Infidelity Deception and Delusion in Relationship

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Please share your thoughts on this. At what point was she wrong? When she stopped ironing his shirts or when she threw him out after having an affair?

I'm hoping so......if I ever find a partner who treats me consistently well for the first 3 months, and I "relax" on her, then I'll know it's really all my fault. I guess it all depends on what I mean by ill-treatment.......I've often felt very guilty about feeling such strong disappointment in my partners, and wondered if I could just be way too sensitive about small issues, such as minor emotional infidelity, not being there for me enough, or failure to engage in respectful dialogue about such issues, but sensitive is all I know. Aspie perfectionism might well be a factor, though I seem to be able to temper that in all other aspects of my life, so it's hard to see why perfectionism alone could be responsible for all my relationship woes.


Now that's what I call perfectionism! Kind of hard for me to understand, as I've generally had the opposite problem - some of my partners have just assumed that cleaning and ironing "for me" was going to make me deliriously happy, and they've been quite offended when I've explained that I don't really go for ironed shirts and wouldn't love them any less if they didn't bother. For me, half an hour of quality time with a partner is worth more than all the ironed shirts in the world. That guy must have been rationalising - nobody in their right mind would see shirt-ironing failure as a license to be unfaithful. I wonder if he even tried to find out why his partner had stopped ironing, or if he just quietly thought "good, an excuse at last!"


Whoever would have thought that not losing one's temper would turn out to be a bad thing in a relationship? But it's surprising how people will feel something is wrong.......when my first wife and I were in counselling, they said they could see that my wife was trying to get me to show some anger and that I was undercutting those attempts by remaining the soul of tranquility...she'd get angry, I'd just look vaguely surprised and ask "why are you shouting?" and she'd be practically banging her head on the wall in frustration at this. Of course by this time I was pretty much emotionally detached from her, so it would have been almost impossible for her to anger me.

There's also some evidence that I tried to get my second wife to stand up to me - her manner was always very deferring and "sugary sweet," which began to annoy me, but I think that was because it was a false persona - she did a lot of things that seemed to show that she had no interest in anybody but herself. And curiously, she would always collapse into a soggy heap if I so much as raised my voice to her - I'd taken the old counselling message to heart and had become convinced that I needed to learn to express my anger in a healthy way, and I had good grounds for being angry, but she forced me to bottle it, and then when it did erupt, it was too strong. It was as if she saw only two possibilities - she could cry until I felt too guilty to complain, or she could cave in and do exactly what I wanted, but with no reassurance that she'd seen the sense or validity in the original complaint. I've often wondered since, if she may have been autistic, and whether knowing that would have made me any more sympathetic to her, but whatever she was, she was rather dangerous because of her weak habit of having affairs rather than tackling the issues or simply leaving. It's very scary to know that the first sign you'll get of a partner's grievances is when they go off and sleep with somebody else.

Back to your story, any partner of mine telling me about past friends they might have chosen instead of me would have incurred my wrath, though I hope if they were as ill as he was, I'd try to appreciate that pain can make a monster of anybody. It's amazing what the politest people can do if they have something as common as a hormone imbalance, and the usual rules of fair play have to go out of the window. Doesn't always ease the hurt it causes though.


True.


It's a great feeling when it all seems to be going my way, but I hate the way it blinds me to their shortcomings, and the way it sneaks up on me so that one little setback can feel like the end of the world for hours. But it's kind of fulfilling to experience strong feelings even if I can't hope to separate the good ones from the bad.


I think it's important to make time for being together....though obviously if you need to separate so that you don't starve to death, survival has to come first. Quite how people come to agreement on separation for non-essential (but quite desirable) purposes, I don't know. How much money do people need? How much job-related success? It's been a point of disagreement with my estranged wife, who seems to think that a weekend together every 4-6 weeks is enough....though she spends most of that time doing her own shopping and cooking, cleaning and ironing "for me." I also experienced the other extreme when I was both living and working with my second wife.....that was a big strain, so I know that spaces are very important. My first wife, after a year or two of courting, said she thought all couples end up bored silly with each other and that we'd be no different. I don't think I'd want a partner at all if I believed that.

Back to your story - I think that common purpose is absolutely critical to the success of any group, so of course it's not too much to ask - in fact no kind of alliance makes any sense without it. I guess a promise to stay for life is rather more difficult.....nobody really knows how long a relationship will last - people can change over the years. I think I'd settle for a strong and genuine intention to stay. Probably best to stick to partners who know themselves reasonably well......when I met my first wife I was so "committed" to her that thought it would be good if there was an injection that would cause one partner to die if the other died, so we wouldn't even have to worry about the grieving survivor. A few years later all I wanted was a new partner. That's how well I knew myself.


Hmmm......it's sometimes hard to know what they are until somebody takes them away. Back in the early 1990s I would have felt very shy of owning any expectations at all....I felt that expectations were unseemly things that must be burdensome for the expected parties. I was rather against couples having much control over each other in those days, and certainly felt that the average marriage was too clingy to be healthy, with all its implied duties and rules. I met one couple who weren't doing very well, and they kept arguing about "what we'll do/where we'll go"......I simply thought "why does it always have to be we? Why can't you do things on your own sometimes? The irony was that they didn't even seem to like each other, but you see they were a Married Couple so they had to Do Things Together. My thinking always seems to become a lot clearer when I ignore the fact of marriage or the declarations of undying love, and just see them as two people together, with all the good and bad feelings that their association produces.

But I mellowed later, and now I'm somewhere between the two extremes. I could list my expectations but it would mostly be a history of the things previous partners have done/failed to do that have caused me what I'd call unacceptable pain. Then there are hard and soft expectations - I have things like infidelity on "zero tolerance" level, and there are also softer expectations like not yelling at me - as an occasional aberration it's acceptable but it must not become a way of life.

