That’s called masking.

I have level 1 ASD and rated pretty high in masking when tested. I show up the way I’m expected to show up. I don’t let people see what it costs me. I deal with that later in private.

You can be an introvert without having autism. A lot of people “mask” it doesn’t mean they’re autistic.

You can’t peer inside someone’s head to know the motivations behind why a person acts the way they do. A autistic person will have different causal reasons for acting in a way that might look like an introvert from the outside.

I ran across a video that went over this and all the autistic reasons in the examples were the ones that resonated with me. I had even spent an hour debating back and forth with a therapist a few months earlier about one of the examples the video gave. The therapist was trying to apply the neurotypical view, and I was unknowingly arguing for the autistic view, trying to explain that I didn’t feel the way he was saying, but he couldn’t understand the nuance I was trying to explain. It was very frustrating. This happened many times, and I finally quit the day before getting the results from the testing.

I used to think like you. That’s why I actually got tested; I wanted to know for sure. It took over 6 months and cost around $3k. It’s not something a person is going to do on a whim to justify their fidget spinner collection. When I got the results, I spent the whole time asking about the tests. Could I have gamed it, objective vs subjective tests, etc. I spent decades trying to figure out what’s “wrong” with me. I didn’t come to this lightly or because it’s popular. It was the first thing that actually fit and made sense. And the more I learn, the more it fits and makes sense. The visibility in the mainstream helps people like me find the answers we have been relentless searching for our whole life, that everyone overlooks because of masking.

That doesn't invalidate the fact that there are high functioning autists that mask well.

If anything, Newton was very well connected with other people and had extensive collaborations with them. He was very much social.

The fact he may have died a virgin says nothing about his social capabilities.

Maybe he was gay in a time when being gay was a death sentence ? Which would be really sad.

You can read his life history in some books. One that I’ve read says that he grew up essentially in foster care because his widowed mother remarried and continued to live mere miles away from him in the same town. She completely avoided all contact with him. You could imagine what that kind of rejection would do without having to invent his sexual orientation.

You're speculating just as much as I was? I never said "he was gay" I was just saying (like you) there are several others reasons he maybe didn't' marry outside of autism.

You actually make it sounds like what I said was derogatory?

In Western Europe in the 1600s, being a virgin didn't make you a loser in most people's eyes like it does now.

Newton had long friendships with other leading intellectual figures (Edmund Halley, John Locke, mathematician David Gregory).

Never being married did however.

It literally did not. Celibacy was much more common (or at least commonly aspired to) and was considered virtuous.

Only in prescribed folds. The average unmarried person was a relative outcast. Lifelong singleness was exceedingly rare. It went as far as having legal ramifications like not being able to own property and being unable to hold certain offices.

> There are essentially no married virgins,

Which is something I point out to JWs rude enough to interrupt my Sunday breakfast. Which of the following scenarios present as most likely:

1. A married couple, living together as a married couple, had never had sex, or

2. They had sex

Feynman was also very charismatic

Ditto for John von Neumann