That sounds like normal behavior for a young man with asperger's. When you say "any advice", does your friend want his/her son to live at home? Are the parents afraid that he cannnot manage on his own?

The reason I ask is that most young men want to establish independence. The son will need to acquire independent decision making abilities if he is to live an adult life where he can be self-reliant. In my case, as a young male with Asperger's, I wanted to establish myself as separate from my parents, though I always wanted to live with someone who I could trust. If the roommate is a good friend, and is aware of the type of behavior the son may exhibit, it could be a positive experience for all involved.

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Would it be a good idea to seek out another guy with aspergers? I'm thinking there would be more understanding between them.

Perhaps. But I would suggest that the choice be his, rather than have him feel like a particular roommate was forced upon him. If there are concerns about how he might be with a roommate, talking them out might help everyone. Direct, non-rhetorical questions about what different types of personalities would be easiest to live with would be what I would prefer in his situation.

Additionally, if part of this process is learning about himself vis-a-vis others, he might get more out of a very accepting roommate who shares some interests but is not necessarily on the spectrum.

Good luck, I hope it works out for him and his family,

"Would it be a good idea to seek out another guy with aspergers? I'm thinking there would be more understanding between them."

I would say yes, but only if they have both been well aware of their Asperger's and have spend a good deal of time coming to understand their own brands of it. Aspies who don't know themselves well, or understand Asperger's itself well, can run into a lot of problems understanding each other.

If you want evidence of that, just visit http://www.wrongplanet.com.

Browse around the discussion forum there. It's a great place to associate online with other Aspies, but it's also full of clear evidence, in my opinion, that Aspies can get tangled up very easily in very complicated misunderstandings with each other that rival, and I dare say often far out strip misunderstandings between Aspies and NT's when it comes to vehemence.

My wife suspects she is an Aspie. I know I am. It wasn't until we both began to suspect she is too, and we looked back on our fourteen year marriage, that we realized that is we are both Aspies, it explains MOST of the difficulties we had with our relationship.

Perhaps your friend should join this board directly. As far as aspies rooming together for understanding, your idea sounds well intentioned but...well, most aspies seem to think entirely in their own terms and it would probably be rare to find aspies able to connect and share that mutual understanding with each other the way non-aspies do.

I personally think that he would probably do better with a NT friend as I have found that Aspies (myself included!) can have some very rigid and not always flexible parts of our personalities and most NTs seem to be a little more chill.

Like I *have* to have a silent bedroom or I can't sleep. At all. And I get into food "ruts" where I just want to eat the same 2-3 foods or food combos for weeks on end. And my routine is pretty fixed - my sleep schedule may be all over the map (yay for chronic insomnia) but I always do the exact same things in roughly the same sequence when I wake up (and for about an hour to two hours after I wake up) and before bed. If my routine gets disrupted, I get pretty b*tchy.

Overall though I think that living on his own with a supportive room-mate would probably be a healthy experience and give him a feeling of independance from mom and dad. Heck he's got a college degree, he's got to be at least reasonably functional and organized :)

I could not handle roommates. Mainly because they couldn't handle me.

In all fairness, yes, I find it insanely difficult to be interested in people with a deep connection, but I tried.

We rented rooms in a house. There were rules. They didn't follow the rules. I decided I was a big kid now and could handle it. Certain rules I could not handle being broken because they started to affect me.

And I don't believe I was wrong in telling the girlfriend of one of the girls not to talk to me in a mean tone or two constantly attack me (she was VERY bossy and verbally abusive to her partner) especially because she didn't live there.

I was nice to everyone but they didn't like how I "spent time in my room a lot." How it was "weird" I didn't watch TV. Also, how I was "quirky" or "strange" or didn't get what they were talking about. My jokes weren't the same. They asked me how I was and I went into some long explanation. I took things too literally.

At that point I really didn't have the social skills needed to live with roommates and I don't think I will ever develop them because I had to work around it in my own way. Roommates don't necessarily open up to people or express concern. It depends how old the person is and where they are in life.

I've had my own apartment for 3 years now. It also is because I haven't had my parents in my life for over 10 years and never will. I will be graduating next month, if all goes according to plan.