Even those of us who are not that sensitive tend to take on the guilt for failures in a relationship. I think it is useful to think about what worked and what did not work and hope to improve in the next relationship.



It would be very liberating to find that my partner does not expect all of those things. And that takes communication.



Yes, he was rationalizing too much. But he also seemed to have abandonment issues so any change in attention or routine from his partner would give him concern.



This was a problem in pairing personalities with different upbringings. No one in my family yells (well my Mom does a good job of it when she is pushed to the limit! Sorry Mom) but his family was fiery and had a need to argue and yell even about minor issues. I had no skill in this area and no interest in developing that skill. But in his mind, if I cared about him, I would yell at him. Didn't make any sense to me though.



I still have a problem understanding the concept of sexual infidelity as a way to deal with lack of affection or other problems in the relationship. Sex and love/affection are not the same thing. For example, I doubt the person who pays for sex feels any affection or love for the sex worker. It seems that sex with a stranger (or a friend) outside the relationship would not provide much fulfillment other than sexual release.



Emotional pain, as well as physical pain, seems to cause people to say things that they should never say to anyone.



While I can't feel limerence, I do have the ability to feel strong attraction for a person that seems to progress as time goes on. It does not blind me to their flaws. It is up to me to decide how I should feel about something that bothers me but it is not always necessary to attempt to change the person.



Your former wife's comment would have concerned me. Perhaps one of those opinions that would have been better kept to herself? I briefly dated someone who broke up with me and told me that I bored him. This confused me since he showed a lot of enthusiasm for me. I'm glad he found me boring early on though since it would have hurt me much more to continue on and accept his poor treatment of me. But I am sensitive now to the thought that I must be boring. I care very much for my partner and hope that he would never leave me out of boredom.


This would be acceptable to me as well.



Doesn't the constant togetherness contribute to the boredom in a relationship? I want to be with my partner as much as possible but I don't need to be with him all the time. I have as little interest in hanging out with him and his guy friends at the pub (well, maybe once in while!) as he would have in tagging along with me at a craft fair or any other activity in which he has no interest and would make him miserable.



I think I'd place fidelity (sexual, financial and emotional) and not being yelled at high on my list of expectations in a relationship. However, I can't really think of other expectations I should have. But it seems that people have a lot of expectations for their friends and partners and not sure whether the expectations are reasonable.

Yes that's a better way of seeing it.....I'd also like one day to make a positive list of what I want, rather than it all being a list of dont's. But a wounded animal is naturally mindful of protecting itself from being wounded again, and given the level of emotional cruelty in so many relationships, maybe defensive is the only option, until I get it through my head that not everybody is lining up to give me another dose of poison.

Well, I think attitudes about these things can sometimes be so fixed and far apart that no amount of talking can fix it. My estranged wife just can't imagine a marriage in which the wife didn't iron Hubbie's clothes......she would doggedly insist on ironing alone rather than spend a bit of time with me, even when our time together was severely limited. Seems to me that she used it as an excuse, ironing being a lot easier than learning to share. But when I''ve suggested that, she hasn't seemed to want to listen. To me it's a strong sign that she's got some autistic traits, needing to get away from social anxiety, and maybe the ironing is a form of stimming for her. I've suggested our problems may have a lot to do with her autism but she hasn't replied, but complains that these heavy ideas of mine are causing her to lose sleep and threatening her performance at her job.


I suspect there are a lot of men who would rather come over as old-school sexists and say it's all about requiring their dinner on the table when they get home from work etc., rather than admit that the wife's liberty is making them feel insecure and lonely.


Politeness expectations can indeed be very different from one family to another. The yelling in my family was frequent but never really seen as healthy....it always led to ill feeling and none of it was ever resolved. Probably explains why I have such a hard time expressing anger now. I know it's sometimes appropriate but I always feel dreadful about my anger, as if I'm doing permanent damage to my relationship.


I suppose it would be downright dangerous for a man to allow himself to have any deep feelings for a sex worker. I knew a guy who had tried to turn one into a girlfriend - she'd been beaten up and was in hospital.....of course her confinement stopped her from plying her trade, and all went well until she was recovered, then she went back on the game and he couldn't cope with that. His opinion of sex workers took something of a tumble....I guess that was the only way he could hit back for getting so badly hurt by one, to damn them all. That way, he didn't have to face his own tender feelings, he just converted them into bigotry and hate.

I know a lot of men seem quite able to have sex once and get away, without seeming to feel anything remotely romantic.......I suspect that they would get emotionally involved if they went back for more. There are some men who have to end relationships as soon as they start to feel serious, because they can't cope with the emotional challenges of commitment. I sometimes wonder how many more failed relationships I'll have to go through before I feel the same way, but for some reason I've always felt fresh hope every time, even though the evidence says there is very little hope. It's very unlike me to have faith, and normally I don't understand the term, but I don't know how else to explain why I'm still so interested in making a relationship work.


And it causes them to do things they shouldn't do to anyone. My promiscuous, alcoholic partner probably hurt me more than anybody else ever did, and it would have been neat to condemn her as a conniving tyrant, but she was in more pain than I was...naturally her terrible habits always blew up in her face, and she died a few years ago while still in her early 50s, as a direct result of poisoning herself to feed the addictions she couldn't control. With my knee-jerk reaction to infidelity, it's almost unheard of for me to feel any sympathy for the unfaithful, but she couldn't really be held responsible.


I don't think I ever changed any partner in a way I wanted, though I often tried very hard to. I think the basic personality of any person is pretty much immutable. So I have to be very careful about noticing those flaws........hopefully these days I'd be able to challenge them before I was too involved, and we could maybe work something out, or at least part in peace knowing that we just weren't suited. Doesn't have to turn into force or blaming - we can simply agree that we have different needs and let each other go while we still can.


