Please help me understand my ASPie ex boyfriend

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Hi everyone
I am NT and new here. I need your valuable advice please.
I am plagued (even though I try not to be) by the memory of my ex-boyfriend, who after lots of research into the topic, I now believe has AS.
When we met I was not in a good state - quite low self-esteem, confusion and depression had reigned in my life for a couple of years (now better though). But he seemed quite refreshingly accepting, even interesting, when we first met, and from a really nice family which I met straight away. He's also good looking and well spoken.
There were many warning signs at the beginning of the relationship, where he would be extremely emotionally cold and distant, and not even realise that he was being so. Even nasty, sometimes. But as my self-esteem was low at the time, I put up with it.
Despite this we moved in together after a year. I was ready to settle down and I thought he was too.
However, from the day we moved in, he completely abandoned the relationship and closed up completely. He would not talk to me for weeks on end. He wouldn't undress in front of me. He'd ridicule me in front of our friends and completely not understand what he'd done when I told him about it. When we thought I was pregnant he silently and moodily drove me to the abortion clinic (thankfully, I was not pregnant in the end), without discussing it. He either made the decision not to, or realise he could not, invest in the relationship.
However, he could be kind, forgiving and even showed a wisdom that touched me very much, when I was being a complete stress-head. I tried to brush the other stuff under the carpet and concentrate on the good stuff.
One day, however, things came to a head and I told him that I knew he wasn't happy in the relationship. He typically was unable to express any feelings and instead simply projected his emotions onto external things, saying things like, "I don't like this house, the walls are too high... I don't like the street, it's too residential". I then told him the relationship was over as I could take no more... finally, after two years.
So... that's all OK because I accept that I probably had a relationship with an undiagnosed ASpie. It's not his fault, nor mine.
HOWEVER... given his track record at being in a relationship with me, where my self-esteem was practically non-existent towards the end, he met and married another girl within months!! And they are seemingly very happily married and she seems to worship the ground he walks on! She's very successful - doing a PhD, from a wealthy family, and finds him very attractive.
My question to you guys is: if he is ASpie, how did it work out that his relationship with me was so absolutely dysfunctional, whilst his relationship with his now Wife is so good? I appreciate I had low self-esteem but I wasn't all bad either: I cared for him, I tried to get him to talk, I was patient, I lost my rag sometimes but heck he wasn't perfect and neither was I. I was trying to have a relationship, that's all.
I try not to dwell on this part of my past too much, as I have since embarked on a process of deep spiritual reflection and have found much peace within myself since then. However, I would very much appreciate some feedback from people with AS who might be able to shed light on this. Whenever I see them together (we all live in a small town) it brings back many old wounds. I'm looking for some understanding of what happened, so that I can properly move on with my life and genuinely be happy for them as a couple.
THANKS
H

To be straight up perfectly honest, I don't think he ever liked you that much. He thought he did to begin with and then eventually realised what he really felt and as you say, expressed it poorly.

Please realise I am not trying to be a bastard but that is what I see here.

It's possible that your attempts to get him to talk and to be nice are what drove him away.


I'm not trying to make this your fault. You had every reason to believe that your relationship needed communication and contact, and didn't see the big warning signs about his reaction to the disruption of routine when you moved in.


He may have found a woman who is willing to have a trophy husband with whom she rarely talks and who lives a life largely separate from hers.

Well first you need to understand that while they may seem happy outside, you really don't know what's going on there. You were also happy at the beginning, so I wouldn't read too much into that. They may actually be happy or it could end when she starts having the same issues you did. You can't tell that from the outside in any relationship (so that isn't you or the relationship).

My husband is NT, so I can tell you what I think, but just understand that we can have all sorts of differences because we are on a spectrum that is wide and we all manifest different things as a result. So let's just go down the list, okay?

Here's what I think happened based on my own experiences in AS/NT relationship. You’ll have to decide how much this does or does not apply, but I would say think it over long and hard before you come to any conclusions.

