I don’t mean that they were dumb or a bit slow. I mean genuinely regarded like they needed a caretaker. I feel embarrassed to say it but I did when I entered the 6th grade on a girl who was nonverbal. She was very pretty and I had a small crush on her. I felt so ashamed for having a crush on her. The older I’ve gotten the less I see genuinely regarded people. So I’ve never had that feeling since then.
Have you ever had a crush on someone that was legitimately regarded?
The older I've gotten the less I see genuinely regarded people. So I've never had that feeling since then.
My favorite part
It’s so wistful
OP's the "+" in LGTBQTIA(?)+
Regard-attracted persons
Regard-attracted person of empathy
My god get the man a triangle in the pride flag!
Why don't we just have LGB+? lol.
Would help elect more Democrats, at the very least.
Or just minority/non-majority sexual orientation, or "queer" as a blanket term.
Having a identifier that is an initialism of vaguely related status that explicitly are not a closed set is fundamentally absurd.
Yeah you said it better
I remember one time a judge in the UK ruled that some guy was too retearded to consent to his sexual relationship, so tread carefully
Story of my life tbh
In the US there was that Rutgers professor. She was like writing love notes to herself with his finger into his Stephen Hawking machine and was convinced it was him doing it. Insane
Lmao the one with the documentary?
You should watch Pumpkin starring bulimic RS darling Christina Ricci
I saw the trailer. At least that guy could talk 😞
great use of Stars of Track and Field by Belle and Sebastian
Loved that movie, it was so funny
Yes, but there is a reasonable excuse, and a story.
One summer while I was in university, I worked at a local historical society on a student grant, messing around with largely-worthless local artifacts and uploading scans of them to some gov't database. We had a lot of local volunteers who'd show up in the summer and help with this stuff. Generally retirees, but some younger people too.
One of them was this girl, Julie. Julie was very French, and spoke pretty limited English. She was also very pretty in a way I was into at this mid-2010s juncture -- blond curly hair, big moon face, lively eyes, shapely -- and dressed a bit kooky: Floor length skirts in weird patterns, etc. She had a pretty small English vocabulary, but seemed to have one of those good-natured off-the-wall senses of humour that ESL people develop when having to speak non-natively with some frequency.
I grew to enjoy working with her on her shifts: she was talkative and bubbly, and though we weren't able to communicate very effectively, she seemed to return my energy really well, even sometimes standing a bit too close to me, laughing a bit too loud at my dumb jokes, our hips touching --- there was chemistry!
Slowly, though, myself and some of the other volunteers began to notice some other less charming aspects of Julie. What initially presented as a slightly ditzy lack of English gradually revealed itself as a more general incompetence, an inability to perform even the simplest tasks consistently. Pauses and lulls in conversation that we'd assumed were just her searching for words were actually her entirely zoning out in the middle of conversations if something else happened, and seeming not to remember any of what happened prior.
Weirdest of all, she seemed to be steadily gaining weight throughout the summer at an alarming pace, bringing very strange and baroque lunches during her shifts, that seemed to be focused on "multiples," if that makes sense: things like 4-5 peanut butter sandwiches, or half a dozen sunkists, or what seemed like an entire package of bear paws.
One of the other volunteers my age once ran to get me, telling me I needed to see something: we went to the office, where we saw Julie on her lunch-break, at one of the computers, scrolling through the google image search results for the search term "food". "It just all looks so good!" she said, entirely without shame, and with an almost frenzied look in her eyes.
The true end of this infatuation, which had mellowed moreso into curiousity by late August, was during one of her final shifts: Her mother came by to pick her up: This was a woman who spoke perfect, midwestern-accented English, and thanked us all for being so nice and kind to Julie this summer, and it was the best summer she's ever had, and that she was scared next summer's placement wouldn't be as fun. Julie started crying and there was just a LOT of snot and we all had to hug her.
I don't know how to feel about this having typed it all out, but I think you can sort of imagine a face I'm making that does it all justice.
This is oddly beautiful
Am I getting this right? You all thought she was a slow speaker because she was a french ESL learner but was actually entirely American? Where did the french assumption come in?
Early on i thought 100% french, by the end I'm thinking it was 20% french 80% something else, and "mom" may have been a charitable type, idk
She was slow. Are zoomers taught reading comprehension?
Tell Wes Anderson you have a movie on your hands
(Owen Wilson runs as fast as he can to spread the news; Bill Murray is seated on a park bench reading the newspaper while puffing on a pipe out the side of his mouth, putting on an affect of uninterest but secretly curious about park passersby. The camera remains fixed on the park bench for the duration of the scene.)
Bill Murray: (Without looking up) What is it this time?
Owen Wilson: (breathlessly) I'm in love with a a *etard!
BM: (Still looking down) Well, did you get her some Peeps or something? They love those.
OW: Gee, I hadn't thought of that. I'll get right to it! (He runs off back to where he came from, almost tripping over his own shoes.)
BM: (Shakes his head.) Young love. What can you do? (To his wife playing with his granddaughters some distance behind the bench- he barks, yelling out the side of his mouth opposite the pipe. Still does not look up.) Marge! Come on let's get outta here, the game comes on at six!
mistuh f
Thanks for this, Mark Kozelek
sounds like it could be Prader-Willi
Does autism count? When I was a recluse I became attracted to people with no social skills. Maybe I’m the autist
Hi
same.. :/ does it work out in the long run?
