Published on 12, July, 2020
I'm married to this person for over a decade, he is autistic, he spend his time talking to himself instead of talking to me, we don't have children because he never wanted children, but I did, now that I am 41 years old I regret bitterly I listened to him and now we don't have children. I feel like is getting more and more distant towards me. We don't make love. He just want to go out with other people. When I try to have a conversation with him, he just keeps shouting at me and getting aggressive.
I feel like I am alone in this marriage. All I I do is crying, I don't care if my husband is autistic, I just want him to love me as much as I love him.
I have to ask when you’re having conversations with him are they mostly ‘we need to talk’ type conversations? Because I think any man autism or not would start to get irritated and distant under that situation?
do you know as I’ve said before I think the hardest thing in a relationship is when people change and particularly change in different directions. So we know you’ve changed, you used to think you’ll be okay not having kids and now you know you’re not. Possibly you’ve changed in other ways. Possibly he’s changed. I don’t think autistic people change as much but we do definitely change.
I think the start of fixing your relationship is understanding how both of you have changed in the last 10 years. Because both of you have to come to terms with those changes in yourselves and in each other. And to be blunt it’s possible you may not like the people you’ve become and to some degree might want to change again.
One thing that might help is joining in with his world. He talks to him self but about what why don’t you talk to him about those things? He goes out to do things with his friends? Why don’t you go out and do things with him things that he enjoys?
The same applies to him of course. If you’re going to have a relationship with a woman you need to be invested in her Life and concerns. But maybe he feels he can’t because recently all you seem to care about is having a baby? Maybe it would be good to give him opportunities to opt into your life. Things he could do with you. Activities and aspirations of yours he can support.
The fact of the matter is at 41 now there is a low chance as I understand it that you will be able to have children naturally, although it is certainly not impossible. The figure I read somewhere was around 40% of women are sterile by 40. By 50 it’s generally over 90%. And even those who are not sterile still often have reduced fertility. IVF is an option, probably with a donor egg. Adoption may be an option. But if he’s been intransigently against the idea of any child-rearing even though you’ve been raising the issue for quite awhile, I think it very unlikely that he will relent and you probably need to come to terms with that one way or another.