He was really tuned into you at first - I read that as he was trying very, very hard to pay attention to what was happening with you and impress you. He may have even executed a script in his mind and actions based on how he thought he should act (many of us do because we don’t intuitively know these things or sometimes even understand why we should do them). He could have been exhausted all the time based on what you say afterward. That is extremely hard for us because many of us pick up on only some of the body language, eye contact, hidden meanings going on and others of us don't get any of it despite training and classes (that’s how it is with me). So it's hard to say how much he did. What we do know is that you were really into him and you say you saw signs all along. That tells me despite the fact that he was probably trying hard at the beginning, he still wasn't recognizing these things one hundred percent. Before we go on, I want you to know that wasn't anything you did wrong. In the case of me, my brain does not recognize those things that seem obvious to you. It's subconscious for you and because of that it is hard to imagine a world in which that doesn't exist. As you probably realize now, this can cause a mess in short order.

So let's go through the rest. As soon as you moved in he seemed cold, he didn't talk, he seemed critical around friends/family. Actually, what he probably did was to relax and not try so hard. If you moved in, he would have to be in a constantly tired and stressed state to keep up with where he was at the beginning because he'd be constantly compensating for what his brain doesn't tell him in the way of the subtle or sometimes even blatant (to you) things going on. He probably didn't even realize what relaxing would cost him. You know how easy it is to just relax and suddenly find out that something happened as a result. That's probably what happened here. And you probably relaxed as well. That meant you weren't working as hard at understanding or compensating as you had been. Completely understandable. It wasn't a flaw in you either. Everyone relaxes when they finally make some type of commitment and everyone has some kind of issues then. Yours were just different. Okay? It's important you remember this.

It's very hard for us to show emotion (at least many if not most of us). Where it's natural for almost all NTs to varying degrees, many of us (and it sounds like him) really have to work at recognizing when we should do it and how to do it appropriately because we aren't getting the right messages to tell us that. Back to the can't relax for a minute. That's when the NTs in the relationship see coldness. He wasn't asking if you wanted something if he got something to eat, right? Didn't ask if you wanted to do something like go out? Didn't ask if you were cold or hot? Didn't ask how your day was? These are all common and trust me, I have to force myself to remember all of them even though I've been working and married for over 25 years. Some on here get better with training and some don't. I love my husband to death, would literally do anything for him and yet I still have to force myself to think about this the entire time I'm at home. You can see where that causes issues on both sides. Again, it isn't anything about you or him, it's just a difference and it causes issues.

The ridicule - I tend to do this sometimes myself and have no idea why. It's like that same mechanism where some stupid little thing in the world bothers me and I blurt out some harshness on the nearest poor person around me before I can stop myself or even realize I'm doing it. Afterward I feel like crap and I don't know how to make it right. Some on here find answers to that and some don't. What I do know is that if you were around family he was probably dealing with some serious sensory and social overload and you maybe touched him or asked him something (at least this is how it goes with me) and he snapped at you with something critical. If he isn't aware of that he may be AS he may think his mind is being logical, but it probably is a sensory thing and you unfortunately gave him a trigger to direct it at you. If you think back, you'll probably notice he has done this to others as well from time to time.

The making decisions without you. We do tend to jump to what we think is the most logical conclusion and not even realize that others would have a different view. Sometimes, we only see one option so we aren’t even aware there are others. At least I do that and notice several others on here do as well. Some of us don't. Again, we're a spectrum so you'll see all kinds of answers to that. It may have had nothing to do with your relationship and I wouldn't assume that unless he actually said it. We don't do much if any non-verbal or hidden meanings when we communicate. We generally say whatever we mean. If you got very emotional (which of course you did, it's an emotional thing), he probably sensed all that emotion and shut down. That's what would have happened to me. I would get so overwhelmed by the emotion and trying to process it that the explanation would never leave my mouth. That happens to me frequently in the face of emotion, especially intense emotion. Unfortunately, most NTs talk when they get emotional so they have no way to understand why someone would just shutdown when faced with emotion. If an NT did that to you, they would be acting cold and thoughtless. You just had no context for processing what he did. There’s nothing wrong with you if that happened. There’s nothing wrong with him if he responded in the way his brain directed him to. It just happened. If you were still in it, you could recognize and work on it (although success varies), but it is important to recognize that it just happened and neither of you did it deliberately.

