gleaned from her lived experience as an autistic woman.
It’s so joyful and validating for me, an autistic woman, to read a romance novel starring at least one autistic character. From reading about characters who are in chronic pain (Frankie in by Chloe Liese) to someone who needs to set timers to remind them to eat (Anna in by Helen Hoang) – I see so much of myself in these neurodiverse female leads.
Helen Hoang’s ‘The Kiss Quotient’. Source: Allen and Unwin
Individually, they may seem like quirks. Taken as a whole, these sensory differences and disabilities are part of the autistic constellation. I wish I had read these romances when I was younger. It would have been so validating to realise that my experiences of sexuality are perfectly normal – for an autistic woman. I need to feel extremely safe before any form of intimacy, and it took my husband courting me, earning my trust and then marrying me for us to reach that place of intimacy.
Not only that, these romance novels reject the stereotype that autistic adults are infantile and don’t have sexual desire or agency. Autistic or autistic-coded characters like Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory and Sam from Atypical are examples of these . The books I have come to love, on the other hand, often navigate the intersections between difficulties in reading social cues, consent and sensory differences in the bedroom. For instance, Kay Kerr’s YA novel explores the vulnerability that young autistic women can face in the dating field, and how predators lurk.
Romance in the real world is tricky enough for autistic individuals, especially when there hasn’t been much positive role modelling in real life. A lot of us grew up in turbulent households with undiagnosed and therefore unsupported neurodivergence. What I saw in my childhood home was coercive control and emotional abuse. That set me up to expect the same for me. Therapy and safe, loving relationships helped me heal, and expect better.
Kay Kerr’s ‘Social Queue’. Source: Text Publishing
What I didn’t see in my parents, I can learn from romance novels. This may sound strange, but I’ve gone to books to figure out pretty much everything else in my life. Why not romance?
For anyone who thinks it’s an absurd idea, I’ll challenge it with this: romance novels written by autistic women, about autistic women, can show what a healthy, consenting relationship looks like between two disabled adults, or between two differently-abled adults. The difference between a sweeping historical romance novel and a healthy, consensual relationship is this – a romance novel may be escapism for neurotypical readers, but it’s also educational for neurodivergent readers. I carry my neurodivergence everywhere I go. I exist with my brutal honesty, sensory differences and keen eye for social justice. I am terrible at sustained eye contact and small talk and dislike loud, grating sounds. In daily life, my threat response is heightened. It’s so hard for me to feel safe, and if there’s anywhere I need to feel the safest, it’s in the bedroom.
I wish I had known earlier in my life about the joy of healthy, consensual sex between disabled equals, or between differently-abled equals. I am grateful that I have this now, with my husband. It was a messy, painful journey to get to this point.
There are so many rules when it comes to courtship in Islam, and I have always loved rules. My husband not only fit my very detailed one-page criteria for a life partner (no explosive anger issues, kind, patient, nurturing, peaceful conflict resolution style) – best of all, he had fallen in love with all of me, including the messy parts. I was honest with him about my then-diagnosis of bipolar. Over the years, he pieced together my interesting quirks and suspected long before I did that I was autistic: my daily sensory overload, digestive issues, blunt honesty and difficulty with social cues. Our daughter’s autism diagnosis confirmed my own.
I’m leaning into how much I love romance novels now, especially ones written by autistic people. Autistic author writes about how so much of the shaming around the romance genre stems from misogyny and patriarchy. Why is it that books where women end up missing, murdered or mutilated (or all of the above) are lauded as “literary gems”, she asks, while romance novels which centre on women’s joy and empowerment are sniffed at?
I hope that more autistic authors from diverse backgrounds get to write the richness of their romantic experiences both inside and outside the bedroom. I would love to read about the romance between a plucky disabled Muslim heroine and her leading man: a romance rich in mutual respect, sensory accommodations and carefully, slowly – with lots of prior warning – the building of a loving bridge between them.
* Noor Abdul is a freelance writer. Name changed for privacy.
