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.
Dear Clovis,
I agree with you almost entirely. One of the main reasons I wrote in is that I don't know whether his rejection of me is purely that he really doesn't love me anymore, and just doesn't want to continue in a relationship with me (for reasons other than AS), or if its because I may have done just that (stripped him of his coping strategies and left him with no support).
As I state in my first post, I don't know if he is AS, and have only recently begun to suspect that he might be. One point that is mistaken about your criticism however is that he was happy. He has spent much of his life feeling very isolated and in significant depression, struggling to equate his need for love and affection with his capacity for it. He is clearly struggling with an AS label, but I'm not. I would find any steps on his part to come to terms and even enjoy any autistic characteristics he has to be extremely positive, and would only be happier to be with him because of it.
In fact, part of my (perhaps clumsy or misguided) intention in asking him to take the test was for him to come to more fully understand himself and for us to be able to learn strategies to help him find balance, and for me to adapt more appropriately to his needs.
I explained the evolution of our courtship, so feel that the criticism that entering such a relationship is unfair, but you're right about taking a good look at myself as to why I stay in such a relationship. The answer is that that's what I'm doing, trying to understand better so that I really know what is involved. I would still choose to be together if my partner would allow it, on the basis that he takes positive steps to live more authentically. You're right that my approach may have been too confronting for him, and if so I am truly sorry for causing him pain. I can only call it "grasping at straws" since he had reached a uniquely low point of real despair, which I almost certainly made worse by my lack of knowledge about AS or his individual needs. I also intended to be there for him throughout this process, but it was his choice to suddenly evict me from the relationship. Which takes me back again to why I posted on this forum in the first place.