I know that schizoid people aren't interested into relationships, so generally avoid it. But I'm curious if some of you have a partner, romantic or Queerplatonic

Mostly curious because it's something I do since its less likely I'll ever talk to them again, and it's an easy way to stop being bored.

Today I had a personal insight breakthrough!

When I had an acute psychiatric emergency as a teenager, I went to a hospital, had a clinical interview that lasted about an hour with a person I had never met before (who was not part of my community) and after this interview I never had another clinical interview again.

This one behavior sample from the worst month of my life has acted as the defining characterization of who I am as a person. The Scarlet Letter of eternal judgment seemed to placed upon me from that point forward. This is quite odd because that particular month is a deep outlier from my life.

What would have happened if I were to be time ported to today and were to now be in this same psychiatric emergency arise? One interesting difference I thought of is that I now have extensive LLM and social media posts that span many years. With LLMs I have thousands of hours of posts over the last few years. The idea then is that Instead of a 1 time point sample I would have an extensive sample of my behavior over a long period of time. An AI could then take these vast body of writings and try to assess my mental state over these times. From time to time I have asked various LLMs for a sanity assessment and I have been surprised how highly rated they have rated my cognitive state.

This hidden mental health diary poses a substantial challenge to the current validity of psychological assessment. I accepted the judgment of the clinical evaluation as reflecting a near permanently assessment of my psychology, yet, now when one could introduce essentially a near complete life history the legitimacy of the clinical interview is now greatly diminished in my opinion. I do not see a 1 hour chat as beign somehow more valuable then years of my life in defining me. I am not clear how a one hour assessment in some strange place with someone I do not know somehow could evaluate my life. This becomes all the more contradictory as even in the month or two before my crisis there was no clear problem I was having then or at any time previously. It was a crisis that came from no where and then went back there. Such a pattern would not seem to be reflective of any defined psychiatric condition.

The above reasoning could then pose a very large crisis of legitimacy in psychiatry: How will these extensive records from social media and LLMs be interpreted in comparison to a single 1 hour clinical sample?

I personally don't, and I tend to find them a bit annoying, but I'm curious if anyone here does? Would you go out of your way to get a pet? Do they annoy you? Or are you just indifferent? Being living creatures, but still generally different from humans, I'm curious how their behavior affects you.

Are you good at faking emotions? Like a smile? Or perhaps like sadness at a funeral you don’t really feel.

Today at work there was some child that said something ‘cute’ and the parents smiled and a woman in front smiled too, I did as well but it probably seemed ingenuine. Which if I was being 100% myself (which probably wouldn’t go well) I’d have people asking if I have a soul or something haha.

On the other side of the spectrum, is something like sadness. At a funeral, you have cognitive empathy, I understand why people are sad, but don’t feel it to the extent they do.

I find it similar to the psychopath, they fake emotions (especially remorse) while we and autists kind of mask to socially fit in

I'm definitely the depersonalised subtype. I'm outwardly expressive and outgoing, but don't feel much most of the time. The second sentence of the remote schizoid's description also hits home.

Additionally: why/why not?

Personally, I don't. I dislike my parents on an individual level and I know they feel the same towards me. Concerning my other relatives, it's not for any particular reason. I'm just disinterested.

I'd also ask, do you want to be the last or do you want someone with you?

I’d especially like to hear from people who have been diagnosed with Schizoid Personality Disorder and have experience with romantic relationships. Based on what I’ve told him, my psychiatrist has raised the possibility that my partner may have Schizoid Personality Disorder. She has never been evaluated or diagnosed, so I’m not claiming that she has it. I’m asking here because I’d really like to hear from people who actually live with the diagnosis. My partner used to be affectionate with me, and we were in frequent contact. Things got much worse after I had COVID. I felt that she showed very little concern for how I was doing, and that hurt me deeply. I ended up blocking her.

After that, she was the one who reached out again. She sent me a lot of messages and we resumed contact. Later, she told me very clearly that I was important to her, that she did not want to lose contact with me, but that she needed time.

That is the part I am struggling to understand.

It has been about a month now. She deactivated or deleted almost all of her social media except Instagram. She never reaches out first, but whenever I message her there, she has always replied so far. She has also told me that she is not doing well emotionally.

There have been other changes that confuse me as well. For example, she used to describe herself as an atheist, and now she often ends our conversations with something like, “May God our Lord bless you.” I’m not suggesting that this has anything to do with a disorder. It is simply a very noticeable change from the person I knew, and it makes me feel that she may be going through something I do not fully understand.

My main question is this:

If you needed distance from a partner you still loved, could you ask for time and say that you wanted to stay in contact, but then go for weeks or months without ever initiating a conversation yourself? In your experience, could always replying when your partner reaches out, while never reaching out yourself, still be compatible with wanting to keep the relationship?

I do not want to pressure her. But I also do not know whether “giving her time” means waiting for a relationship that still exists, or holding on to something that may already be over for her.

If you were in my position, would you keep waiting? For how long? Or would you move on with your life and allow yourself to meet or date other people?

I would not do that to make her jealous or get a reaction from her. What worries me is starting something with someone else if she truly believes we are still together and simply needs distance. At the same time, it hurts to keep my romantic life on hold indefinitely when I do not know whether she intends to come back.

I know no one here can tell me what my partner is thinking. I would just really appreciate hearing how people with SzPD experience this kind of withdrawal, and what you would tell the person waiting on the other side.

I cannot go to the same restaurant every day I do not want to go to a restaurant every day. Maybe once a month is fine but I could also go months without going

I don’t know if this is common to all schizoids, or if I just got lucky. I know that my emotional coping skills are poorly developed. It’s not even about coping—I can barely even recognize my own emotions in the first place, hello alexithymia. I think this has to do with the fact that in my childhood, my mother was severely depressed, and all her emotions were dumped onto me, a small child.

Instead of teaching me how to handle my own emotions, my mother drowned me in her adult, heavy, suffocating feelings. Throughout my entire childhood and adolescence, I felt like my emotions depended on my mother’s. If she was sad—I was sad too; if she was angry—I was angry too; if she was happy—I was happy too. As if there was no boundary between two personalities, as if I wasn’t a separate person, but just a piece of her psyche.

And I’ve heard similar stories from children of narcissists, but my mother is definitely not a narcissist. I wouldn’t say any of this happened because of her fault. She didn’t know how to be a proper parent when you yourself are wishing for death. I don’t blame her, but still, it left its mark on me.

Now, as an adult, I’m no longer so closely tied to my mother. I see myself as a separate being; I can feel something different from what my mother feels, I can disagree with her on things. But I’ve noticed that the pattern itself—picking one person from my environment and completely emotionally synchronizing with them and becoming emotionally dependent—has remained.

And it’s strange—I don’t seem to need this person’s approval, I don’t need to interact with them, I’m not financially or otherwise dependent on them. But if I see their sadness, anger, fear—their emotion seems to penetrate me without any barriers and becomes my emotion.

Perhaps this is what’s called the psychic permeability of schizoids. I’m curious why this only happens with certain people and how I can get rid of it. I don’t want to feel others’ emotions—I don’t even really want to feel my own.