My wife recently took a de facto decision to go and live over a hundred miles away. Her given reasons were that she felt she couldn't make enough money here and that she wanted to spend more time with her kids, who are now grown up. But I think her main reason was that, on our discovering that I had AS, she lost hope of changing me into the person she'd like me to be.
She's still in touch by phone and is visiting me now and then, and has no intentions of ending the relationship or finding another partner.
She did the same thing some years ago - initially when we first got married, she moved in with me and brought her kids with her. But after a year or two, she decided that I wasn't involving myself enough with acting like a father to her kids, and she moved away with them. We didn't know about my AS at the time. Another big issue for her was that I wasn't moving quickly enough with refurbishing the house to her desired standards (which is still an issue now). Eventually her kids grew up and she moved back in with me, and as I say, she's just moved back out again.
As for how I've felt about all that, well the first time I felt very let down. Though I wasn't the world's most involved "father figure," I was never once nasty to her kids. And I felt that she'd exacerbated my reluctance to take more interest in them by regularly "roasting" me about it and making demands in a threatening manner. That was a feature of all our disagreements, and though I often told her that we needed to discuss these things in a calm, supportive atmosphere, her temper always got the better of her, and I don't think she's ever acknowledged the importance of negotiating in a reasonable manner. I remember shortly before she decided to leave, I'd got into a bad stress problem at work and was on tranquillisers, and all she could do was to lay on further pressure, making demands of me in a horribly aggressive way, so that all I could do was shut down.
Her idea was to stay away until the kids were old enough to look after themselves in a few years' time. Meanwhile she continued to put pressure on me to refurbish the house, which seemed a bit rich to me as she wasn't even living in it. Initially I'd said that I didn't intend to visit her - before our marriage, whenever I'd returned from visiting her, a horrible depressive mood would descend over me, which I had absolutely no wish to have again, and anyway I felt that as she was moving out against my wishes, she ought to be the one who did the travelling. She agreed initially, but after a few months she started to put pressure on me to do half of the travelling, and when I showed reluctance, she accused me of just being like that to punish her. So I eventually started to visit her again, and the depressive feelings came back.....I used to throw loads of coping strategies at them, but nothing did much to make me feel better.
She came back once the kids were getting their independence. I did a few refurbishments, and she got a nice room of her own in the house; we got the stairs carpeted. She was angry with me for not having done up the whole house before she'd moved back in. She took to spending most of her time in her own room, in a sense behaving more like an Aspie than I was. I'd just let her be and get on with my own stuff in the living room. It meant that we were sharing very little time together, and I was concerned about the wisdom of that, but it seemed to be the way she wanted it and I didn't want to come over as possessive by putting pressure on her to be with me a bit more. Then she'd suddenly appear, seeming to want immediate attention, and tended to lose patience and go back off to her room if she didn't get that attention quickly. Then she'd wait till just before bedtime to announce that she wanted to sleep alone so she'd be fresh to do her job in the morning. We managed to share a few things, but she had a lot of trouble telling the difference between sharing a thing and just doing her own thing while expecting me to fit around it. At times I've wondered who the real Aspie is.
She felt very disappointed in me for not making the house fit for her to invite her friends to visit - the few friends I have come to see me and don't pass judgement on the state of the house....the place does need to be refurbished better, but the basics are all there, it's a bit frugal and cluttered, but what with my management defecit issues and special interests, I doubt that I'm capable of making it a lot different in the near future. I'm currently unsure whether I'm going to be able to hang onto my job or not, and until I've found out how well my employers are going to adjust my working conditions, there's a real possibility that I'll have to live on my savings for the next 8 years (until my pension kicks in), which will be tough, so I don't feel able to start spending money on refurbishments in the near future, though if things go well then it ought to be possible, as long as I use some restraint.
I felt let down last time she left, and I feel let down this time also. She visited the other week, and we spent a fairly happy time together, but she got angry when she realised I didn't want to have sex with her. I'm still coming to terms with her leaving, and I just don't feel like having sex with her right now. At the time she had given me no hope of her ever coming back, in fact she was even talking about going and living in another country. She accused me of holding back on sex to punish her. All I'd said was that I felt we should wait until we'd talked through some of the issues. Since then she's begun to suggest that she hopes that we'll live together again one day, and she's said that if I couldn't live overseas, she wouldn't go there, though she still seems to think I ought to try it before declaring it impossible. I haven't told her this, but trying it would make as much sense to me as buying a hundred pigs to see if I could make them fly - and the last thing I need is a massive upheaval in my way of life. I like England and I'd hate to lose regular contact with my son and with my small social circle.
In many ways she's been a good wife....I think almost nothing of trusting her to live so far away from me, and in many respects she's dependable and obviously cares about me a lot and I care about her also. But the law says that two years' separation is grounds for divorce, and if I'd known what she was going to do, I wouldn't have married her in the first place. More than likely, if I divorced her she'd be absolutely livid, but I don't like having to explain to people why my wife doesn't live with me. Somehow it hurts my pride on a deep level, and I don't know what I'm going to do about it yet. I'd think that there would be no problem about divorcing - after all, we could always get married again, and I don't equate not being married with looking for new partners....I suppose some people feel that it's wrong to live together without being married, while I feel that it's wrong (for me) to be married and not live together. Living with people isn't easy for me, and I don't say I'm easy to live with, buit the opportunity to do that has been taken away from me.
I rather admire those of you who in many ways would wish to live separately but have chosen not to because your spouse hates the idea. I hope your partners deserve that vote of confidence you've given them......and I wish mine had had the same degree of staying power.
Not that I'm passing judgement on married couples who live apart. I'm sure it's the best thing for some people. Just that I think it has to be a mutual choice to do that. I made a lot of compromises, and they weren't easy, and would have made a lot more, if only my wife's negotiating style had been less brutal and impatient.
17 Aug 2009, 3:38 pm
