Published on 12, July, 2020
I’d really appreciate some advice about how to proceed now that my partner has ended our relationship. We got together more than 6 years ago, but it is only in the past year that I’ve become convinced that he has Aspergers. He is now in his mid-50s and I am more than 10 years younger. At several points in our relationship he has gone through very deep periods of depression and anxiety and is in a particularly deep one right now. I need help to assess whether to accept it is over and move on, or try to help him even more, as I believe that he may be shutting me out because of fear.
He has been struggling with these issues all his life and has developed sophisticated tools to disguise what’s really going on with him, has no close friends and although he had girlfriends before me, the relationships were highly dysfunctional and almost devoid of intimacy. In the early part of our relationship I just thought that he had “commitment issues” which I was relaxed about as he wasn’t really my type even though I liked him very much as a colleague, and found him attractive. After about a year of having caring but casual fun, I tried to bring it to a natural end but to my astonishment he strongly requested that we give it a proper go. I agreed on the basis that we deepen the commitment and the intimacy and he did. It was an astonishing and lasting change and ever since physical affection has been the strongest, loveliest part of our relationship, even when I’m struggling because we don’t really have anything to talk about.
He matches the Aspergers definitions very strongly is some ways but not in others. He is highly functional and most people (including myself in the early days) think of him as private, but more-than socially competent and easy-going. But I’ve been able to see ‘behind the curtain’ over the years and he matches all of these http://www.autism.org.uk/professionals/teachers/breaking-barriers/asperger.aspx and almost all of these points http://www.autism.org.uk/gp#Checklist for adults. After the first couple of years his lack of social skills became almost paralyzing,; we’ll visit my friends and he is sullen and distracted to the extent of causing general discomfort, so that I’ve just stopped seeing them when he’s in town. He’s known my mother for years now and we’ve even lived with her for a while but she says that she feels like she doesn’t know him any better than the day they met. He has a limited range of interests, mostly related to his profession, but they’ve lost their ‘interest’ and he confesses that they’ve become little more than joyless distractions and he's struggling professionally and spiritually now. Communication between us is stilted and I confess that I’m feeling lonely and bored.
He has disguised these issues in large part by maintaining an itinerant lifestyle – a professional one in which he is very well-respected. It means that social interaction is kept superficial and ensures that he can “escape” (his word) whenever responsibilities become too pressing. This is where I get confused about an Aspergers diagnosis because his love of routine is actually a regular change-of-routine, although he maintains very identifiable habits and methodology in each new place. Our whole relationship has been punctuated with gaps of weeks or months at a time, but I had a similar lifestyle until the past year, so it worked well enough and we’ve have been working towards building a more stable base together, which is what he said, repeatedly and vehemently, was what he wanted. Until a few days ago when he said he realized that it isn’t, and that he wants out permanently.
I am also a trigger. I’m prone to ‘reactive’ depression and can be overly sensitive anyway, but recent events have been uniquely hard. In the past 18 months I have had 2 of the most challenging experiences of my life, including the recent traumatic death of my father, whom I loved very much and nursed through his last few months. My partner absented himself from both of these experiences – literally and figuratively – and my feelings about him have been deeply shaken by his lack of support. He even tried to break up with me the day after my father died because I wanted him to come back to help me through the funeral; he said it was “too much for him”. He did eventually come back for the funeral but I made that clear that even if he is in a bad state, this is unacceptable behavior if we’re in a relationship and the tension has been clearly been a factor in his current state of mind. He rarely says he loves me, but despite how bad it all sounds, he is extremely loving in almost every other way; faithful, generous, and generally tries very hard to be a good boyfriend. I was also single for a long time before we met and I know that meeting someone new won't be on the horizon for a very long time, if ever. I'm a very independent person, but I like being in a committed relationship. At times there is a very beautiful bond between us, which I will be very sad to let go of.
I have been trying to get him to think about the Aspergers possibility, but he has completely dismissed it. He shut down to the point of almost non-functionality last week and I eventually persuaded him to take the online test. He did it in private and it came out at 18 – well under the limit. When I reviewed the questions with him, he had fudged the answers, whether to deliberately ‘pass’, or just because of a profound lack of self-awareness, I’m not sure. I re-took it on his behalf, with him present for consultation and the result came over 32. He found this very difficult to accept and told me that the relationship was over the following morning. He has since left on one of his trips, resolute and having changed his arrangements so that it is possible that I may not see him again.
I’m clearly struggling. The relationship was far from perfect and I’ve wanted out myself many times, but so far I’ve always come to the conclusion that the good outweighs the bad. Now I’m not sure if I have an option of whether to continue or not, but I am deeply concerned about the welfare of this man that I care deeply for, particularly as he’s pushing away the only person he has ever let into his life.
Advice from the Aspergers community would be very much appreciated.
Mara said:Thank you everyone for replying. I cried and cried when I read your message Tom, as the notion that he really may be just better off without me struck home. I really do want him to be happy, so I guess I have to come to terms with the fact that he just may not be able to cope with having a relationship. Very hard to do as I know that he has had some of the happiest times of his life with me, and until a few days ago he expressed his desire to working through our problems together. I read of AS people being very honest, but that doesn't seem to be the case with him - he's more about saying what he thinks you want to hear to keep an equilibrium, does that suggest that perhaps he isn't AS?