Here is the most important one I want you to understand because it’s probably true of all of us on here (although I can’t say with 100% certainty and maybe the guys can speak up).


You said, “He either made the decision not to, or realise he could not, invest in the relationship.”

I do not believe this, although I understand why you do. If any NT man acted as he did, of course you would think this, but his brain is very different from yours in very intrinsic ways. I haven’t seen people on here who wouldn’t just say it if the relationship was over or had no hope. If anything, we are too blunt and often hurt feelings because we see those things clearly and announce them immediately. Here’s point in case. My old boyfriend, Bob, who I went out with on and off for five years, never wanted to believe me when I told him we were not compatible, I would never marry him and nothing would ever come of us seeing each other. Considering we met at 15, in the NT world he would have been correct to assume that I would probably change. I never changed. He wanted kids and I did not. To me, that was an issue that could not be resolved so no matter how much he saw me, I never saw the relationship as anything but a dead end and told him that. I was way too blunt by NT standards and seriously hurt his feelings many times, but I was completely honest. After five years, I met my husband, during one of my many break ups with Bob, moved in with him three weeks later and married him ten months later. Bob still calls my mother every once in awhile to see if I’m still married. He probably feels as lost as you at understanding what happened. The difference is, I told him what was going on, he just couldn’t accept it because it was too foreign to his own world.

So what I think in your case is that you projected what you thought was happening onto him. Well of course you did because that’s what we do, we project a theory onto a situation based on what we know from previous experiences and about the situation. The problem is that your previous experiences and what you could read from your own situation probably did not match what was really happening in him because he’s outside your normal scope. You decided based on what you knew about humans that all of his actions said he thought the relationship was over. That’s what you would normally do. Unfortunately, it probably hit him out of left field because he doesn’t see things as you do and he doesn’t respond to them as you do. So he may not have even known the relationship was hitting complete breakdown when you decided it was over. Again, the context from which you both made decisions was different. That is what caused the breakdown. It wasn’t because you were bad or he was bad, it was because the two of you were communicating in parallel universes and there was no bridge at the at point between the two. Make sense?

I also think when that happened, you probably reeled off a list of reasons why you thought he was done with the relationship. That would be normal for you to do. However, if you did, that’s why he started reeling off his list of what bothered him (notice none of that was about you or your relationship indicating he didn’t really see problems there you thought he did). He probably thought you were just blowing off steam about what was bothering you at the time. So he responds in kind. Only what is bothering him is all sensory (that’s why I think he did what he did around friends and family). He wasn’t projecting at all. We (or almost all of us) don’t do that. We just reel off facts generally. (I don’t know of any of us that project at all, but I guess there could be some.) So if he said those were the things bothering him, they were and not you or the relationship. The walls, the residential street are all big sensory problems for most of us. Living in that can put us in a state of constant anxiety and cause other problems to happen, like being snappy, not being able to follow conversations, not being able to sleep, etc. Think of your brain taking what is normal stimuli and ramping it up to 100 times what you normally hear it or feel it at and that is what his brain is doing to him. If you could take normal street sounds, blast them at 100X their normal sound in a warehouse environment, you would get a similar effect to what he felt the whole time he lived there. Now picture being in that situation and trying to pay attention to what your significant other is trying to say and figure out all of the non-verbal communication when you aren’t good at it anyway (so picture yourself blind). That will give you some insight into what it might have been like for him. When you finally get to that point, you will see how things broke down between you. Again, you had no context from which to understand that and since that is the world he lives in, he has no context to understand that you were talking about strictly your relationship and not just things that were bothering you. It was just communication breakdown. No one did this deliberately and to be frank, how could you have known that before? It’s very possible there was no way for him to know that before. You were both just trying to deal with it from what you knew.