Yes - I'd completely forgotten that she'd said that until I was thinking about her the other day....I tend to blame myself for our failure because of my unfaithful tendency at the end of the relationship, but when I look at the details of her manner with me, it's not hard to see how her insensitivity could have been the problem all along. But in those days I didn't have enough emotional intelligence to understand what was hitting me, I just felt gutted by her comment but without any clear idea why an honest opinion could upset me.

As for boring, that was a dreadful way for him to explain himself. There is no such thing as a boring person in absolute terms. A has certain interests. B has certain interests. When they overlap, they call each other interesting. When they don't, they call each other boring. But the only truth is the degree of overlap. Yet people say these things, cleverly leaving themselves out of the equation so they can fob off all the blame onto somebody else.


Yes.....paradoxically, spaces in a relationship are vital as quality time together. You have nothing new to bring to a relationship unless you separate occasionally. John and Yoko didn't turn out to be very good role models as partners, did they? And they blamed a lot of their woes on living in each other's pockets too much, though at the time they would have defended it with their dying breath. I think it's very important for any budding couple to agree roughly how much time they feel they need to spend together, because it's surprising how different people can be on that one, and I don't think it's easy for anybody to give much ground there, once they've committed to each other.

I'm fairly happy to leave financial fidelity in the lap of the gods, because it's the only type that can't be transgressed without my consent, though after my experiences I'd want to warn them they might find me a little untrusting about money. Sexual fidelity, yes that's a must. Emotional infidelity is still a little too new a concept for me to know quite where I stand......certainly discussing a partner's shortcomings with a potential sexual rival in private would usually be seriously wrong, though it's not always clear who is a potential sexual rival. I'd want to take the definition further as well, and websites like this one are food for thought:

http://www.allaboutlove.org/emotional-infidelity.htm

It's great to see that somebody out there thinks that so many of these "little things" that have scared or hurt me should be taboo, when I've experienced so many of them and felt (or even been told) that I'm just being possessive or paranoid to raise objections. But it's also worrying to think that all I might end up with is a long list of draconian rules that nobody in the real world could stick to. I don't want to be divorced for failing to avoid walking past a pornographic billboard. The website also seems to be implying that a partner should completely avoid being in private with potential sexual rivals.......I must confess it's always scared me when my partners have been open to that, but surely it's very controversial these days to call for avoiding it? Or are they right - is it just too dangerous to allow it?

Is there an easy way to trust again? It does not help to go into a new relationship with a sense of mistrust.



It seems that she can't explain how your ideas are causing her to lose sleep. Perhaps she is not very introspective. If she could express her feelings, can you deal with her issues?



Yes, women get very confused. We know that men want dinner and a clean house and now they are asking for emotion too!! ! (sarcasm.) The aspie woman can burn out very quickly having to multi-task to meet all of her partner's needs (most of them unspoken, by the way.) Better communication skills from our partners,perhaps? Instead of "You never listen to me" perhaps one should say, "I feel cared for when you listen to me." Change from negative to positive and give her an opportunity then to initiate those actions to make our partners happy.



I always believed that if two or more people are yelling at each other at the same, then no one listening to each other, therefore, there is no opportunity for resolution. It is just then a simultaneous rant.



He had difficulty separating sex from love, just as a woman who becomes angry when she realizes that the man she has had sex with does not love her. In these cases, the partners have not communicated their values on sex and love to each other.



I'm not sure that they had planned to get serious and are quite suprised when they realize the seriousness of the situation. There was no probably no attempt at deception on their part.



I am currently in a relationship I did not intend to begin. My failures in earlier relationships have made me wary of entering another one and I know I don't need one to be happy. I care very much for my partner though and am committed to making our relationship work because he is an important part of my life and I don't want to be without him. However, I still believe that a person does not need a relationship to be happy in life. And I really don't understand those who are constantly seeking someone (and it seems that anyone will do) to complete their lives. I don't think they know how much energy is involved in properly caring for someone.



I wouldn't want someone whose personality needed to be changed - then he wouldn't be the person I originally fell in love with. Sometimes the flaws make the personality very interesting. Sometimes the partner will discover his flaws on his own and will be more likely to change them without being nagged to do so.



I hadn't had the thought before that it is my lack of emotional intelligence that makes me stop and analyze each odd comment that comes out my partner's mouth. His friends may tell him that the comment is inappropriate but I haven't yet realized the meaning of the remark or its intent. But intent is more important to me than the unfortunate words. And although I am the daughter of a master of sarcasm, I still have trouble sometimes knowing whether the comment was meant to be hurtful. Usually I find that the remark was not intended to hurt my feelings. And so I am forgiving.



I think sometimes we don't pay enough attention to what our partners say about their past (or previous partners) and then we are surprised when they treat us the same way as their previous partners. Yes, he told me that he gets easily bored and hasl dumped girlfriends because of boredom. I didn't think at the time that he would do that to me. After he broke up with me, we kept in contact for a short time and I (unfortunately) had to hear stories of his new girlfriends (who also didn't last long) who seemed to have severe psychotic behaviors and he had to dump them when they stopped taking their meds and started sleeping around. Then I realized that he must be one of those men who is attracted only to women with serious mental issues (or extremely extroverted party girls) who seemed really exciting (they never bored him) until he could no longer deal with their issues. Yes, it was his problem, not mine.



I hadn't thought of John and Yoko but they are a good example of this problem - they annoyed each other - as well as the rest of the world - with their very public incessant togetherness.[/quote]



I'm certain that many people think of these things but it is very hard to discuss these matters. I find that having this discussion has helped me think more about some of these things. I wonder if there are others on this board though who have different experiences?