Thank you everyone for replying. I cried and cried when I read your message Tom, as the notion that he really may be just better off without me struck home. I really do want him to be happy, so I guess I have to come to terms with the fact that he just may not be able to cope with having a relationship. Very hard to do as I know that he has had some of the happiest times of his life with me, and until a few days ago he expressed his desire to working through our problems together. I read of AS people being very honest, but that doesn't seem to be the case with him - he's more about saying what he thinks you want to hear to keep an equilibrium, does that suggest that perhaps he isn't AS?
Hi Mara,
It may not be that he'll be better off without you. It may instead be that he feels completely uncertain as to what to do for the best. Again, I'll try to explain based on my own experiences.
In my marriage, I admit I felt stifled. I loved this woman I was with - a powerful, overwhelming emotion - but I was doing all of the things that I always felt I didn't want to do: be in a marriage, have a mortgage, have a steady job, etc. It was about much more than that, though. It was about letting go of the rudder I'd been using to steer my own way through life, and suddenly finding myself adrift at the mercy of the currents. At the time, I felt it was because I was a natural nonconformist. Now, I think it may have been my Aspie side finding its first expressions in a situation that I'd helped to create (and had convinced myself that I wanted), but which I didn't feel psychologically or spiritually comfortable in. My parents, thankfully, were never pushy and always wanted me to do whatever I wanted to do, as long as I was happy. I know they were concerned, though, that I never seemed to have (or want) friends. And I think they were puzzled about my introversion, and my seemingly odd take on life. Even in my mid-teens, I used to look at the lives of other people and simply not want to live those lives myself in any way whatsoever. I saw societal expectations (conditioned aspirations, as I thought of them) - career progression, buying a house, raising a family - as something totally alien to what I thought life should really be about. It didn't ring true for me. It all felt too prescriptive. Things like fashion never made sense to me. Why would anyone want to express their individuality by looking like everyone else? It wasn't a path I wanted to tread. So, whenever I had the opportunity for a promotion in my first real job, I would turn it down. Then I'd give the job up and go find another one. Then another one. I never wanted to settle or conform in any way. In my 40 years of work, I've had perhaps 25 jobs (and it's been more 'career regression' rather than 'progression': I earn less now, in real terms, than I earned 30 years ago). The longest I ever held a job was 6 years. The shortest, 2 weeks. The 6-year job was in a wholefood shop. I loved it for, as I see now, very 'Aspie' reasons. It was a hotbed of nonconformism, radical politics, anarchism... in short, everything that was about being a square peg in a round hole. Questioning and rejecting convention in all its forms. Dropping-out.
It was my first job after uni, when I should have been using my degree for career advancement. But I hadn't done the degree for that reason. It was education for education's sake - and the best thing I ever did. It opened up my mind, and enabled me to take the alternative path in life that my still-unknown Aspie nature needed to take. In my 30s, as I was then, I was being the rebellious teenager I'd always been inside - and still am. I don't 'go with the flow' and have never wanted to. So... marriage, with a mortage and a steady (stiflingly boring and conservative) civil service job on the one hand. On the other, the very human part of me that loved another person and wanted to be with them. But the two things went together. Not a good mix. Something had to give.
And it did. In 2004, my father died. That was the final straw. I crashed, as did everything around me. Within a year, I was divorced and living alone in a low-rent flat. I'd also given up my well-paid 'career' for a minimum wage job, working in care with special needs adults. My ex-wife, heart-broken and devastated, wanted nothing more to do with me. It was horrendous, because I still loved her. But how would I ever be able to convince her of that, given what had happened? I wanted us to remain friends, but that wasn't possible for her. I haven't seen or heard from her since.
That's the point I'm trying to make. I'm human, and as such I experience strong human emotions. Love is one of the strongest. I loved that woman, and therefore couldn't imagine my life without her. I wanted her in my life. But my life, in that situation, made no sense to me. It wasn't really about not wanting commitment. It was more about wanting two things that seemed, in my head, to be impossible to have at the same time: a loving relationship with another human being, and the independence of a solitary life in which I could focus totally on my own needs. In a sense, then - to be back in control.
The same goes for my last relationship. I loved the woman, but I lost control of my life. There were options, of course. We'd discussed living apart as a way to make it work. But financially, such an arrangement was impossible. So... we carried on, until it imploded.
It's an odd fix to be in, really. I realise now that, for me, falling in love is about losing control. Which, of course, it is. That's, for many, part of the fun of it. That wonderful, floaty feeling, when everything seems sharper and brighter and you feel so full of energy and hope. That's how it's always been for me. And I, too, have had some wonderfully happy times with my ex-partners. But there's always been that underlying sense that I've lost control of something more fundamental: my own sense of self. 'Self' being the operative word, I think. I'm a selfish person. Not wilfully, though. It's something I can't really help. I wish I could. It's the way I'm wired.
I don't know if this is the case with your partner. I think it's probably an aspect of any relationship - the ceding of control, the sharing, the compromising.
With someone with autism, though, it's much more problematic. As I've discovered. And so, sadly, have all of my ex-partners.
As a footnote: a few years ago, before my diagnosis, I wrote a semi-autobiographical novel about living with my as-then unrealised and unfathomable condition. Here's a telling passage:
'My relationships with women... have always been difficult and unstable. My emotions go haywire. I want the person, and then I don't. They're everything to me, and then nothing. I try to finish things. And then, when it's over, I go to pieces and want them back. I simply can't cope either way. Yes... I am better off alone. And they're better off without me, probably. It doesn't stop me wanting something, though. I'm still human. We all need love.'