The Rosie Project Don Tillman

I’m going to talk about the main character in ‘The Rosie Project’, Don Tillman. He is 39 years old and describes himself as tall, fit and intelligent, with a relatively high status and an above-average income as an associate professor. Don doesn’t know he has Asperger’s syndrome, although his symptoms are obvious. He finds it difficult to make friends, he’s bad at interpreting expressions and he hates to make small talk. That’s why he only has two friends: Gene and Claudia. He always arrives exactly at the arranged time and all his ideas are evidence-based. His life is ruled by a whiteboard and he has difficulty empathizing. Don says he was ‘wired differently’.

Don has never had a significant relationship, or even a second date. He decides that it’s high time for him to get married, so he organises the Wife Project. To find the perfect wife, he comes up with the idea to use a questionnaire: A sixteen-page, scientifically valid survey to filter out the smokers, the drinkers, the vegetarians, the late arrivers. It leaves a manageable shortlist of candidates from which he can choose his partner and it eliminates all incompatible women, who would otherwise waste his time.

She is a graduate student in psychology, she works at a gay bar, she smokes, she’s disorganized, mathematically illiterate and she has ridiculous food requirements. She failed almost every criterion of the Wife Project and is absolutely incompatible as Don’s