I think the real problem is having a partner who would impose these rules because they generalize that "all women are _____" or "all men are ______." We all have our insecurities but we cannot blame everyone for the bad behavior of a few people we have known. I think that if I tell my partner that I would not like it if he slept with other women or engaged in other relationships (or friendships) in order to replace me as a partner, then I have to trust him that he won't do those things. I think I would have trouble positively identifying a potential sexual rival unless she made her interest in my partner very clear to me. However, if he relayed a conversation (that I found to be troubling) with me that he had had with a female friend, I would encourage him to continue to talk about it so I can then decide if the friendship bothered me. I would not tell him not to have the person as a friend, but I would tell him what concerned me about the conversation.

I don't know of an easy way. I've imagined that I do trust new partners and then found out that I don't. If any of the psychoanalytical stuff has any truth in it, we are most of us full of deep-rooted fears that we are hardly aware of. Most NT counselling that I've known of seems to work my encouraging the clients to examine their deeper emotions and to find out how their life experiences have caused these things.....the theory is that once the stuff is brought into consciousness, the client usually works out a solution. Unfortunately psychoanalysis can get very complicated and bogged down unless the guru is really on the ball, and even then it can be very slow, and Aspies have particular difficulty in identifying their feelings.


I'd like the chance to find out.....I'm sure she's expressed a lot of them already, but only in distorted, destructive, or competitive ways, and I like to think that I'd be a lot more able to listen and respond appropriately if it were done more gently and directly. A few years ago she described herself to me as shallow (I couldn't quite see how anybody really shallow would even know that they were shallow), and she's certainly not used to looking at her feelings and experiences. Since her complaint about my ideas interfering with her sleep and job, I haven't felt much like bringing the matter up again. She had also cut off all communication with me for a week, apparently to protect herself from more insomnia and job anxieties, though it's hard to see why it was necessary to go that far - a simple moratorium on the subject for a few days would have been just as good......given that we've never been out of communication for that long since we met over a decade ago, it struck me as having an element of punishment to it, but it could be that she really felt that scared and panicked......an Aspie failure to put herself into my shoes could be the reason for what looks like an attack.

I suppose I should be proactive and ask what she wants to do about the subject matter she's shelved, but I'd rather wait until this workplace inspection she's expecting has been and gone - she did rather give me the impression that it was an important part of her reason to clam up, and that it was scheduled to happen during the week that we were out of touch, but when I asked how it had gone, she said it wasn't, and that they were still waiting for it. I'm sure that's the truth. I also think we're both rather afraid of getting into another argument, as we both seem to feel that the previous one was rather harmful.


Yes that positive, diplomatic method is a lot more likely to get results than mixing it with aggression. I'm quite good at putting my case calmly but I seem to unwittingly say things that are taken as hurtful. And frankly some of my resentments run pretty deep, so I can't always bring matters up without my anger getting in the way.


I'd go further and suggest that if just one person is yelling, mostly neither of them are listening. I can just about hold on if somebody yells and it's not at me but at the situation or about something external, but if it's at me, I feel forced to withdraw, and rather worried about the likely effect of rewarding them by trying to deal with it....like I said above, the positive, diplomatic method is more likely to get results, and that's up to the partner as well as me.


I think she felt something for him, because he was looking after her emotionally while she was in hospital, when nobody else seemed to give a damn. She had little choice but to be "faitfhul" to him during her confinement, and he probably never realised that she'd be any different when she was out. Suddenly the helpless lady with nobody else to talk to was back in her own element.


I think sometimes there is, sometimes there isn't. I've often thought that it must be much easier to acquire one-night stands than appropriate, longterm partners, because there's no need to spoil a good persona with the truth. But it's wise to check which type you've got these days, and hopefully most people would be straight about it.


I don't know if that's common or not. But certainly for me I don't quite feel complete while I'm partnerless. And my expectations can seem quite lofty compared with the likely mundane realities of living together longterm. Yet I had no great problem tolerating my wife's annoying ways for many years, until she went a step too far by moving out. She's been very loyal sexually, so I suppose that goes a long way with me, and I tend to see all other issues as much easier to live with.


The Relate people used to say they couldn't really tell me anything, and that all they could do was to help me find out for myself, and I think that's a much better way. I never found significant flaws interesting exactly - more like disappointing problems I could do without. But I'm apparently a surprisingly liberal person once I feel the basics are in place, so possibly I wouldn't see flaws as flaws, unless they threatened me so severely that they also depressed me. I suppose in the end there are no absolute flaws, just things that happen to hurt because of both people.


I usually keep well away from ex-partners so I spevifically don't have to cope with jealous feelings when I'm not really over them. And I'm never really over them until I've found somebody else, which suggests more of an envy element than simple jealousy. I don't think I'd want to hear that a partner I'd just failed with had formed a really good relationship with somebody else. But you seem to have been spared that. I can see the attraction for "exciting" women the guy had.....it would be hard to settle with a sane, reliable, "nice" partner after that, but clearly choosing excitement didn't work out for him either.


Hope so. It would be interesting to hear from people with different opinions on what level of emotional fidelity they'd expect or be prepared to give.


I think with me it's not so much blaming as a deep-rooted fear that the same thing will happen to me again, which of course logically implies the assumption that all partners are somehow the same, though it isn't really that. It's probable, I think, that Aspie have a lot of trouble in noticing the nonverbal cues that a real sexual rival would give out (hence my interest in emotional infidelity, because it seems to set out certain behaviours as being signs of danger) - without some kind of touchstone, the Aspie would quite likely get concerned over harmless and innocent things, while not noticing actual dangers.

