The Married Aspie Cafe Thread (discussion of marriage, etc.)

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So far, the best advice I can offer is be observant. Don't talk as much as you want to, listen and pay attention. Grab your spouse aside and ask questions about the in-laws behavior. Ask NT's you are close to at work about other coworkers. Treat it like an anthropological study and make a game of it. It seems that most of us are smarter than them, use it to your advantage.

I've had reasonable success with this technique in the last 6 months or so since I've been in therapy and started to understand my tenancies.

The older I get, the less I talk. Part of that is knowing the Aspie tendency to bore the living daylights out of people. I've learned people really do not want me to thoroughly delineate the minute differences in the thirty or so varieties of sonnet, nor in the five hundred plus poetic forms I currently have catalogued. And most neuro-typical conversations bore me as much as I bore the NTs. I am blessed to have a wife who, if not in Aspie territory, is certainly odd enough to keep me interested most of the time.



Another one of the books I have on the back-burner to finish writing is tentatively titled, The Alien's Field Guide to the Human Race.

Good advice on both points.

My wife must have read that same site, and as a result, I'm ready to be rescued by the Humane Society!

It worked for me. When I did good, I got a nice flash of her breasts. When I did really good, I got a nice face between breasts treatment. When I did really, really good...well, we usually took a nap after that reward.

I miss doing really, really good...

My husband sure wants to train me and sometimes it works. But I don't know what to do sometimes.

Also, I don't always get a reward.

New person here.

I'm married, been with my wife for 10+ years. We got together very young, I'm in my early 30s now. Things have always been up and down in our relationship, and I think it's just the way things go, but things have been particularly rocky this year. We had our first child early in the year, a little boy. We've embraced all of the hippie parenting things: cloth diapers, attachment parenting, etc.

Now we're tearing at each other. It's been a lot of ugliness punctuated by brief periods of great (like we used to be). I'm sure the lack of sleep is a major factor in this. Asperger's Syndrome obviously plays a role or I wouldn't be here. I was diagnosed earlier this year, and the diagnosis was a relief in a way because it explained the first ~30 years of my life, but it's also a major challenge.

A big problem is that our perspectives are so different with regard to what's happening. I perceive her as irritable and easily upset. Some of her reactions seem irrational to me (like when she can't find an item she's looking for, and starts cursing or being rude to everyone around her). I find myself in a constant state of trying to please her, trying to do whatever she wants to keep her calm and happy, but THAT behavior pisses her off too, and it's exacerbated when I forget something or screw something up.

Her perspective, as I understand it from our discussions (though I'm probably somewhat off the mark here), is that I'm being emotionally manipulative/abusive toward her. She seems to believe I'm being intentionally obtuse/forgetful/rude in order to wind her up, then I tell her I'm not doing that in order to invalidate her feelings. She's accused me of gaslighting her. I feel justified in claiming that her reactions are sometimes irrational based on her being diagnosed bipolar. I'm probably not delivering that message in the best way.

I don't know how to repair our situation. I love her, I love our son, and I want us to be happy. But she seems very unhappy, I'm extremely unhappy, and I've found myself lately daydreaming about what their life would be like if I were gone (death, accident, whatever) and wishing I could just go hide in a cabin in the woods for ten or twenty years.

I've already decided that if this doesn't work out, I'm done with relationships. I'm not built for it, and I feel like I've done her and my son a disservice by getting married and getting her pregnant in the first place. They're now stuck with me to some degree for the rest of my life. Had I known I had AS I might not have married her or had a child.

But I don't want this to fail if at all possible. Has anyone found themselves in a situation like this? If so, were you able to pull out of it and get things back on track? I'm all ears.

Hi ninja man,

I see no one's responded to your post in 2 weeks. I am finding that this place can be dissappointing that way, considering how busy it is. Often seems to be busy, mainly with people making innane comments.

I recognise some of your perspective on your situation in my own perspective on my situation. I have a wife and 2 young kids. I spend a lot of time lamenting how unfortunate this is for me and wishing it were not so, but I can't make it go away.

I too, wonder if I could leave this situation and how that would be, although I'm not really suicidal. I also feel as though I have let them down or at least I will have done if things can't get sorted out.

I can't honestly say that I love my wife and kid's though. Mind you, I can't really talk meaningfuly about 'love' at all as I don't know what it is, I don't recognise it anywhere, it is just an ideal, to me.

If you have this love and if you really don't want to see your thing fail, then you perhaps have the basics there to make it work. I get the sense that you're not really getting to the bottom of the problem although obviously you are limited in what you can say in one forum post. Your talk about problematic reactions to each other strikes me as a superficial account of what the source of the problems might be that are giving rise to those conflicts.

