Published on 12, July, 2020
I wanted to join a discussion for women married to men with Aspergers but I must be a bit thick as I can't see how to join in the threads I have read so far. I have been married for 45 years and for 34 of those years I have been chronically sick and disabled. Although I always knew my husband was 'a bit strange' I thought it was mostly his upbringing and then this year discovered it was Aspergers. Reading about it and seeing a counseller has helped but I am overwhelmed by the sadness I feel that I have in some ways 'wasted' 45 years of my life expecting something different and always trying to work things out and hope for change. Now I know that I can stop banging my head against a brick wall but I also know that if I could turn the clock back I would not have married this man. I can't leave him now. It's too difficult because of my condition. I have often said that if my husband had taken up medicine he would have been a brilliant surgeon who would save your life but have no bedside manner! It's the emotional support which is lacking. He can build a ramp and adapt a bathroom but when another long term medical condition hit me 3 years ago and I thought I was going to lose my sight he said NOTHING! It's words that fail him. Anyway, this is just a start as I dip my toe into this community... but I would like to hear from other people who are NTs and whose health is not good and have found their partners wanting in that situation because of their lack of empathy. Even though he tells me he loves me every day you begin to wonder what love is because somehow it feels like a mechanical habit as he always says it at the same time and in the same way... Gotta go now
Hi IntenseWorld,
I agree that NT men can be just as callous and I do suspect that others in his family are possible Aspies. They all agreed to do the online test for comparison but none of them wanted to talk about it after giving me their score. One of his brothers is much more 'typical' in that he is very fixed in his ways, likes a schedule, collects things, is fanatically tidy etc. and after he did the test he said, "I suppose that makes me socially inept". He and H scored 40 and I scored 10. Other members of his family and our two children scored from 17 to 21. But this brother who scored 40 is much, much, more in touch with his emotions than H.
As I said, I was lucky in that I had an exceptional father and brother and lots of uncles. We're all big feelings people. It's rather perverse of me to marry into a family which is just the opposite but you don't always think straight when you fall in love and in my case my husband was away in the merchant navy for the 3 years that we were 'courting' and so I don't think we really knew each other when he got back. We didn't live together like couples do these days and for a while we only had each other as we moved from one place to another.
Well I couldn't help laughing when you asked if I'd written anything down. I seem to have spent my life writing about it/him/us. Of course, initially, our relationship was based on letter writing and he chose the right girl because I'm a prolific letter writer and the sad thing about that is that as soon as we came back from our honeymoon we had to stay in his parents' house for a bit until he took up his new shore job. The first thing he did was to burn all of my letters even though I begged him not to. I said that if he didn't want them I would like them to keep with all of his. He wouldn't be swayed and all my airmail paper floated up into the bright blue August sky like black butterflies. And then I had to paint a smile on my face to go out and meet all our old friends. It shouldn't matter that much but it did and I remember now because it seems symbolic of how things were going to be.
But yes I've tried to write things down but it doesn't work with him. I learned from my therapist to make him sit down so that he's level with me and to make eye contact. This was particularly useful in the early days of using a wheelchair because he was a nightmare when pushing me around (I've got an electric one now). Everyone in this world is in his way and so he just rams them with me in the wheelchair. After one particuarly bad incident my therapist told me to tell him to stop and come round and face me so that I can talk to him. I have learned all the ways of speaking like 'it' makes me feel and not 'you' make me feel.... and to be clear in my requests so a mixture of plain speaking and lists seem to do the trick. One thing he had to learn was that the wheelchair is an extension of me. He probably hated the thing and what it represented when we were getting used to my disability.
A lot of books and AS people say that with age they find that they feel 'better' and more able to cope with life but H says the opposite. He often says "I think I'm getting worse" even though he feels relieved to put a name to it.