Autism Vox

Associative Mating and Autism

by Kristina Chew, PhD on March 10th, 2007

What does the 2002 movie Maid in Manhattan have to do with a theory about a rising number of children with autism?

If Christopher Marshall, the Senate candidate played by Ralph Fiennes, and Marisa Ventura, the hotel maid played by Jennifer Lopez, were to have a child, chances are that child would not have autism. This ludicrous speculation was prompted by my reading of an article by Judith Warner in the March 10th New York Times (the article is available by subscription only). After a chance viewing of Maid in Manhattan with her daughters, Warner notes that “in the real world, the fantasy of a highly successful man swooping down to make off with a winsome, wide-eyed maid is pretty well dead” due to the theory of “associative mating—-like marrying like, in normal-people-speak.” While this has been going on “pretty much forever,” only recently, it is thought, have men and women chosen each other on the basis of similar achievements in the work world. Warner writes:

In Britain, Simon Baron-Cohen, the Autism Research Center director at the University of Cambridge, postulates that assortative mating among people with great skills in understanding and building systems, like engineers and economists, may be linked to the greater numbers of autistic children. Similar hypotheses have been floated around to explain the increased and earlier incidence of bipolar disorder and anorexia (too many perfectionists marrying perfectionists, too little “hybrid vigor”).

To be honest, I am never quite sure what to make of the “associative mating” theory of autism. There are a lot of engineers on my side of the family, but my husband and I, while both academics, study the humanities—history for Jim, literature and languages for me. I wonder if there might be a tendency for some parents of autistic parents to shy away from the theory precisely because it puts the focus on parents as “why” a child has autism, rather than on an external agent (such as a vaccine and environmental pollution)?

I can say that the combination of the three us makes for one happy family.

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POSTED IN: Anorexia, Movies, Psychology, Romance