Personally, at this moment in time, I would say that I would rather find a way out of my situation that works rather than a way to stay in it that works. Either way, I think and feel that things have to be a lot different from how they have been.

I don't think that separation is necessarily 'failure'. Perhaps failure is when something is not working.

There have been times when I wish my spouse would train me, then I remember that I don't like to be manipulated ... so that wouldn't work.

I'm in my sixties and I worry that I won't be able to take care of my wife (for the past 25+ years). It's only in the last year that it occurred to me that I might need to take care of her. Up until then, I had just assumed that she would always be around to take care of me in my old age.

What happens when you are the only survivor and have no friends?

yours,

.. Jim

There have been times when I wish my spouse would train me, then I remember that I don't like to be manipulated ... so that wouldn't work.

I'm in my sixties and I worry that I won't be able to take care of my wife (for the past 25+ years). It's only in the last year that it occurred to me that I might need to take care of her. Up until then, I had just assumed that she would always be around to take care of me in my old age.

What happens when you are the only survivor and have no friends?

yours,

.. Jim

I don't know. I don't know what happens then.

I know my dad was an Aspie, and he was an excellent caregiver-- as long as he didn't let himself get caught up in denial. When he was afraid to see Mom's problems, he was completely blind to them-- and all Hell broke loose.

You go on. That's all there is to it-- that's a lot of what life is, it seems. You get up in the morning and you go on.


In other thoughts. I worry. I'm 33, been with my mate for 13 years, married for 11 years this March. We've got three kids-- 10, 4, and 2-- and another one due in June.

I love him. Dearly. He loves me-- or swears he does, anyway.

The statistics-- they aren't good. They basically say there's very little prayer of us staying together and both ending up happy and fulfilled.

The experts don't get to say what our life is. WE DO. But-- I don't know. I'm scared.

I want to be good to him. I want him to be happy, not like all the bitter NTs in NT/AS partnerships I read about. I'm also intelligent enough to realize that I have to be good to myself if I plan to survive. I'm scared.

I wish to hell I had accepted that having AS precludes marriage when I was young and never got us into this mess.

Denial is a beast.

I'm a writer and have been studying the cognitive scientists. One of them, Michael Austin, wrote a book titled, Useful Fictions. In it, he describes the fictions we create as a strategy for restoring harmony within. Although he was writing for an NT audience, I am now aware of myself creating internal narratives in reaction to anything that disturbs my equalibrium (internal or external).

That's initially what got me worried that I might be in the middle of a "useful delusion" and not see her danger. However, my current useful fiction has evolved.

Austin describes the evolutionary process as it relates to our beliefs as follows:

We have a current harmony including a belief system

The harmony is disturbed by something that disputes the assumptions of the current harmony

We develop a new thesis combining both the current harmony and the disturbing element

We write a new narrative to explain the thesis.

The new narrative restores us to harmony.

Austin adds, ironically, that often the fictional approach (that all of us were born with) is more effective than a factual approach.

Nature doesn't care, apparently, whether something is true or not - it seems to be irrelevant.

This thesis and narrative (Thank you Michael Austin) has allowed me to give up my need to be right all the time, and also my need to seek only the truth (I am beginning to read fiction again.)

Thought I'd share that with you since you were so kind as to reply to this thread.

Yours,

... Jim

I fear ruining things with my mood swings. Now that I have accepted an engagement ring, I fear that I am going to screw things up, or find that I have made a mistake, etc. Nobody gets it right all the time, nor is anyone perfect. Yet I go through these irrational fear attacks at least once a month.

There are many times when stress causes me to ruin something that is valuable to me.

It is as though something inside doesn't want me to be stressed and "stops" the activity surrounding it.

I think that something is my "older" inherited mind deciding to "take over."

I'm engaged to someone who I think has Aspie traits, but he's never been diagnosed. We're waiting until both of us are more financially stable before setting an actual wedding date.

New to this board. I am 25, so a little young for the dino cafe, but I am married and was wondering something. Do any of you married people not live with your spouses for a while? I got married last September, but we don't live together and don't plan on doing so anytime soon. The reason is twofold: he's still in college and I am in an institution. We got married to prove our love to each other, which according ot the civil service person who did our wedding was really special, but I wonder sometimes whether we would be able to cope once living together.

[quote="funnyflashfiction"]There have been times when I wish my spouse would train me, then I remember that I don't like to be manipulated ... so that wouldn't work.

How would training imply manipulation. If she/he tries to teach you something, there are various ways you can use to confirm if it's for your own good or she/he being selfish. people enter in to relationship to develop a mutually beneficial relationship, not to manipulate someone.