21yo girl here, finally getting back into the relationship game and serious about it after a nasty breakup a couple years ago.

My problem? I'm autistic, but it's not really obvious unless you were some kind of specialist. I look like an unassuming, decently attractive college girl. I've developed plenty of coping mechanisms to pass as relatively normal; at worst, people might say I'm a bit weird or shy. I don't tend to get along with most "normal" people I meet, but when I do, they love my uniqueness. It's nothing I'm embarrassed of, but it does impact me socially...badly.

I'm kind of missing the "How to be Human" manual that most people are born with already in their brains. Small talk is almost impossible for me, and I'm painfully shy until I've known someone for a while. Even if we have everything in common and our personalities mesh well, my mind just draws blanks.

I decided to give Tinder another whirl a couple months ago, since I go to a big school which oddly has almost no opportunity for social life. I was up front in my bio about not being interested in pointless one night stands, and hit it off with a few guys despite how picky I tend to be.

The other night, I ended up matching with a guy who is exactly what I've had my sights on, as far as I can tell. Physical attraction is rare for me, but it's already there. I snooped on his social media that he had linked in his bio, and it seems like we have everything in common; it's kind of spooky. We had a nice long chat about our lives and some shared interests, and he finally said, "take my number!".

Well...I suck at texting, and I'm not sure why. I've never managed to make conversation flow, and can't seem to have any of value. That's assuming that I remember to reply in a timely manner, if at all. Seddit's unanimous ruling seems to be "texting is for setting up dates only, not conversation!"...but it seems like he wants to make conversation.

I don't know or understand much for the "rules" of texting, like those 'don't text for ___ days' rules that seem to be mostly BS to me. I just don't know how to text, or what to say. In an actual message setting like on Facebook or Tinder, I have absolutely no problem holding great conversation.

Ever since we moved to text, our communication has dropped off, and I'm afraid I'm about to lose contact completely. It's probably because, for example, I sat there staring at "How's your day been?" for almost 2 hours trying to reply in a way that both answers in an interesting way and spurs conversation so it doesn't end there.

We've hit a dead end or two, and now I haven't texted him since Saturday night. I'm not sure how to initiate talking again, since I don't have much to say due to not knowing him well at all. I wish he'd just ask to meet up in person, but I'm not sure how I'd try to make that happen. And if it did, I'd be a quiet, anxious mess because we haven't talked over messages enough.

Things were going amazing until we traded numbers, and now I just don't know how to talk. I can see that he's still as interested as I am, but I'm just not good at this. I don't have the natural ability to be smooth with my conversations until I know someone well, and people always seem to misread it as me not being interested.

Help? Mayday? How do I start talking again without running back into the conversational loop/dead end of how our days are going and what we did with our weekend?