But I do seem to have some kind of radar......men would occasionally visit my promiscuous partner, and I would nearly always feel very suspicious of their motives, and I had a hard time with that suspicion because all they seemed to be doing was visiting. But although I was initially very skeptical when she said that a gay friend of hers would be visiting (she'd been known to lie about that before), when he did arrive I seemed to sense that he was no threat, which was strange because he wasn't particularly camp or effeminate....just some subliminal chemistry that wasn't there. So I was able to feel non-possessive, which was very refreshing at the time, because it showed that I wasn't just objecting to her friends for the sake of it, but because of the very real threat that many of those men posed for my relationship, a threat that was always played down because I couldn't explain how I "knew" what was really going on.

Don't know about explaining to new partners that I don't like infidelity. Ideally I would mention it, but I wouldn't want to take all the blame if I happened to forget to say it - if they hadn't already picked up that most people want sexual fidelity, they'd already be way too socially naive for me, I think.

And each of us deals with the introspection differently. I would likely tell my partner that I needed some time to think about a particular issue but I wouldn't withdraw from him. I know I wouldn't like it if he did that to me. I would feel as if I were being punished by him.



I'm not sure that both parties would understand that the meeting is only a one-night stand until after the fact.



I'm sure that I am only one of many who feels no need to be part of a couple. When my husband died, I had no desire to find another partner. However, single people are not always welcome at many events so I thought it would be nice to have a companion to spend time with. As it turned out, I became more and more attached to my current partner and was surprised when I realized his importance in my life. (And I am still ashamed at how long it took me to appreciate him.) I now think less of 'me', and more of 'us."



I should have referred to them not as flaws, but as quirks. I don't think I've been with anyone whose flaws I couldn't live with.



I think this type of person may not be looking for someone for the long term - no matter what he says - relationships are usually most exciting in the early days.



I know it seems that someone shouldn't have to have the importance of fidelity explained to them, but since many relationships end due to infidelity, it seems that the idea of fidelity may not be part of basic human nature. I'm sure I'm wrong about the last statement, but I don't know how to explain it otherwise.

Strangely, when my partner phoned for the first time after that mysterious "suspension," she expressed a lot of concern over the fact that I'd recently cycled to my son's house, as if I were in some significant danger and should stop doing it. Don't know what that means, but I keep wondering if there's some kind of (unconscious?) power issue going on. I'd love to know what a psychologist would say about the way we interact, but there's never one listening in when these things are happening.


That's why I think it's important for couples to hold off on sex until they've had time to find out about these things. Conceptually it's not hard to just bring it up in conversation, "I do/don't go for one-night stands," without spoiling the romance or that "thrill of the chase" which seems so important to some people.


I went through a phase where I felt I was pretty independent and happy to be partnerless, but looking back, my happiness was very dependent on the signs some women were giving me that we could end up as partners. It was easy for me to tell myself it wasn't so as long as those signs were there, but I always became unhappy when there was a setback....I didn't fill my head with thinking about those women when they weren't around, but that awareness that I meant something to them was quietly propping up my mood all the time. I'm sure you're right that many people aren't like that, so it must be hard to understand.......I really related to a comment by one lady who said that she felt she needed a partner so that she could feel free to be independent - it's quite a paradox, but feelings are like that - for me, partnerless = somehow incomplete, and when I have a partner I'm proud of, it has a huge effect on my emotional well-being, even when they're not around, so that all I do seems better.


I've heard that fear of intimacy (not necessarily sexual intimacy) is a common unconscious problem which leads to people making all kinds of weird excuses and gambits for keeping people at bay. I particularly don't trust an excuse of "boredom" - I told a counsellor that my first wife had become boring in bed, and she suggested that what had happened was that the sex life had stopped developing. I didn't take much notice at the time, but later I started to think that her way of putting it was a lot more objective and healthy.


I think that fidelity is a learned response, and that if we were all brought up in a society that used group marriage as the main thing, we'd not think infidelity was wrong. I like to think that a couple who are getting on well together would never feel any temptation, but maybe it depends on the level of the temptation, and our society doesn't seem to try very hard to reduce that. Society is swamped with sexual images and ideas, and very little of it seems to be a serious attempt to discuss the subject like adults...mostly it seems to be hedonistic escapism.

Although you felt that you were suspended or being punsihed by her, she probably did not have a sense that she was treating you any differently. She would not have shown concern if she did not care about you. I don't think it is about power. But that is only my understanding of what you wrote.



This is a good idea. But sometimes the approach of holding off on sex causes confusion. "He/She doesn't like me because he (or she) is not trying to have sex with me." So sometimes having the conversation about sex can ease one's mind about the other person's interest and intentions.



I've never looked at any friendship with a view to become more than friends with them. My partner and I are friends but the attraction was there from the beginning and I (too) slowly realized I had more than a friendship interest in him. But generally I have no interest in more than friendship with my friends.

As for your comment, was your interest in these women dependent on these "signs?" In other words, would you have made the approach without the signs? I, as an aspie, don't give signs so I must be very perplexing to anyone who meets me. What signs would cause you to move from friendship to relationship?



Although I am content to be alone, (now that I have a partner) I am happy that I have someone to care for. Having a partner does not provide me with better self-esteem but thinking of my partner throughout the day makes me feel happier (even when the days are not so good.)



But do you think that the issue was only that of boring sex? Perhaps one or both partners become exhausted in finding creative ways to care for each other. A relationship requires constant nurturing. Many people (aspie and non-aspie) do not have the stamina to keep a relationship going. But there is little reason to expect a partner to provide all of our entertainment to avoid boredom. If a person has sufficient interests (hobbies, etc.), then that person should be able to allow their partner to also pursue their interests or relax (even if it appears boring) to help keep the relationship alive. Partners cannot be expected to do everything together. Does that make sense?



I feel no temptation to be with another person while I am with a partner. I don't know if that is because I believe that infidelity is wrong or because I don't allow society's views on relationships and sex to have any influence on my relationship (or any of my views for that matter.)

