What do you think of this description of AS + NT marriages?

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DW_a_mom, thanks for your post. I have to say that my quick glance at the article in the original post has me fuming....but that's also because I'm in Midlife Autistic Burnout right now.

My husband and I have a great marriage, and he is an incredibly loving and accepting person. He takes care of most things in our lives together: earning money, social interactions at school, often groceries and cooking and cleaning. I do the financial stuff, laundry, and cleaning to the extent I can (the chaos in a house of five really gets to me, and makes it hard for me to even see where to begin). But I don't think for a second he'd say the marriage is "all about me and my needs," nor would I. Gimme a break! My entire life has been all about OTHER people and THEIR wants and needs. If my life revolved around my needs, I'd live alone.

I am pretty tired of this "AS men are so hard to live with" crap. (I'm an autistic woman, not a man, but it's still crap. ) If their whiny wives had any idea how hard their husbands are working not to bite heads off from all the sensory overload, maybe they'd understand a little better.

This article starts of with what seems to me a head-on clash of things I've read, seen, heard, around here. Seen a lot where the message is that folks with AS like, want, to deal with clear and well defined truths.
not so big a deal what the truth is, just that it is truth.

That beginning sentence feels like it sets a confrontational atmosphere and I never got past that way of looking at the rest of the article.

It does seem to me like that's a clever sentence they've written there, designed to pre-empt any counter-argument. It insinuates that any offense caused is unrealistic - when they say "....to write about the realities..." they're hiding a major assertion - that what follows is "about the realities" - in a minor part of the sentence. Then the article goes on to generalise about Aspies. If it were about an ethnic group, the inherent prejudice would perhaps be more obvious.

Yeah, we're just getting demonized as domestic parners/spouses. I think some of us can be great spouses for some people, maybe some of us can't. Or rather, won't really want to. I have a very happy marriage, myself.

I got kind of curious about the phenomenon and looked at online support-group forums for people married to aspies. And found a bunch I couldn't look at, because they lock them to keep aspies out. And then got booted off one where they claimed to be for both partners and to want input from people with AS. I think that, like the article, those groups are very often promoting bigotry while somehow managing to believe they're helping.

I made another one that I'm hoping can be more fair, and offer better advice than 'he can't change, get a divorce.'

http://asdrelationships.freeforums.org

I find it slightly bizarre that (in civilised countries) employers are legally obliged to make reasonable adjustments for Aspie disabilities, but spouses are not. It also seems axiomatic to me that, if any kind of advice is to be given for an AS-NT relationship, then the group doing the advising should be made up of an equal number of Aspies and neurotypicals, to avoid inherent bias. But I suppose at the end of the day it depends on how easily led the spouse in question happens to be. I guess that's a warning for anybody who thinks it's wise to pair up with a gullible individual rather than selecting one who has a mind of their own. The latter is no doubt likely to be a lot more awkward to live with, but at least one is free from the worry of thinking that they're open to the disingenuous persuasion of groups and individuals who have something other than the couple's interests at heart.

Interesting about you getting banned from one of those forums - did they give any reason for it, in terms of breaking the rules?

Doubleposted in error.

Last edited by Electric_Kite on 27 Jul 2009, 3:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Their only 'rules' are here and here and as you can see they aren't rules. In the aftermath of my getting booted off the moderator kept going off about my violating her clear guidelines, though it seems to me the converse. What she said was that I was talking about others 'behind their backs' (though this person could come along and read the post any time he wanted, I was just talking about him in third person) and that I had an 'argumentative tone' that made her tired. This should take you to the relevant bits, if you care. I'm 'Key2101', the moderator is 'barneysmom52.' You probably won't have any trouble figuring out that, or the rest of the little dramatis personae. There is a little bit of comedy gold near the end with one of them saying that we need to follow strict (yet unwritten) standards of propriety because it's a diverse group.

The mod had previously complained about my 'tone' but didn't do anything about it when I said that I was, being AS, a little tone challenged and needed her to tell me what she meant. A couple weeks before I got booted she'd locked a thread because I pointed out that letting some posters say that Maxine Aston is helpful while refusing to let me say that Maxine Aston is a bigot does not fit the definition of 'neutrality.' Fun stuff.



I see what you mean, though I don't think you literally want laws about it? What I don't get is why these people married AS people to begin with, if they find us so hard to stand. Elsewhere Willard wrote about his marriages being obsessions that eventually burned out and became boring, but I suspect that happens to all marriages, not just ours. Statistically, marriages very often end in 5 +/- 2 years after they start or the youngest child is born. NTs talk about this all the time, how to get past that point where the marriage isn't fresh and new and thrilling any more. These 'support' groups seem to give the (mostly) women involved in them an excuse to blame this phenomenon on there being 'something wrong' with the husband rather than just dealing with the reality of a real long-term commitment and the fact that the guy is an individual.