Finally, let’s look at where he is because this is bothering you. If he met her and married her in months, two things could have happened that I see. Either he was devastated by what happened with you (which he would have seen as a complete disaster he didn’t really understand and probably still doesn’t) and he was just glad that someone found him attractive again so he acted or he actually did feel more comfortable with her type of personality. Either is just as likely and they may both be true to a degree.

I know you are wondering what personality mixes better with an Aspie and I can only tell you what worked with me. The guys can give you some insight into what worked for them if they have long term marriages that are good. For me, it’s because my husband is super analytical and he applies that to me. He doesn’t deal with my Aspieness from an emotional state and he’s had to deal with some real whoppers over the years. When he’s confronted with something that seems to come out of left field, he’ll sit and think about it and observe it and analyze it to death. It might hurt his feelings, but he’ll quickly put that aside. Don’t get me wrong, he is very emotional about me. Probably overly so. But, he doesn’t deal with my differences from that state and that has really helped us. I am definitely one who shuts down if I get hit with someone else’s emotional response. I have very low tolerance for it before I feel like I get hit with a tsunami. So in our case that was critical. We never knew I was Aspie either until just a few months ago, but he managed to logically make his way through most of it and just talk to me about it. I realized so many things just by him explaining them to me in his calm and rational tone. That made me feel like he helped me and wasn’t blaming me or angry with me. But, that’s just him and he’s very atypical for an NT. It’s not something I would expect just any man in a relationship with me to be able to do. I know most couldn’t.

He also loves intellectual pursuits. He can sit there quietly for hours and dwell in that world with me. We often don’t talk for hours and we’re perfectly happy there. Sometimes we do things we both like and we are completely happy there as well. We are really well matched in our need for quiet and intellectual stimulation. I’ve seen that frequently on here. Not always, but frequently and I personally think that really helps.

My husband is social, but he has his outlets and doesn’t expect me to socialize with him. He’ll organize company events and sports teams. He’ll go to the park and play basketball with the guys. He has his ways of getting his social stimulation without me and he honestly doesn’t care that he does that away from me. He doesn’t expect me to do everything with him. He’s very different that way. Most people in a relationship would not do that and be happy.

He also knows that any social event, including family, is going to stress me completely out and either make me sick or bring out the worst in me (possibly both). He’s seen me try and try to psych myself out, do biofeedback and all sorts of things with no success. So he just rides it out now and we hardly ever see family and friends together. If I do get sarcastic, he has these key phrases he says to me and I know immediately I’m doing that and stop it. (Our thing is that he’ll say things to me in German,) It is just something we came up with that worked for us. He understands that it isn’t really him, it’s just my brain gone haywire from all the stimulus. Again, he’s super analytical. (But if you came up to him and said, boy isn’t she a b***h? He’d yell at you, then rush over to me and fuss all over me. So he can be super emotional as well.)

What I’m saying is that it is possible she’s a very different NT and that it will work. That doesn’t mean anything is wrong with you at all. I personally think Aspies can’t get on with most NTs, but that is just my feeling. I think that we are so different from the NT mind that in order for it to work without ultimate failure that it takes that mixture of extremely rational and emotional to figure out what the heck is going on and work around it. Unfortunately, at least in my case, I read all of that non-verbal language so badly that he literally has to explain it to me and I still don’t see it or completely misinterpret it. So in our case, the load has been very heavy on him. On the other hand, he’s as OCD as the day is long and that doesn’t bother me one bit. There is not a woman on earth that would live with that except me and we both know it. There are reasons that both of us are in this relationship and like it. That’s why it works for us.

So rather than look at you and wonder what it was in you that made it not work, I’d just try accept that many things just went haywire and there may not have been anything you could have done. It might just be that your emotional needs are not compatible with his Aspieness (which doesn’t even mean you wouldn’t be happy with another Aspie). It might just be that your particular brains were not a good mix. That’s okay. It’s sad and it’s heartbreaking, but it’s okay to say that’s how it was and accept it. It does not mean you can’t find someone else and be happy as well. It doesn’t mean she’s is 100% the right woman for him and he the right man for her. It just means that at that particular point in time, the mixture of you two did not work and it was no one’s fault. It just happened.

