2023 Note: In 2012, the world was more innocent than a decade later. “Love-shyness” is actually a major part of the “Manosphere” and the incel community,  Brian Gilmartin’s work is cited in the alpha vs. beta male description. There had been opinions that his work was fringe, and he was forced to go to Montana, and try to use the remaining credibility. Over a decade after writing this, I look at this that love-shyness from the originalist perspective (at that time 35 years ago) was people who were afraid of love, was on burnout much like the original intentions of the Incel USENET group. But when the incel and manosphere community started to take off by 2017, it was on anger, and attack on the other-side. MGTOWS and PUAs are extremely dangerous to the society and “love-shyness” as merged in part of the incel culture – the indiscriminate hate to women. Boy have some of my words gone moldy since…I hope men who have been extremely hurt and only anger is the PUA and MGTOW can take back the “Incel” name and make what it used to be

The most searched phrases in my search metrics, continues to be the whole theme can someone with autism fall in love, why autistic people can’t love, etc, etc.
I appreciate you people searching for that subject, because I still don’t have any ideas ether. It doesn’t help when the liberal elitists that knows it all when it comes to ASD and to the HFA population, because they don’t know everything because they create politics and ideals of what the population should be so the population gets screwed horribly.
Today, the focus will be on a subject known as  “Love shyness.” It’s coined by Brian G. Gilmartin who wrote a book in 1987 and had “estimated that love-shyness afflicts approximately 1.5% of American males and will prevent about 1.7 million U.S. males from ever marrying or experiencing intimate sexual contact with women“*
*From a Wikipedia article entitled “Love-shyness” referenced in a cautious manner.
From the same source, he stated with his data collection various factors, such as temperament, history of being bullied, that the “love-shy’s life” had grown up in dysfunctional families, etc.  Another striking fact was the

“men reported that their parents and societal attitudes pressured them into being “real boys” because of the men’s personalities as children. “

So here goes that “man-child” stereotype the rich bitches won’t want to touch with a 10 foot pole.
Also the social economic factor is shocking that

“As a result, all of the love-shy men were in the lower middle class or lower.”

My spin on that would be a “love-shyness” is probably a lot worse if one came up as a lower middle class and growing up in the Suburbia where a lot of girls are overprotected by their rich conservative leaning daddys. Hey, that’s worth shot I suppose.
After this book was originally published in the late 80s, he had confirmed that some of the cases may had been considered to be autistic or dare I say Asperger Syndrome. He had also responded to an email years after the publication that about 40% of the severely love-shy men would have AS or ADHD. And of course he probably at the time was ignorant about the high functioning cases of ASD or people who had severe cases of autism to be upgraded to a functioning equivalent of their peers.
Another piece would be is:

” He says in his book ‘Shyness is never ‘good’. Shyness obviates free choice and self-determination, and it stands squarely in the way of responsible self-control and self-management.’ Again, he states ‘Simply put, shyness is never healthy.'”

Well then try to educate the union thugs at the local liberal SPED programs in the public school system.
The takeaway is that “love-shyness”, however you want to slice and dice it, can be in some regards synthetic thanks to the excessive laws the Feds and state and local governments put into the special education classrooms. Oh, don’t get me started with the overzealous sexual harassment classes (where I don’t even think the mainstream classes even teach to begin with)  and how the Hacks basically frame us as freaks and creeps and who else knows what kills our self esteem.
Not dismissing love-shyness, but some of this is made up thanks to the ever so complicated issue of high functioning autism and the blur between the evil side of Asperger’s and the HFAs who struggle in life and again the upbringing in the classroom and the unions and liberals POV of what the ASD community needs to be.
The unions and the public schools can really do us a favor if they can get laid off and deregulate the special ed system so people won’t have to go through what I went through becoming a synthetic hopeless romantic.
However, this is one’s own opinion. I can’t speak for the rest of the population. This may just be pure emotion and not thinking rationally. I think the politics of autism or whatever social disorder has gotten way out of hand, and instead of preaching on “love-shyness”, maybe there should be less liberals teaching social skills for a change.