Published on 12, July, 2020
I have been married to my partner for 18 years and we have 3 children. My partner has always been interested in gaming more so than me and we went on holiday and he bought a new camera and spent hours staring at it, playing with it and even took it to the dinner table with him. He gets extremely stressed in certain situations to the point he takes it out on me. We only figures out he was autistic after having an autistic child. He has got worse as our relationship has gone on...mainly though realising he is autistic. He is kind, never goes out, always at home, but he lacks natural affection, somedays I feel very alone as he fails to talk more than 10 sentences in a day. I wonder what it is like to be with someone that shows interest in me and chats to me.
This is surprisingly common - and there are things you can do about it to help yourself. Internally, he has developed a mask that allows him to fake his way through the days by appearing normal in the everyday environment.- mostly at work - where the penalty for being too weird could cost him his job. This 'performance' is incredibly draining and stressful - as he's having to go through the whole social interaction game without knowing all the rules and having to work out what people really mean.
As a defence against being 'outed', we learn to hide our true interests as we've probably been bullied in the past - enigmatic silence is easier to pass off.
He'll be coming home stressed and his brain will likely be in turmoil most days and he'll need time to process it all before he'll be interactive.
You can short-circuit most of his stress by engaging him in something he's passionate about - like his camera. I'd guess that if you learned exactly what he finds so fascinating about it, you'd never get him to shut up! Again, taking him to a camera museum would really de-stress him and let him open up to you. Make life fun again.
Do you know what he likes to photograph? You could arrange something for him - it would demonstrate that you actually want to engage with him with something he finds interesting rather than discussing getting a loaf of bread and having to pay the gas bill - which is too mundane to want to engage with.
It might sound odd, but he has probably stayed constant his whole life - from his point of view, everyone around him is constantly changing which is pulling the rug from under his stability and confidence - he might not know how to interact with you any more - he'll be craving the simplicity of when you first got together all those years ago.
What do you both like to do together? What did you do years ago? What does 'fun' mean to you? He's probably still in there, just getting lost in a complex world. You might need to chat to him and explain in simple terms what you would like - the occasional bunch of flowers etc. Give him some clues. Sort-of re-stating the rules of engagement so he can work with it.
Plastic,
You are giving good advice but giving her training manuals on how to survive the torture of being with an autistic man wich is a punishment surely, I find pointless she will never be satisfied period.
She's been married 18 years to this guy and had three children, she wants to be with someone else simple.
Harsh! I work from the point of view that everything is fixable if the participants are interested in finding a solution.
50% of 'normal' marriages fail - so I'd say an aspie bloke is actually the most simple thing to fix. He was obviously attractive 18 years ago - and as he won't have changed, it's more a case of her recapturing her fun side.
Also, mathematically, the available gene-pool of available single blokes means that odds are, any guy she meets will be a total a-hole. It's much easier to fix what she knows.
Also, I do a lot of daytime coffee mornings and I'd say the vast majority of NT women are just soooooo boring - no hobbies, no interests - materialistically driven and shallow. Maybe she's just become 'mature', grown-up and totally uninteresting to him.
Sorry its not meant to be harsh, but I can't see anything that suggests she wants to be flexible, her gripe is that she has been married for 18 years to a man who can't support her emotionally knowing this she wants someone who can.
The thing is people can not be everything loyal, sweet, intelligent, funny, passionate, emotionally intelligent, tall dark and handsome, have a great income, be likable to everyone, and all the other stuff
But it's expected and to expect all this stuff from someone with autism is wrong.
Not saying that this is the case here, but he can't be void of any good quality and he's been in this relationship to for 18 year probably thinking he's doing great or at least trying to do his best and no doubt he has his own gripes wonder if he's got any support or had any advice?