I had a brief experience like this at Wal-Mart a couple weeks ago: my cashier was strikingly pretty and also the lowest-functioning employee I've ever seen. She was seemingly non-verbal, she would pause and stare off into the distance every few seconds, and she had a blue balloon tied to her shoulder – presumably to help find her if she wandered off. She provoked a mix of feelings that's hard to describe.
Pumpkinmaxxing
Mr. F
I watched Love On The Spectrum on Netflix. I thought Connor was very handsome and a sweet guy. Also liked the old guy Steve; seemed like a very sweet, kind and handsome guy.
Kind of. There was this gorgeous girl who moved to my school in 1st grade but we didn't know she was hearing impaired so at first everyone thought she was just a little re✝️arded. She was so pretty I honestly didn't care
You seem really into this first grader m8
Mr. F….
There was a slow girl in my gym class and she had a very sheepish crush on this short handsome dude with surfer hair in our class. It was very precious
No. Did you watch that doc on Netflix? Do you think they were in love or did the lady abuse him?
“Tell Them You Love Me”, for those playing along at home, and yes you need to watch it. Insane story.
Thanks for recommending it. Just watched it, that was insane.
It's on Netflix now? I had to pirate it before because it was only on Xfinity TV
Yah, Netflix bought the distribution rights, in the US at least
I haven’t watched yet but I think she abused him
no way they were in love, experts literally said he was a new born trapped in a grown mans body
No, I prefer to be the regarded one
I has a crush on an intelligent autist
Time to log off, Jake
The real question OP, is did you have a crush on her because she was regarded or you had a crush on her and she was regarded.
She just happened to be regarded. Like I said she was very pretty. Her being regarded was stopped me from developing any serious feelings.
I don't think that's necessarily wrong. People who have mental disabilities still fall in love and have sexual desire, they still are participants in the human condition. I think treating them as totally asexual and "innocent", if anything, removes their fundamental humanity.
Also there's a lot of non-verbal people with higher faculties. They just communicate with digital devices.
That’s true but this girl was definitely not at that level. She could move her upper body but still had to be spoon fed because she wouldn’t eat unless they put it in her mouth.
Man
I don't think people with the mental faculties of children should be participating in an act that can produce children
I’ve married one
that one episode of it's always sunny
Yes, 52 upvotes and I’ll link her TikTok I dated her for 5 months too
Went from 100 -> 52 upvotes
Your mum
You stink 😡
I'm not sure if diagnosable but I had (and still have) a crush on a guy who admitted to shitting on bread with the intention to eat it. He got scared last minute. He says he has to get up and dance while pooping to make the stuff come out... Claims everyone does this.
The Gourmand
wtf
Lil’ Kev?
There was a girl in 4th grade that I thought was cute that was in the special ed class. I don't remember much about her. She didn't talk much and I was not much of a socialite myself.
i had this bit in junior high school where i would just wave and say hi to people i didn't know. my intentions were largely good but i was probably annoying and also weird, but i waved at this one guy. in the province i lived in at the time, most people were very stupid but not all were regarded, i was incredibly average and also probably mildly mentally challenged because i was an out of school hermit for almost 10 years at the time, but was still placed in the highest section for the 2 years of junior high school i attended. the stupider you are, the lower your section, the worse your classroom was. this guy was on the lower spectrum. i waved at him and he misconstrued this as affection? i guess? he stopped attending his classes just to hang out by my classroom, and he'd follow me around even out of school. i moved later on, so i never saw him again, but i do wonder if he legitimately had something wrong with him or if he was just a creep. or maybe i was the regarded one? probably. who knows.
Hope Sandoval
I’m the regard now that needs caretaking, come find me
Swear the dude I've got a crush on now is so incel that he genuinely is a tard lol
The YouTube white nationalist Jean-François Gariépy tried to impregnate an autistic 19-year-old Hispanic girl with the social and mental maturity of a 10- or 11-year-old child.
No, but many have had crushes on me 😇
The last girl I was with, she was crazy hot and super understanding, she deffinitly had a crush on someone regarded, I couldn't have fucked that up better if I had wrote it into a drama.
Poor lady had to deal with 6 months of my complete regardedness
OP wanted to wrangle up some russy
Every time I look in the mirror
not technically a tard story but i work at a (high-functioning) special needs summer camp and there is one camper who is a remarkably handsome young man and would probably get lots of pussy if he did not constantly flap his hands in public
he's short but well-built and muscular so every time he does it near me it viscerally bothers me because part of me subconsciously thinks he's going to slap me or something
When I was 12 this 16 year old girl came on to me at a friends house. She was incredibly attractive. We ended up making out on his pull out couch in the living room. I probably could have taken it further but I was incredibly inexperienced and nervous, so instead I put on the movie Juno. She kept saying what a good movie it was and looking back today that should have been a major red flag that she was regarded. Plus she made out with a 12 year old, like wtf?
3 missing replies
No, but the sub is now so back