I hope that helped you. You are stronger than you think if you analyzed that past relationship and realized all the things you did. It’s very impressive. I think you should start to give yourself a break. I see a lot in you to like. You need to let yourself see that as well.

Good luck.

Last edited by ZanneMarie on 05 Apr 2007, 6:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I quite agree with that. I was dating someone I enjoyed and when I moved in with him, it was a disaster. We were ill-suited for each other. His friends were over every night and disturbed my peace. It got to the point where I couldn't stand him, his friends, and his incessant plans for my free time. I couldn't talk to him about it because I knew he would never understand. I was young and undiagnosed, but I knew that his lifestyle was totally out of synch for me.

One day, I just packed up and left while he was at work. I never spoke to him again. It probably sounds cold, but it was the only thing I could do without causing a big confrontation. I will avoid confronations at all costs.

At first I was like, she did not just get up and leave with no explanations. Then, I realized that when my friends/roommates actually made me date in college, I did the same thing within five minutes of meeting these guys. LOL But, I also didn't really see them as people at that point. I don't know that I'd do that to someone I knew.

I think Henna said she was the one that called it quits and left. That's what made me think that she might have misread him. Think of all the guys on here who have had similar mishaps with women and didn't know what went wrong. I guess that's where I was coming from when I read it.

ZanneMarie typed out such a wonderful explanatory post delving into each issue.

It wasn't a question of not liking, as I liked him very much intitially, but his lifestyle drove me out of my mind.

I couldn't conceptualize his lifestyle before moving in with him. I didn't realize that the friends we sometimes ran into would suddenly be at our house and stay until late. It was torturous for me.

And I couldn't explain to him that I found his lifestyle intolerable because he was "normal." To acutally go there, I would have to delve into how "abnormal" I was and I didn't want to do that.

I'm sorry this happened to you, but as ZanneMarie said, it takes a very special NT to live with us. In my case, the partner must be introverted and not expect me to socialize. I have absolutely no interest in small talk. He also must be intellecually interesting. I can't live with a person who is overemotional and responds to every unintentional slight.

I suspect the OP's former lover's new wife is more suited to his personality, plain and simple. It is not a reflection on the OP.

Yes, I didn't read your post before I typed mine. I don't know if he would have stuck around, waiting to get more comfortable, or pulled a disappearing act like me. If my BF at that time said it wasn't gong to work out, I would have said, "okay." It would have gotten me off the hook.

Perhaps some of the men here will respond.

It's also possible that he's not AS... it's just that when you described he was married within months of leaving you, that seems rather un-AS, as people with AS can have a very hard time socializing.

I'm reading "Loving Mr. Spock" now and it seems that some Aspies approach total strangers.

The author is quite harsh in her initial description of her aspie man. It is almost painful to read.

That's true, the new girl could have been a stranger for whom he developed an obsession.

To the original poster: did you ever get the feeling that you were one of his obsessions? Because being obsessive about someone can sustain a relationship, for an aspie. If he was not obsessive about you, it might have been harder for him to be in a relationship with you.

As an Aspie male, I can confirm the whole shutting down thing when the other's emotional. I do that anytime someone's emotional, raises their voice, etc. I don't bother talking to them when their like that, and I'm actually discouraged from talking to them about important matters like this in the future. I can name off people who've done this:

-My parents
-Some of my aunts
-A few instructors
-Past girlfriends

After they did that, regardless as to if it was directed at me or not, I shut off and I remember not to talk to them about pretty much everything ever again. My parents still get upset when there's something wrong with me on a emotional basis and I won't tell them, explaining to them exactly why I won't. I've more or less severed my ties with them and I'm looking forward to living in the dorms come this August.