Yes, it might well be nothing to do with power plays at all. She can be remarkably impulsive and will take sweeping decisions without appearing to understand the consequences....which is a common Aspie trait. Also her difficulty in putting herself into my shoes (another common Aspie trait) would contribute to the surprising nature of some of those decisions. So it could simply be that she didn't appreciate the magnitude of her action, and maybe her (presumably overblown) anxieties about me were a result of her having had time to realise what she'd done.

She visited me at the weekend and things were pretty cordial......we didn't discuss our problems, possibly out of fear of getting into a bad argument again, though I'm not too unhappy about that because I think the most important thing we need to work on is to learn to relate better, and we seem to have gone some way towards that. We did argue a little when she brought up her idea of my moving to her place (and/or to another much more distant place that she has hopes of living in), I calmly but wearily reiterated my position that pulling up my roots would be a huge step for me (don't want to lose my job or be so far away from my friends and family, etc.)....she still hasn't acknowledged that I have any kind of a valid point there, which astonishes me, but it didn't blow up into a bad fight.


Yes. If they get told why sex is off the menu for a while, they're less likely to think it reflects on their acceptability. And if they don't like the real reasons, they need to move on.

It was a long time ago.....the signs I noticed were things like smiling at me for longer than women usually do, or anything that showed some kind of unusual level of interest in me. It's long been a theory of mine that in most cases, unless there's a reason why sex wouldn't take place (incest taboos, wrong sexual orientation, huge age difference etc.), then if we're clearly becoming fairly close and spending time together in private, it's highly likely that it will become sexual. It's never absolutely certain, but in the vast majority of cases it's a strong possibility. There would seem to be an unspoken rule that people who are "spoken for" will keep their contact with the opposite sex at a lukewarm level. So the "signs" were really no more than indications that the lady in question seemed rather more fond of me than normal - normally it feels as if most women slightly cold-shoulder me. I very much do the Aspie thing of liking anybody who likes me, as long as their general behaviour seems reasonably in keeping with my own expectations......if anybody indicates even vaguely that I'm not wanted, I just kind of write them off as having no taste, and move on.

It's exactly the same for women, men, and for musicians I'm interested in associating with. Another way of putting it is that I notice that they're giving me a lot of (positive?) attention. Frankly I've had very few female friendships that haven't become sexual, and even those that haven't, had some curious features that made me wonder if it was really just a friendship in their eyes. They have, for example, complained about their existing partners to me (when they've already had partners). Other times I've heard from mutual acquaintances that they've admitted they want me. Another lady was surprisingly annoyed whenever I mentioned anything I was doing or thinking that might have brought me closer to another woman, though she once sent me a letter in which she said categorically that she felt nothing for me whatsoever - which seemed a ridiculous thing to say considering that she would often seek out my company, which from all outward appearances she thoroughly enjoyed.

Not that I'd necessarily move from friendship to relationship purely on account of signs. That would just be one thing that had to be right. Though while partnerless or in a "dead" relationship, I would feel a lot of temptation to find out whether the signs were real or not, by making an advance. Really it's only my understanding of the likely bad consequences of such actions that would stop me.


No, even at the time I knew that sex wasn't the only issue. The prevailing view at the time was that most couple problems had their origins in the bedroom - probably a hangover from Freud - I don't see why it can't just as easily happen the other way round, i.e. a problem in the general relationship has repercussions in bed. But back then, I was feeling very guilty about having married somebody and then wanting to leave when she'd committed herself to me, so I found it impossible to come out with anything critical about her to counsellors.....there's also the problem that the things she did that hurt me were rather subtle, so either I couldn't see those behaviours clearly, or I thought the counsellors would say I was just being silly.

Looking back now, I'd say it was her insensitivity to me that was the main issue. She didn't seem to value our quality time together anything like as highly as I did, her expectations of life as a couple were rather low (apparently happy to think that we'd practically hate each other after a few years), she would flirt with my friends, and though I don't think any of that behaviour was a serious sexual threat, she never once acknowledged that I had any kind of a point when I complained to her about it. I also felt awful about having had to overpower her so often in order to command any respect from her.....I don't think I ever got over that - it always seemed to me that the right partner would have just given me most of that respect in the first place, and that I should never have had to get so tough about it. I was taken for granted until I turned nasty about it, and I had no confidence in my right to have any expectations, so the whole mess made me feel like a green-eyed monster. I never shared our problems with friends or family, because I thought they'd say I was wrong......but my feelings didn't care whether I was right or not, they were very strong, and in hindsight there was a lot more substance in my grievances than I'd thought there was at the time. Feelings were at the time almost a complete mystery to me. And she was my first serious girlfriend.....the first cut is the deepest.

I don't know how much stamina it takes to keep the average relationship working. I guess it depends a lot on the individuals. I think it's another of those things that people should talk about before making a commitment - how much time they want to share with each other, how much responsibility they expect the other person to take for their well-being.


I feel no temptation to be with another person while I am with a partner. I don't know if that is because I believe that infidelity is wrong or because I don't allow society's views on relationships and sex to have any influence on my relationship (or any of my views for that matter.)[/quote]
Must confess I've never been influenced much by what the mainstreamers get up to either. I can't even see people as friends who advocate or practise cheating on partners. To me they seem as bad as bullies or pedophiles.

Do you feel that you and your partner have opposite Aspie traits or are you both unable to see how you affect each other? Seems to me a good Aspie/Aspie couple would be one impulsive type and one over-analyzer - the overanalyzer to keep the other grounded and the impulsive type to help the overanalyzer learn to relax and enjoy life. But neither one would fully understand the other (no matter the type) but would learn acceptance.

