I’m in a long-distance relationship with a woman from America. We got engaged last December, but we haven’t started planning the wedding, because my fiancée (I’ll call her E) is anxious about our relationship.
I was diagnosed autistic last year. Now we wonder if E might also be on the spectrum. E has always struggled with many of the things I struggle with (small talk, noise, ‘peopling’, constant exhaustion, bouts of mental illness), but we didn’t think anything of it until she read an autism memoir and felt that she had a lot in common with the author. She isn’t certain that she presents with enough traits to be diagnosable, though.
Whether she’s on the spectrum or not, neither of us is physically and emotionally able to work full-time, which obviously has financial implications, particularly given that we would like children one day. E worries that we would struggle financially and practically, which is understandable, but she also worries about how tired we both are so much of the time. She is particularly concerned that after even mildly busy days or small social events, I’m often completely burnt out and unable to do anything the next day.
Our different understandings of the future can really be summed up by the fact that I think I need to accept that I won’t have a “normal” life because of my autism, whereas E still hopes we will find that “normal” life together. Of course, “normal” is subjective, and we are looking for ways to define and manage it.
I guess that autistic rigidity, black and white thinking and catastrophising can be seen with our reactions to the financial and energy questions: we just fear the worst and freeze into inactivity rather than problem solving together. They can also be seen in relation to a different area of anxiety for E (less so for me) that I haven't mentioned here.
Other than this, we have a strong relationship: good communication (perhaps, paradoxically, because we’re both on the spectrum – neither of us plays games or expects the other to just intuit stuff without being told), shared values and interests, similar outlooks on life. We both feel very comfortable together, which is not something I’m used to. So we are not on the verge of breaking up, but we are looking for an autism-experienced relationship counsellor to help us find our way through this, particularly regarding finding those “normal” lives.
We really love each other and feel that this relationship is different to anything either of us have experienced before (not that either of us has a huge amount of relationship experience), but things just feel stuck sometimes and I don’t know what to do. Is any of this familiar to anyone from their relationships? How did you manage?