If you're gonna talk to me, be rational and calm , otherwise it's just gonna cause more problems than solve them. After 25 years, my parents still don't know this, even after talking to them about this. I've given up on talking to them about anything important. I'm pretty sure that, with most Aspies, like myself, being overly emotional will drive a wedge between you and them. It takes patience...a lot of it...to deal with Aspies, I'll admit, but it pays off and can be rather rewarding because, speaking from experience, if I trust you and feel comfortable around you, then you've got a friend for life with no strings attached, no exceptions, no BS.

Reading this just kills me.

Sorry, I was only 18 years old at the time. It would have been an awful scene.

Why is that Calandale?

Hi everyone

I am the OP

there are so many valuable things you have said here, thank you for all your insights and detailed explanations.... I cannot reply to each and every comment just now but just want to say to the person that questioned, yes I do think my ex is definitely AS. He doesn't socialise at all well. In fact I used to dread parties as I am quite lively and I'd suddenly realise he wasn't around... I'd go searching and find him sitting alone in an empty room, sipping his drink and staring into space. He'd also pressurise me to leave early, every time, even though I was enjoying myself. He would especially freeze in formal social situations and dinner parties were an absolute NIGHTMARE - I'd cringe when I'd see people genuinely trying to engage with him and he would slowly murmur something monosyllabic and look ahead, unable to engage. The other person would be visibly quite offended.

He met his current wife at a one-off event with some friends - an annual college ball. I wasn't there of course. All I can say is that I have met her and she does seem nice, but also she struck me as the kind of girl that did very much want to be married. She talked about it alot. Which brings me onto what someone said about "trophy husband" and living relatively separate lives. She is currently living in Asia, him in the UK! She is carrying out research for her PhD. He didn't want to go with her. Before that they had a long-distant relationship for a while as she had to return to the US to sort out her visa. As I remember he has no ability to get enthusiastic about things he has done or to initiate dialogue on new things, visiting places etc. He is obsessive about a certain strand of politics, and about a certain type of music. Neither of which seemed to bring him much joy, as I remember; he just clung onto them as "things he is into" and hated when other people could talk about them with greater fluency than he or tried to introduce other angles of interest. Same goes with computers. He's a techie geek for a living and clings onto this identity with his life. He would become very irritated if someone showed any degree of knowledge that was greater, or complimentary to, his. His wife is very intellectual and perhaps this is something that bonds them together; I am a "thinking girl" but I also like to have fun and am sociable.

Another really important thing is that he was full of facades and borrowed personalities, which I now see as his own set of survival skills. He had developed a repertoire of stock phrases and personas for different situations, for example: with his college friends he would become Mr "cool" guy that uses lots of "street" gestures and language, to the point where you cannot actually have any conversation with him as he is so far off in his borrowed persona and you cannot bring him back. In the safety of his own family -who very much treat him as their "little boy"- he reverts to nice, educated son who is into politics, and likes to debate for the sake of it (nothing wrong with that) but who also makes flippant, judgmental remarks. He borrowed many points of view from his family and friends and in the end I was never convinced if anything he said was actually from him or something he had simply borrowed. In social situations with people he is unfamiliar with he freezes, as I have explained. Sometimes with strangers when he was more relaxed or had had a drink he would make conversation by initiating a strange conversation about someone's very personal life, or introduce the topic of his favourite strand of politics or music, expecting the other person to be receptive, when in fact they found it very alienating. Alone with me I would do most of the talking but he would occasionally come out with the odd valuable or meaningful comment. I am not saying that he is not intelligent, because he is, and has a good university degree. I am simply talking about how he expresses himself.

He has no memory bank and does not add context to things. He hates shopping and birthdays. He will never, ever show emotion. The brother of a good friend of ours died and he did not tell me for a number of hours (only after I prompted him) as he felt it was somehow distasteful to talk about it.

I could go on and on.... but I hope it gives people a sense of why I came to the conclusion that he has AS. Maybe his new wife doesn't push him to communicate like I did, as one of you pointed out... and that's ultimately what he couldn't take with me, but he can with her.