What if I told you

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what if I told you that it's not only people with AS who need to change

what if I told you that it's possible for NTs to be total whack jobs

what if I told you that it's not just aspies who have trouble getting or holding down jobs

what if I told you that there are NTs who can screw up socially

what if I told you that when you let your AS become "the reason for all the problems" in a bad relationship, the one who does not have AS ceased to recognize their own faults, and ceases to grow, and even becomes worse?

what if I told you that it's human nature (read: expected of NTs) to get lazy when there is a crutch, something else to blame, reason to not lift heavy, etc

what if I told you what it's like to realize that you let someone else blame their faults on your problem

what if I told you that all those meltdowns had a significant amount of help from outside

what if I told you that putting so much energy into ending meltdowns and DE-escalation could mean the relationship getting worse because you are not "the ret*d" when you do that

what if I told you what it's like to get just enough light from above to realize that the darkness around you is really the walls of a deep pit

what if I told you that such a thing went on for years

this is what I am telling you.

What if I told you my problems were bigger than the scope of one cause?

What's the point of this thread?

I agree with you here. I know I'm the first one to say that I hate having AS and want to be NT, but my reason for wanting to be NT is not because I choose to naively believe that all NTs have it great. I just know that having AS causes extra unwanted hassle for me, and not being understood makes things even harder.

Recently I remember somebody on WP saying: "Now I have a life that even some NTs might envy".

(what if I told you ) it's nice to have best friends who knew you before you get into a bad relationship whereby all the bad ends up being blamed on having AS and tell you the outside perspective of things.


I suppose a long dramatic dialogue would be in order here, but there's work to be done, so here's the tl;dr version:


For nearly 3 years in a relationship with a very volatile and wound up woman. My AS is blamed on everything when in fact, she's got issues and some serious ones I can harp on for pages of text. This needs to be addressed.


One thing I just noticed though, is that once I've had a "few meltdowns" in past relationships and like this one, all development of the girl friend or wife (was married once) stops. They actually get worse. Nobody is perfect of course. That's no big deal, but it feels like a "400 lb Welder thing". How often have we seen on reality TV, especially those cop shows, where you got the 400 lb welder and the 400 wide/gf having some domestic dispute and they are both morbidly unhealthy (of which obesity is merely a symptom, not the center), living in filth with trash everywhere, total slobs, etc. I think perhaps a woman with low self esteem hooks up with the 400 lb welder with the hairy back and thinks they sold low so no point in any personal improvement or maintenance. Right? Well, once it become apparent that I am not quite normal. they let themselves go, as if I just became the 400 lb welder sitting drunk in front of the TV all day with a big gut hanging out. I don't really watch much TV, I stay in good shape (I am over 40 and still wear the same sized clothes I wore in high school- and even have some of the clothes I wore in high school ) I work a full time job at least 40 hours a week, usually 50, and I always have projects that I carefully keep out of the "special interest zone", just enough to make me happy, not enough to consume me. It took years to develop that skill.
So they don't take care of themselves, they get fat, they don't do anything, I end up cleaning up everything, but will still take heat for being so busy as if I just spent all night at a bar or something. I once had a crawling-in-the-dirt meltdown because I could not work past the total frustration derived from getting a hard time from her over me.... cleaning the kitchen.

So what it boils down to, it becomes all about me, how I act, AS, and all that, and not about what she does wrong. And I have found that it's human nature that once anybody (NTs mainly) gets a "free pass" to act certain ways without having to be responsible, they go all out. She has done nothing but get more lazy, get more high strung, yell and throw things a lot, get fat, and set up a mine field of "funny one moment, the same thing not funny the next" that is so arbitrary that even my NT friends who have witnessed this all tell me I can stay at their place for a while if I needed a break.

Yeah, I got issues. But you know what? I am no loser. Yeah, I can be a prick sometimes, especially when I get overloaded. I have a friend with an NT boyfriend who knows how to deal with that without the same grief that I put up with. I am just a bit bothered by the fact that I let it all fall on me, out of guilt, and probably out of the desire not to end up alone again, when at the same time being alone now looks pretty damned good. Loneliness is depressing, but so are horrible relationships. I would rather be alone and depressed because at least I have control.

It's also very possible to have a personality type in an NT-AS relationship where the NT and AS can be completely incompatible. It's starting to look like that, and that's something that has to be addressed like an adult. It's like every day I relive that scene from "Ghostworld" where Seymour (a character with some AS-like traits) was on a date with a very NT instant-outside-stimuli type in a night club.

Now I have a volatile screamaholic who does not work, that I take care of, who lives in her own fantasy world and I am evil incarnate and everything is my fault and I have to change. She says I did this to her. Funny thing is, I don't melt down any more, because the last time I did, I thought 'this is dumb, how did I get here?' and then started to recognize the pathways to meltdown and avoid them. You'd think that would improve things, but no. Things just get worse because I will walk away before any meltdown occurs. I simply will not go there, especially when she starts in with the screaming, which if I allow to affect me, creates a feedback that will garantee a meltdown. Loud screeching women make my head feel like it's being pinned against a revving car engine. One that feedback starts, here comes the death spiral towards meltdown, so I learned how to de-escalate, even when it hurts, because the meltdown only hurts more and I've have them bad enough that it takes days to recover. I have changed, for the better, because I learned to de-escalate which is something I was never good at. I HAD to in this relationship, unlike past ones where there was not so much trouble to begin with, lest I would be melting down every day and I'd probably be a quivering mass in the corner by now. I changed for the better and she gets even worse. She actually has hate for me, and says this. I cannot relax when she's around. When she's mad at me and won't talk to me I feel relief. This can't go on.

So much for tl;dr.