It seems that your partner though makes these decisions based on her own self-centeredness (and I don't mean that in a negative way - most people are self-centered - not many are honest about it though) and not with a sense of consequence to both of you as a couple. There is also sometimes a lack of experience to draw on in acting as a couple. I was very clueless as a young person (no good role models as couples) but I began to pay close attention to the relationships of those that seemed to work. I learned a lot and it helped in my marriage - although I always seemed to make mistakes anyway. But my husband knew I was trying.



Sometimes the signs are not that clear. The L&D forum is full of questions such as "does she like me because she smiled/talked/(fill in the blank0 to me?" I have been criticized for being too friendly to people that I meet. My husband was always cautioning me about talking to (or smiling at) strangers. But of course, no respectable Southerner would ignore a person passing them on the sidewalk without a smile or hello! And I do get odd looks when I chat with the cashiers at the stores, at first they are alarmed and then they seem to relax. Since I have no ability to flirt, I can never really be accused of making an approach. Although I have a partner, I tend to go out alone (shopping, etc.) and constantly talk to strangers ( to make small talk or ask for help) and I sometimes get the feeling that my intentions are misunderstood. I make a quick retreat when I sense that a stranger has misunderstood my friendliness. Sometimes a smile or hello is just a smile or hello.

It can only be hoped that a woman would not allow herself to be in a situation where she spends a lot of private time with a man in whom she has no romantic interest. But perhaps she is naive about his intentions.



Why do aspies do this? It only makes sense to detach from people who are not interested in us - but it is seen as odd or antisocial to show this indifference to others.



Previous bad relationship experiences would also stop me. I have an excellent memory about how I've been treated (and how I have treated others.) This makes me averse to being in a normal relationship. However I feel safe with my partner so I am happy with the relationship. I wonder then if it is normal to be "slow" in developing the relationship to allow for this comfort level. I know of no one who is slower than me. Lol.



And if the counselor did not take you seriously, would you think that you were suffering from Cassandra Syndrome? If the syndrome is real, it seems that it might occur frequently in aspie/aspie couples due to the constant confusion caused by both parties in the relationship.



Some of the stamina is needed for the emotional matters (and that can be physically exhausting.) Constantly wondering what would make my partner feel loved (what to say and what not to say and providing response, how to react to problems or disappointments in a way that makes him feel that I really care, knowing when to back off and knowing when to nag him for his own good, etc.) This emotional connection takes a lot of focus for those of us with ADHD traits. But I don't believe that I am unsuitable as a partner and should be alone for the rest of my life because I have these challenges. I only need a lot more practice.

Well, if her self-assessment on the Aspie-Quiz is anything to go by, she has some Aspie traits and some NT traits.....the NT traits were mainly in the area of social interaction. She has neither denied nor admitted that she has autism, so it's difficult to know what I'm dealing with. I do recognise your notion of an impulsive partner and an overanalysing partner being potentially a good match......I even said to a friend, years ago, that we were probably good for each other in that way - without me to temper her impulsiveness, she'd be making big mistakes, while without her to give me an occasional push, I'd probably not get a lot done.

Unfortunately, although I've long seen that virtue, this difference is still a bone of contention between us. When she has an impulsive idea, she usually gets angry at me for raining on her parade, and will redouble her efforts to persuade me that she is right, finally resigning herself to the situation with (what looks to me like) resentment....I tend to respond by feeling guilty even when it's fairly clear that her idea was reckless....so whenever she wants something I tend to feel mindful of all the previous times when I've not let her have her way. When I'm procrastinating too much and need some gentle corrective advice, she usually lays into me aggressively, and then I feel so invaded and harrassed that I switch off. Whether or not I'd listen and respond appropriately to a kind, thoughtful approach has never been tested. If people yell at me like that, even if their protest or advice has merit, I feel very reluctant to respond with any generosity, because it feels as if I'd be rewarding unacceptable behaviour, which logically I suppose I would be. Curiously, I seem to be more relaxed and able to enjoy life than my partner is, even though she's the impulsive one.


We both have the experience of past marriages and relationships to draw on. I think it can be a result of thinking habits - my wife doesn't seem to notice the emotional interchanges that go on between couples in terms of psychology.......e.g. a couple visited us, and I was impressed by the way they interacted - one of them would make an assertion, the other would contradict, etc., but it never went more than a couple of rounds before one of them would concede that the other had a fair point. Seems that (at least in public), they were both happy to lose the argument rather than invalidate the other's views. When I later mentioned this to my partner, she didn't seem to know what to do with the idea, while I was intrigued and proud of myself for noticing, because it's the kind of social intelligence I've strived all my life to achieve. I've heard that Aspies who take a keen interest in psychology can do a lot to dig themselves out of their social problems.

The L&D people do often have a hard time over interpreting the signs.....one thing that makes me glad to be older is that I can see so much now that would have gone over my head when I was younger. But even with my experience, I have to be careful and accept that there can be ulterior motives - some people will feign affection to a person they don't much like, just to get a bit of company while their preferred friends aren't around, some will do it just to force their existing partner's jealousy to surface so that they will feel reassured that they "really love them."

I've seen the cultural confusion that you mentioned too. When my wife and I were a new couple, I was quite concerned to occasionally find men in her bedroom who were not what I'd term "blood relatives." The explanation was that her culture is "extended family" in which what I'd term a distant relative was seen as very much part of the family, so what they would call "brothers" or "sons" were actually sons-in-law and brothers-in-law, etc. The other thing was that in my culture the couple's bedroom is seen as rather more of a private place which most other people never see, whereas for her culture it's just another room in which the couple happens to sleep. I also had something of a shock when a man asked her to dance at a party........luckily I didn't make my feelings known at the time - the dances they were doing were not the sexualised ones that you'd see at night clubs and many English parties, and I could tell from the body language that there was very little to worry about.

