Published on 12, July, 2020
I appreciate I am posting under the 'Parents and carers' category. I am neither, however, I am married to an aspie and I just need some help.
I would be very grateful if someone could point me in the direction of all the other frazzled husbands/wives?
I've been married a year and a half, we moved in together when we got married (not due to tradition, but due to commitments that prevented our co-habiting sooner).
A couple of WEEKS after moving in I asked myself: 'who is this selfish, uncaring, unsympathetic, I'm-always-right, rude, arrogant man, and where the HELL is my husband??'
A confusing, emotional and unbearable year passed (no, there was no 'honeymoon period' for us), and we finally have the answer (I'll give you a hint, it starts with 'A' and rhymes with blasperger's)
Since then I've read books and really brushed up on my knowledge of the big 'A'. I'm still mourning the life I expected to live when I got married. It's very, very sad. I now have a completely different view of the man I married and it breaks my heart. He's someone else entirely now. But things are getting better. The last 6 months have been amazing. It's so hard trying to forget everything I know about communication and starting again, and even harder to view things from his perspective, but I'm getting there.
Tonight, however, is a turning point. I need help. It's the first night I'm not sleeping in the same bed as him. Because of his sensory issues, I've not been able to read a book or peruse my laptop before bed in all the time we've been married. He point blank refuses to wear an eye-mask and ear-buds because they irritate him too much. I haven't slept well recently so now I have to sleep in a different room until I sort it out.
Ugh, please I just need help to cope with this. I'm 25 and sleeping in a single bed. This isn't RIGHT!!!
Hi everyone
Thanks for the messages, I’ve just come back to have a read-through of everybody’s experiences and stories. Sadly, my husband and I divorced 3 years ago. We tried both the usual couples counselling as well as specialist AS couples counselling, but sadly he didn’t want to accept his diagnosis or make any changes in the relationship. That was a bitter pill to swallow, and after making many, many sacrifices in order to salvage our marriage I eventually had to make the decision to walk away from the man I loved. I had poured all my energy into helping ‘him’ and ‘us’ that I had totally neglected to help myself.
It breaks my heart a bit looking back at these posts, he will always be my first love and the man I married, and I’ll always love him in one way or another. It absolutely crushed me to walk away knowing I wouldn’t meet anyone else quite like him, knowing that I may not meet someone as loyal as him, or someone who I swore I would follow anywhere. Looking back, I absolutely idolised him and wanted so desperately for us to work in some sort of harmony together. I wasn’t expecting it would be ‘harmonious’ exactly, but I always felt that as long as we were BOTH invested in building our lives together then that would be enough for me. It’s the trying that counts and he is a very good man with a very good heart, however, we weren’t meeting each other halfway so it was never going to get any better.
I learned a lot from my time with him, about compassion, about new ways of thinking, about the different languages of love. I definitely grew as a person and for the better from having him in my life. I learnt the importance of self-care, and knowing when enough is enough. I tried every avenue available in an attempt to save us and have no regrets or ‘what-if’ moments. I tried everything.
I just hope now that he has a good life and that nobody takes advantage of him. It makes me sick to my stomach that I can’t be there to have his back (he moved to a different country), and I still worry about who will be washing his clothes and reminding him that he’d been wearing his jeans for 3 weeks solid, and whether or not he is being cooked proper food and that whoever is making a trifle for him remembers to add some rose water to the jelly. I hope whoever is buying his clothes for him makes sure they are the right material and not too scratchy, and I hope that whoever he is with never asks him to pop to a supermarket (especially the ones that play music). I don’t think he had any clue that these things affected his life and his mood - they were just things I observed along the way.
P and I used to describe our marriage as being ‘alone, together’. Now we are ‘alone, apart’.
Whenever we were apart from each other before we would always say ‘I can feel the tug of the invisible thread that ties my heart to yours’ - that little thread is still there and always will be. I will always have his back, despite our relationship being well and truly over.
Anyway, it was a journey I will never forget, don’t regret, and am eternally grateful for. He’s a special soul and I will always have his back.