[Garfie]

Just to make people aware, one of the major difficulties of people on the Autistic Spectrum, is their inability to read and understand social interactions effectively, as they tend to interpret language in a very literal way, making it challenging to recognise when someone is being sarcastic, using banter or making a joke.. I would imagine it is probably her condition, rather than for any devious reason, that Ali showed concern about the kiss comment.

Due to how they interpret language, Autistic people can be quite naive and innocent regarding the intentions of other people, and can therefore easily be taken advantage of, or manipulated. Just as their tendency is to interpret language very literally, they also tend to use it in the same way, and for that reason, they have much less capacity to lie, deceive, manipulate or scheme than the average person.

The majority of us can identify whether someone is being serious or having a joke through social cues which we can easily recognise, such as tone of voice, facial expressions and body language. We can do this without even thinking about it. In contrast, Autistic people cannot read social cues, so they are often unable to understand them in the way we instinctively do - to them, these cues are a foreign language which is immensely difficult (and for many impossible) to master, as their brains just don’t work that way. This makes navigating social situations and interactions unimaginably challenging, and like a minefield of confusion.

These are things that might be worth considering when forming views on how Ali is behaving.