Relationship with Aspergers Boyfriend

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This could easily apply, but not sure. There was a lot of information to work with.

People with Aspergers have a lot of demands and expectations placed on them to be normal. Any misbehaviour is automatically qualified as "f*****g up." in the dating world and the assumption is made that we don't care about our partners. Nothing is farther from the truth. It takes a lot of baby steps in order for an Aspie to navigate through a relationship successfully. Unfortunately for someone like me, no one has the patience when you are 27 years old and people my age want to get married within a year or two and start raising a family together.

Aspies deal with emotions rather poorly, and I know that from my experience. The truth is, I am emotionally empathetic towards others, but the logical part of the empathy (the knowing what to say or do) is a problem for anyone I have ever dated. Even better, they have no understanding or any desire to understand what I have to deal with just being an Aspie trying to navigate through the world. People want what they call "normal." Anything less is not welcome.

The emotional part of things is quite overwhelming for an Aspie as they hate being yelled at, and definitely hate it when they perceive others to be upset with them. I do believe to a degree that Aspies self-destruct when others get overly emotional. It's too much to handle for them at times. They might misinterpret you're being upset about something as you being upset with them.

You may not like this next point, but Aspies deal much better with text communication than they do verbal or face to face when dealing with situations in which hurt feelings or anger played a role. This is a situation in which either of you could take a day or two to calm down and then write the other person a text or e-mail and say something like "I'm doing my best to understand where you are coming from, but I need clarification. I would like to work things out and I would like to speak to you tonight around 6:30 pm."

The emotions simply have to be taught to an Aspie. They also have to learn that just because someone is upset, doesn't mean that the person upset is upset with them. Aspies have a tendency to take things very personally and this drives everyone else nuts. The emotions can be overwhelming to him. This may lead to a burnout, and possibly self-defeating behaviour. An Aspie who f***s up and knows it will likely believe he won't be forgiven for his f**k ups if his mind frame is similar to mine.

As for your partner: the one problem I see in him is anger management issues. He needs to find a way to control it as you describe it. Very hard for an Aspie if depression and anxiety are also pre-existing conditions.

Aspie gf and I broke up just a week ago over similar issues. She was getting more and more stressed about school stuff - would go radio silent for days and days. Ruder and ruder and ruder, until finally I couldn't take it anymore. I would send you via PM some actual snippets of our texts - just so you have a frame of reference - let me know. I actually was astonished. It all gets triggered whenever I say the slightest thing in complaint - she has no time to talk or respond to anything friendly - but she seems to have hours available to unload hateful messages by the dozen after receiving a message from me like "can you tone down the snarkiness please?" It just became out of control.