The Journal of Best Practices (11 page)

Whether my friends are right remains a mystery. They are often too busy watching mixed martial arts or men’s professional wrestling to offer me any explanation as to why they think my interests are, as they put it, gay. For me, scantily clad female models it is. What can I say? Finding common ground in gay stuff with Kristen has led to plenty of phenomenal hetero sex for me. I guess I’d rather get some action watching
Sex and the City
than fall asleep alone on the couch with the game on.

Not that I’d have to. As if in response to my efforts, Kristen started getting into my types of shows as well. Some of them, anyway. Televised cattle auctions were pushing it, but she would cheer with me while we watched professional bull riding. “Chris Shivers just rode for eight!” she’d say. “We like him, right?” She started spending more time watching
Family Guy
and stand-up comedy specials, while I learned to sit through syndicated episodes of
Roseanne
and
Saved by the Bell
.

Our mutual world was beginning to take shape, and it felt great. Getting inside her girl world and looking around was proving to be one of my easiest Best Practices. Instead of saying, “Let’s foster companionship over an awkward dinner,” I was now saying, “Want to join me at the spa for my birthday?” Rather than suggesting, “Let’s work on communicating tonight!” it was so much easier and more human to say, “Let’s watch some TV.” We’d settle in together, knowing that there would always be a big, emotional discussion waiting for us, something with no commercial interruptions or laugh tracks, and for those few hours, we’d feel as tuned-in as ever.

Just listen.

K
risten and I were sitting out on our patio, enjoying a midsummer evening with a glass of wine and a cozy little fire. The leaves of our young maple trees whispered faintly overhead and broke up the bright moonlight, which glistened off our patio furniture and cast shadows from the tall wooden swing set in the corner of our lawn. While warming her toes near the fire, Kristen told me that she’d heard about a research study that was meant to determine how early in life humans can exhibit empathy.

“Apparently the researchers gathered all these infants together to see how they’d react when they heard the sound of a baby crying, and they found that if one infant cried, then most of the other infants would cry in response,” she said.

I was mesmerized by the glowing embers beneath the flames in our fire pit, which made the surrounding brick come alive in a delicate, jittery light. “And?”

“Well, they think it’s proof that humans can empathize when they’re just a few weeks old. Isn’t that amazing?”

I said that it was, and then I made the story about me. “I wonder if I would have cried.”

We unanimously agreed that if another baby had cried, then I most certainly would have cried, too, but only because the little son of a bitch would have interrupted my sleep. What can I say? I’m just not as empathic as, well, most of the world’s population. Not that it’s my fault, of course.

First of all—let’s face it—I’m a guy. That’s strike one. To make matters worse, I’m a guy with Asperger syndrome. If empathy were currency, men with Asperger syndrome would starve. The fact that I’m also a husband basically means that if you ever want to get your feelings noticed, you pretty much have to grab me by the cheeks and say very slowly: “I. Need. You. To. Listen. To. Me.” Even then, I might misinterpret your point:
Woo hoo! She’s hitting me up for sex!

With our communication skills on the mend, Kristen and I had begun talking more frequently about empathy, and more specifically my apparent deficiency in it. The topic was bound to come up; reduced empathic ability was a frustrating reality of my disorder, and by extension, our marriage. I understood that one of the major bullet points in any list of symptoms associated with autism spectrum conditions was a problematic deficiency in empathy in relation to neurotypicals. But in the first few months after my diagnosis, I wasn’t certain that I had that particular symptom.
I feel stuff,
I thought.

Kristen thought differently. She was painfully aware of my deficit, having been something of a victim of my apparent insensitivity (read: cluelessness) for years. With my diagnosis, she gained a new perspective that allowed her to see that I may have been clinically self-centered, outrageously self-centered, but not
willfully
self-centered. She tried sharing this perspective with me, explaining that I hadn’t been programmed for empathic ability and never would be. “And that’s fine,” she’d add.
Is it?
I’d wonder.
Sounds like empathy is a pretty big deal, actually.

She began taking time to explain why certain social situations were challenging for me. Things like engaging with people in socially appropriate ways: “I think your brother really wanted to see you the other night, Dave. It’s not your fault, but you missed the cues.” This after my brother had offered—out of the blue—to buy me dinner one evening, and although we almost never go out together, I’d declined, saying, “I do love free food. But it’s Butter Noodles Saturday, so I’m going to pass.” My response had seemed perfectly acceptable to me, but to Kristen and my brother it was clear that I hadn’t interpreted his emotional intent: to spend time together.

As empathy became the focus of Kristen’s and my discussions, I became increasingly confused about whether or not I could empathize, and if so, how well. I couldn’t begin to imagine how a person might quantify a deficit in empathy. A deficit in teeth or eyebrows would be pretty easy to assess, but what constitutes a lack of empathy?

“What if I give a shit, but just barely?” I once asked Kristen. “Would that count? What if I can determine what someone else is feeling, but I can’t actually feel it myself? Or what if I could sense your sadness but never offered you any comfort? In that case, would empathy even matter? How much is ‘I’m sorry’ going to buy you, really? If I’m willing to be compassionate on demand, could that count for something?”

Kristen waited until I finished, then shrugged her shoulders and said, “Empathy is like talent, Dave. We’re born with some amount of it, so we all function at different levels. Also, it’s not a matter of ‘I’m better’ or ‘you’re worse.’ We’re just different.”

Still, I couldn’t help but feel cheated. I understood that empathy was a vital resource for successful social interactions, that it prevented one person from offending another and even drew people together, allowing them to bond in ways that are exclusive to the human experience. I felt like I was missing out on part of that experience. And looking back, I was. Engaging the social world without empathy is like going to the mall without any money or pants on; it can be done, but you’re bound to have problems.

