Now a growing body of research is pushing against that stereotype, finding that many autistic people yearn for human connections and community at least as much as their neurotypical peers. The challenges they face are attributable not only to their neurology but also to the ways nonautistic people respond (or fail to respond) to them. Not surprisingly, intimacy turns out to be a two-way street. The impaired ability of many neurotypical people to accurately gauge the emotional states of people with autism—which Damian Milton, an autistic researcher at the University of Kent, has dubbed the “double empathy problem”—turns out to drive many failures of reciprocity that have long been blamed solely on autistic “impairments.”