What Made 'The Undateables' Undateable?

Meet autistic men and co.

A UK show called ‘The Undateables’ followed individuals who were afflicted with a variety of physical and neurological disabilities and disorders on their quest for love.

A cynic might argue that it served as a modern, sanitized version of a freak show, which allowed people to gawk at sideshow oddities while feeling like they’re engaging with something wholesome and uplifting.

Regardless, assuming there is some correlation between the severity of dating challenges posed by different kinds of conditions and their prevalence on the show, examining these patterns could potentially reveal some valuable insights.

What makes someone ‘undateable’?

Using episode synopses and additional searches when necessary, I was able to identify and tally up the conditions of the participants through seasons 1-12. So, what kind of handicaps hamper one's dateability?

Autism and Asperger's blew the rest out of the water, accounting for a third of all participants and nearly half of male participants. This could be an underestimate too, as some individuals described as having a learning disability would've probably been autistic as well. Learning disabilities were the second most common at 11%, followed by craniofacial abnormalities¹ at 8%, Down’s and Tourette’s syndrome at 7%, Cerebral palsy/paralysis, Dwarfism, and skeletal disorders² at 6%, speech disorders³ at 4%, and so on.

Gender differences?

It's possible that some issues have a more detrimental effect on one gender than the other. Many people claim for instance that autism hinders men's success more, as the pursuer role demands a higher degree of social competence than women’s traditionally more passive role. Conversely, many people believe that women are valued more for their physical attractiveness than men, or at least that other things matter relatively less for women than they do for men, which might lead us to expect conditions affecting morphology to be more prevalent among female participants.

In favour of the first idea, autism was far more common among men than women, with only 2 of 32 women being autistic compared to 31 of 67, though it's worth mentioning that since autism seems to be more commonly found in men in general, 6% is a greater overrepresentation⁴ for women than it would be for men.

On their own, none of the other conditions show significant gender differences using Fisher’s exact tests except Down’s syndrome, which became nonsignificant after correcting for multiple comparisons. However, when combining conditions that substantially affect morphology—craniofacial abnormalities, Down’s syndrome, dwarfism, skeletal disorders, Williams syndrome, Neurofibromatosis—we find a significantly higher proportion of women (56.3%) than men (17.9%) who suffer from these conditions (p < 0.0001). Removing the autistic people from the sample, the difference is still significant, but not strongly.

Conclusion

Autism is often regarded as a barrier to dating, and this analysis seemed to bear this out.

Season 5 featured this rugby hunk with Asperger's and Tourette's, who went on to become a model:

Tom Morgan.

Sure, the exposure provided by the show might have garnered him some fangirls, and his appeal may have partially been why he was selected for the show, but presumably he ended up on a show alongside people with disfigured faces, standing (or crippled in a wheelchair) at four foot tall, or who were mentally retarded for a reason.

Of course, it’s worth considering the fact that autism is a fair amount more common than most of the other conditions featured here, which could exaggerate its relative impact. Still, I think if black pillers/morphological reductionists were right then we wouldn't see this—though I can imagine some of them arguing that having on more male midgets etc. might have been discouraged to avoid the implication that women were ‘superficially’ excluding them or something along those lines.

While this was by no means some rigorous scientific study, nor this show’s cast a perfectly representative sample of people facing significant dating challenges, hopefully it was at least mildly interesting.

In a future installment, the interplay between autism and dating will be explored in more depth.

1. Conditions such as Apert syndrome, facial dysplasia, and Saethre-Chotzen syndrome were grouped into this category.

2. Skeletal disorders includes brittle bone disease, scoliosis, and Marfan syndrome.

3. The men had a stutter and the woman had expressive aphasia.

4. You could argue that we should determine overrepresentation by comparing the prevalence rate to that in the ‘disabled/disfigured’ community, but if it had no effect at all on dateability then we should expect it to show up at about the normal rate regardless. A further caveat here is that it might be more common in the disabled community due to it showing up as a comorbidity more than you'd expect by chance though.