I didn’t want to think of myself as being devoid of feeling, so I initially rejected the idea that I lacked empathy. I thought of my reactions to situations captured in films, television, and literature. I could recognize when a character offended someone important, for instance, and I would become anxious the moment he or she realized it. I understood what it meant whenever the medical director softened his eyes in a dramatic tough-love speech. I had shed tears during Folgers coffee commercials. (I didn’t bother to consider the fact that had the actor in the Folgers commercial pulled me aside after the shoot and told me he had only one day left to live, I would have immediately asked him if he knew how many days I had left.)

I thought of my favorite childhood teddy bear. How I had discovered him one afternoon lying facedown on my bedroom floor and had clutched him to my chest and cried apologetically because I thought he seemed lonely. But then I thought of the countless times I’d seen my classmates burst into tears in the classroom or on the playground, and I realized that in those moments I always reacted the same way I did when I watched them take a bite out of a sandwich.
So, does the teddy bear count?
I wondered.

I also tried to convince myself that my compassion for (and understanding of) cattle counted as empathy. Growing up, we raised red Angus cattle and showed them every summer at the Illinois state and county fairs, and at my dad’s comical, almost maniacal insistence, I spent a lot of time around the herd. “We’re not going to half-ass this,” he’d say whenever I complained. “Now get out there and brush your steer. And when you’re done with that, you can wash him and brush him again.” His point was that if you’re going to do something, then you need to do it right. He also knew that an animal’s trust is garnered over time, so I learned how to interact with our cattle, hour by hour, as the summers unfolded. Amid dusty beams of sunlight streaming in through the cracks and knotholes in the siding of the barn, I’d watch them watching me while they ate—staring with awe into the masticating faces of unimpressed cattle was an activity I found easy to focus on. Then the summer would end, and I’d be forced to sell my steer at the annual livestock auction.

I’ve attended funerals for loved ones where the greatest discomfort I experienced came from the suit I had to wear. But each summer, after loading my steer onto the slaughter truck, I’d suffer crying jags that would pop up randomly for days. I’d lie awake nights, thinking about him—his huge, calm, trusting eyes; his ears falling forward, relaxed; the sound of his breathing; how he just ate and looked around, totally comfortable in my presence. There was never a question in my mind as to how my steer felt in those moments I spent with him:
We have a weird relationship here, but it works. Can you do something about these flies?

I was no expert, but to me these examples constituted some empathic ability, which made things rather confusing for me. Worse, nobody could agree on what empathy amounted to. Kristen had her definition, which differed from the one in the dictionary, which contradicted my friends’ theories. And of course, none of those definitions could please the millions of contrarian bloggers I found when I searched for the term online—faceless people with names like CaptainHamwhistle who stay up nights rethinking their avatars and who themselves couldn’t define the concept yet insisted that any mainstream definition was not to be trusted.

With no clear definition of empathy, and no way of quantifying how much of it I had or didn’t have, I resorted to actual research to get to the bottom of things. I sequestered myself in Kristen’s office one evening while she was watching a movie—some tearjerker I had no business getting myself involved in.
Beaches,
I think it was. My first Internet search included the keywords
empathy, Asperger,
and
syndrome,
and the results were rather useless—confusing wiki threads, links to videos of purportedly clairvoyant house cats, that sort of thing. Then I added the word
measuring
to my search parameters, and within minutes I had all the answers I needed.

There were many results to choose from, but I started with an article titled “The Empathy Quotient: An Investigation of Adults with Asperger Syndrome,” which had been written by Simon Baron-Cohen and Sally Wheelwright of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. (Leave it to renowned experts and leading researchers to really know what they’re talking about. No offense, CaptainHamwhistle.)

In the article, Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright spelled out in no uncertain terms—and I’m paraphrasing here—that my wife had been right all along. I do in fact have a measurable deficiency in empathic ability. My Empathy Quotient? Using Baron-Cohen’s method, I earned a meager fifteen points out of a possible eighty. That’s 19 percent. Talk about just barely giving a shit. The study’s control group—neurotypicals—averaged in the forties. (Interestingly, a second study revealed that among the general population, women scored significantly higher than men. A point that will come as no surprise to women.)

According to Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright, empathy is “the drive or ability to attribute mental states to another person/animal, and entails an appropriate affective response in the observer to the other person’s mental state.”
Hmm
. I called up the stairs to Kristen, asking her what
affective
meant.

“Affective what?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Just affective.”

“Relating to an emotional state,” she called.

Oh. Okay, this makes sense.
I wrote the definition down in my notebook.
So
this
is what I’m lacking!

Baron-Cohen’s first article inspired me to read more. In all the subsequent searches I made sure to include his name, and by the end of the evening I had a stack of clinical papers on the subject. I had empirical data rather than conjecture, which meant that I finally had answers.

What I gleaned from all this research is that empathy is the result of numerous cognitive and affective processes, all firing away behind the scenes somewhere in our brains. Cognitive processes allow us to understand the mental state of another person—his or her emotions, desires, beliefs, intentions, et cetera—which in turn helps us to understand and even predict the person’s actions or behaviors. They allow us to step outside of our own experience in order to take on and understand other people’s perspectives—something that every wife on the planet wishes her husband would do. The affective component of empathy is more related to our emotional responses to the mental states that we observe in other people. This component allows us to
feel
some appropriate and non-egocentric emotional response to another person’s emotions—something
else
that every wife on the planet wishes her husband would do.