3 Life Lessons from Love on the Spectrum

Hi friend,

Last week I found myself on the couch, crying my eyes out to the season 1 finale of Love on the Spectrum.

If you’re not familiar, Love on the Spectrum is a dating show that follows autistic people as they navigate dating, complete with wildly awkward small talk, agonizing heartbreak, and first kisses that make you almost pass out. (In other words: love.)

As far as I’m concerned, this show is a painfully relatable masterpiece that celebrates humanity (and diversity) with a heart-warming combination of tenderness and respect. And since I can’t stop thinking about it, I figured today I would share a few life lessons from the show that we would all benefit from. :-)

3 Life Lessons from Love on the Spectrum

1. We should all give our “special interests” more credit.

In the show, everyone talks openly about their “special interests,” whether that’s trains, princesses, animals, history, or superheroes.

And when two people’s special interests are aligned? 

My god, the joy! The delight! The freakin’ sparks! 

Seeing the joy of two people geeking out about trains or whatever made me think we’ve all undersold the importance of our own special interests to our own detriment! 

After all, how often do we try to downplay our passions and obsessions—especially early on in the dating process?

Like, maybe in attempt to be relatable or whatever on date, we might just say “I like to read sci-fi,” when what we really want to say is:

“I love when authors explore the ecological system of alien species, and I’m reading this book right now with a tiny squirrel-like alien who is super intelligent, and sometimes I feel incredibly sad that my little alien friend doesn’t exist in real life because I’ll miss her so much when the series is over. What are your favorite kind of aliens?”

And how often do we try to get into the other person’s interests to seem cool and compatible, (even though we don’t give a single damn about mushroom foraging or hockey, Michael!), or because we’ve learned to feel embarrassed by the things that actually light us up?

Watching the show made me think that we haven’t been giving our special interests enough credit in general, and especially so when it comes to partner compatibility!

We tend to spend so much time thinking about whether or not our core values and life goals align with the other person’s while dating, that we totally forget most relationships end up being built on small daily conversations about stuff we just think is interesting.

As far as I’m concerned, this show proves that we should all be a lot more loud-and-proud about the random weird shit that lights us up.

2. Everyone’s best self comes out when we feel safe.

A lot of the leads of the show have experiences that clearly make them feel anxious or misunderstood, and you can literally see them start to get dysregulated and fall apart in real time. 

It’s brutal to watch this happen, both because their overt visual distress cues make it so easy to imagine what they’re feeling and struggling with, and because while their actual responses to stress might be different than your own, the emotional experience itself is so damn relatable. 

The cool thing though is that you get to see the flip side of this, too, when a lead seems to fully relax and blossom around people who make them feel safe, seen, and accepted. Maybe it’s around a family member who celebrates them, a producer who makes them feel cared for, or a date who just announced they also love collecting plushies, but you can see them visibly calm down, gain confidence, and just become more themselves when they feel comfortable.

And honestly? Same. 

Feeling safe, liked, and understood tends to bring out the most likable and charming version of everyone, and more often than not those “unlikeable” qualities and behaviors we tend to want to change about ourselves are actually just the result of being stressed, uncomfortable, or on the defensive.

This show beautifully demonstrated that most of the time, people don’t need to get better, they just need to feel safer. 

So maybe we don’t need to fix ourselves, we just need to find the people and spaces where our nervous systems can relax, and our warmest, shiniest selves can emerge.

3. Be yourself, and speak your truth.

One of my favorite things about the show is that people just… say what they think. 

There’s no game-playing, no pretending, and no “wait three hours to text back, or else they’ll think I’m desperate. The leads just speak their truth, and I think we can all take inspiration from their transparency and authenticity:

“I really like you.” 

“I don’t think we’re a good match.” 

“I want to go home now.”

Watching people speak their truth this way is both incredibly liberating, and kind of terrifying, given that most of us have been conditioned to play games, people-please, self-edit, and try to act “normal” to fit in. 

But all this “careful socializing” makes it so that a lot of folks don’t even know their truth in the moment, let alone know how to communicate it out loud!

In fact, I often help my clients learn to push back against this conditioning and stop over-managing other people’s feelings in this way, both to help them reconnect with (and reclaim) their own experience and truth, and to help them navigate social situations and relationships more effectively! Because while it might feel like all that management work is about being kind to others, more often than not it’s actually about avoiding your own discomfort—both to your own detriment, and to the detriment of the other person.

I think we could all learn a lot from the way the leads on this show just speak their damn truth, and I encourage us all to be less concerned with managing other people’s feelings, and more concerned with how to be truly authentic and honest in the moment. (Both when it comes to dating, and in life in general!)

I think that’s it for today, thank you for reading! And yes, yes, I know. Love on the Spectrum is technically just a reality dating show.

But to me, it was a show about the beautiful (and painful) experience of being human, the courage it takes to be yourself (in a world that maybe wasn’t built for you), and the power of reaching for connection and believing in love (no matter the obstacles).

Have you ever seen the show? If so, what did you think?

Big hug,

Jessi

PS I’m considering putting together another small body neutrality coaching group together for the summer, so please hit reply and let me know if you might be interested!