You'd think so. I don't think autistics are the best at helping me figure out what my NT partner really needs, though they may help me figure how to deliver it. These support groups for NT spouses seem to want to exclude AS people on the grounds that they're tired of AS people 'cause they have to deal with one at home. So it's the blind leading the blind, so to speak.

Addendum: Oh dear, I have written about Willard in the third person. I expect you all to overcome your disability and demand that the moderators take me out behind the chemical sheds and shoot me now. I haven't had a cigarette in two months and need the excuse.

I took a look. Not exactly a clear set of rules, is it? I can't understand why those people were so touchy. I know loads of (presumably NT) people in real life who are way more prickly than you, yet they don't get usually excluded from anything as long as they don't really start tearing the place apart. And as far as I can see, you just said what you thought - I just don't see why they were so delicate.


Yes as a gut reaction, but it would probably never work in practice......there would no doubt be unintended consequenses. I just don't feel that a spouse has the right to disregard their partner's disabilities. In a sense I feel we lost something when the legal system threw out the concept of guilty and injured parties in divorce cases, and replaced it with a simple "nobody's really to blame but the marriage has broken down irretrievably" stance. Some partners really do inflict cruelty and unreasonable behaviour on their other half, and I think there are times when it would do a lot of good for them to be pulled up for it and told that they just can't go around treating them like that. But I accept that it's no easy task to pass judgement of that sort, as the circumstances aren't always clear cut, and sometimes even the partners themselves don't really understand whats going on. I used to think that infidelity should be a punishable offense, and I still think there are many cases in which it ought to be, but since those days I've noticed that there are sometimes very strong mitigating circumstances. So if they made me Lord Protector of the UK, I'd be very wary of forging ahead with sweeping reforms of matrimonial law.

I used to think that way too, and I still think that a lot of NT spouses of Aspies have no case, and that they deserve a slap round the head for being so disingenuous. But since then I've heard of examples where the Aspie has changed for the worse after the partner has committed themselves to them. And sometimes I suspect it's nobody's fault - I'm sure, with one or two of my past partners, that the beginning of those relationships made me so euphoric and confident that I felt able to do amazing things, and thought that I'd at last overcome a lot of my social ineptitude, only to find that once the relationship had aged a little and a few hard realities had entered to playing field, my newly-acquired super powers drained out of me and I became a worse person to be with. From the partner's point of view, it must have looked very much like a case of deliberate entrapment, but I swear at the time I had no such intention - I've known for decades that to deliberately hide my personality flaws until the partner is hooked can only lead to misery for me as well as the partner.


I suspect you're right - that a lot of these NT spouses are just looking for an excuse to desert a partner who they've become bored with. And some of these websites seem to offer just the validation they want. But I can't help but think that anybody who falls for it is going to find out in the end that their failure to tackle their own personality problems is going to backfire on them. These people are in denial about their own weaknesses, and are therefore in danger of finding out the hard way that they're not the saints they think they are.


I agree. It's not nice for the ego, but much healthier to get views from the opposition as well as the "like minds." How many men have complained to the guys about their partners, only to be told that the problem is that women are irrational idiots? How many women have been fed this "men are all the same" line when they've tried to talk to their girlfriends about their other half?

Thanks. I don't think I'm all that prickly either. Most people don't. Or say they don't, anyway.

I agree that it's probably very often somebody's fault when marriages break down. Just not the business of the state to figure out whose. Really I don't think government ought to have anything to do with marriage. But that's another topic entirely.

I wonder about these tales of aspies changing for the worse. Seems a common story on those support groups, with a generally accepted explaination that it's a form of entrapment. That we're on our 'best behavior' until she commits. I don't buy it. I think they're just ignoring (or ignorant of) the fact that courting has many more discernable rules than marriage/cohabitation. Seducing somebody is a snap compared to living with her.



You may be more optimistic than I. I figure they'll go along with the denial forever, since they're getting the validation. All these people saying, "Oh, poor luckless you, entrapped into a loveless marriage by a duplicitous autistic! He's a bastard!" What is probably more called for is, "Your spouse is not the Purina Cat Chow for the soul, complete and balanced nutrition for all life stages. NT spouses aren't either. Not even your mommy can do that. Grow up and learn how to look after your own emotional needs, and learn to get your emotional 'nutrients' from more than one place. For pity's sake." I'm not unsympathetic to those who are geographically isolated, or who have controlling mates who deny them opportunities to connect with others, but mostly that doesn't seem to be the case. And my NT friends who have happy marriages are all a heck of a lot less dependent on their spouses than the people on those groups seem to wish they could be.