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.
I have not thought about leaving just trying to make it better. I have 3 children. I dont want a broken family. I just want to know how to engage with my husband
An easy start would be casually asking him why he chose that camera and not a different one - what does it do differently to the others - and exactly why that feature is so useful - get him to show you the differences and the pictures he's taken and why his camera is the one to have. You'll have difficulty getting him to stop talking. You have your first 'in' to his mind. Ask him what sort of pictures he'd like to take - it's easy to book a photographic day somewhere - or if it's wildlife or scenery - suggest some interesting views to go to. He might actually like to photograph you.
We are often eternal children inside - just wanting a nice, simple life filled with fun and novelty and we don't tend to change very much - it's one of our traits. As we get older, the world gets so much more complex that we don't want to interact with it - we shut down and burn out - it all gets to be too much stress and we spend 90% of our lives stressed to breaking - there's loads of threads on here about this problem.
He's probably got to a place where he literally doesn't know what to do apart from get up, go to work, get stressed with the whole need to earn money to support his immediate responsibility (the family), go home with his brain fried and needing time to straighten out - and as he arrives home, it's just more stress. If he's 90% stressed, it will take only the slightest thing to push him to 100% into angry/argument mode - which will make him look totally unreasonable.
He'll be feeling like he's backed into a corner with no way out and so his only escape from all this is to engage with something where he has total control - like gaming.
When we're young, we often line up our toy cars etc. It provided order and and logic to the chaos of living - it's a sort of stimming. Him being fascinated with a piece of tech is the same thing - it has lines and colour, the light shines off it in a pleasing way, it has working features - it's basically the best Dinky Toy ever and there's a million things to fully learn about it.
In a way, he's crying out for interaction but is too lost to be able to figure out what he needs. Like a child. All he knows is that life = stress.
He'll be 100% faithful - but all he really wants is the younger you that was fun and interactive without all the hassle of growing up. His programming is likely to be very basic - be a good father, earn money, etc. All the flowery bits that you want will be very low down his program list so in times of stress, only the basics get delivered because it's taking all his brain power to cover that.
You can easily get him back - just by engaging with him so he starts to see you as an object of interest again - more interesting than gaming - but that's going to be really hard for you because you will be carrying all the emotional baggage of the last years - but you're the only one who can change - back to who you were.
I suspect he'd love to talk to you and the easiest way to get him to open up is to talk to him about things he's passionate about - get the dialogue going that way and then you can drift it to other subjects - think of it a bit like engaging with a child on their birthday. Show him you're interested in his interests and you'll find you can get him to do anything you want - tell him what you need from him and how you'd like to be treated - make it that simple.
A quick caveat - you must be genuine about showing interest in his interests - don't mess him about - he will be mostly shut down and afraid of ridicule so if he senses that you're not genuine, he'll back away. Are you able to offload the kids for a weekend? Go somewhere interesting with him - recapture your youth - do some silly things - have a weekend like you did when you first met.