It's a shame that just being personable or making small talk is so often seen as a sexual signal. One guy I know got completely the wrong idea when he saw his girlfriend doing that, and from his reaction anybody would have thought he'd just caught her in bed with the guy......it was one of the main reasons they later broke up. No doubt he had big insecurity issues and needed some very patient help and reassurance to rise above his irrational anxieties, but few people are likely to have that kind of patience when their partner is hauling them over the coals for what they see as nothing. If only the line between emotional infidelity and acceptable behaviour were absolute and clear cut, then at least it would be simple to work out who was in the wrong, but it's such a woolly issue that it's easy to drift into a grey area where A feels very threatened but B doesn't feel they're doing anything threatening. Then B feels justified in labelling A as possessive, which makes A feel that they're being ridiculed instead of having their need for peace of mind addressed. B might then out of desperation start using force, which of course only makes the possessive label stick more tightly.

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It gets complicated for musicians such as myself......if I meet a woman who can sing good harmonies with me, I'll naturally want to practise with her, but I always have this awareness that we're likely to end up crossing the line by spending too much time alone together. Some activities like music and certain sports would seem to provide the perfect cover for infidelity, if one partner doesn't have any interest or talent in the hobby.

During my second marriage, a female musician who I admired greatly asked me to record her with my home studio. Nobody even mentioned the sexual danger (which was possibly real, as I'd definitely felt something for her before I met my wife). So I moved the whole studio from the attic to a ground floor room so that my wife would be in the next room and could more easily keep an eye on what was going on. I wondered at the time whether I wasn't just being paranoid - this was the 1980s when couples were starting to be more relaxed and open about such things instead of walling themselves up alive together like the previous generation had often done - but I did notice that the lady kept smiling at me very warmly.....I would just grin and say "let's get on with the music." She was also known to be having boyfriend problems - he was rather taking her for granted and she was feeling deprived and bitter about it. I was quite relieved when the project was completed and she moved on and joined a band, though I also felt some sorrow at losing her, and I was sad that my gallantry (in keeping her at arm's length) had not been recognised.


Do you mean why do they so readily back off at the faintest sign of disinterest?



Yes I have a very good memory for my relationship problems and successes, and can recall them in near-perfect detail even when it was decades ago. I always thought it was because those memories have strong emotional connotations.....a counsellor once told me that humans are excellent at recalling situations that gave rise to strong emotions. But it took a lot of bad experiences to stop me from ignoring the past and from seeing each new woman as a completley new leaf in the book. It used to feel rather like "burning one's cards" in a card game - I hadn't yet realised that there were problems with the whole deck and with the player (me).


Well, I never took the risk of declaring anything to them in those days, nor did I talk about it to anybody else apart from my partner, who never really acknowledged that I had any kind of a point, so I suppose if I'd known about the Cassandra Syndrome I'd have felt that I was sufferning from that in the relationship. Mostly though, I just felt on a very deep level that I was wrong, and that my feelings were basically paranoid and silly. I was astonished at how I found the nerve to put my foot down over the most hurtful things she seemed to feel entitled to do - I was frequently putting the whole relationship on the line by saying things like "if you're going to do x, then I'll finish with you." She would often play brinksmanship with that and try to call my "bluff," but she'd back down once she realised I meant it. But I felt it to be a pyrrhic victory because I felt I shouldn't have had to use force - she hadn't appeared to see the validity or sense in my original objections, though strangely she seemd quite confortable with complying in perpetuo once I'd got tough about it. I sometimes wondered in later years whether she had unconsciously needed to be dominated. But I hated using the stron-arm tactics so much that even when all the fighting was over, I still resented her for making me do that stuff, and I never really got over it.

With me it's often a question of reciprocity - if I don't feel that my partner is nurturing me, then after challenging them and getting nowhere for long enough, I tend to stop nurturing them on the grounds that it's no longer fair to expect it of me, though I don't think it out that way, I just find myself not doing it. Just as a person who talks and talks to me but hardly ever listens will get my attention for a while, but if they continue to take from me then eventually I'll lose interest.

I definitely suffer from attention defecit, and sadly my wife's strange grasp of English syntax makes the problem even worse.....it requires a huge effort for me to make sense of her sometimes. I guess I didn't notice until very late in the day because of my energised state when we were first getting together. Also she's sometimes perfectly clear, yet she doesn't seem to have learned over time to be clear more often than she used to be, the poor clarity is something she doesn't seem able to help.....I've tried repeating back to her what she's just said in the hope that she'll see how unclear it is and try rephrasing it, but that makes her angry and she complains when I do it. She did once say that she'd found out from an online test that she's dyslexic, and I was sympathetic, but since then she's shown no interest in the matter, and seems to want to just forge on without addressing how it might be interfering with her/our life or what interventions might help her. It's possible that she's afraid of what diagnostic labels such as AS and dyslexia might do to her employment potential. She clearly defines herself by her work extremely strongly - possibly more strongly than she defines herself by her marriage - but it's strange that she has nothing to say about those impairments even to me (I'm really not reknowned for blowing her cover, and would be more than willing to collude with her in secrecy about such matters).

I'm sure I overload her too with a lot of the things I say - mostly talking past the point about things she has little interest in. Often I've been able to notice that she's looking uncomfortable and bored, in which case I've stopped talking. More recently I've suggested that we both should try to use a signal - raising one hand - to say "I'm being overloaded, please slow down and give me space to think and to ask questions."

I don't like to tell anyone what to do and I know that most people will do what they want to do anyway - so I give advice carefully. If I think the person is in danger of making a serious (and irreversible) mistake, I will mention a few possible outcomes to their latest "scheme" with some bad consequences thrown in to let them think about it for a day or two - but I won't say "don't do this" unless I think they are likely to get hurt. The more introspective they are, they will think about these consequences and usually modify or abandon their scheme (on their own) without my telling them what to do. I don't know why I seem to know all of the bad outcomes to their types of situations, but it has helped me stay out of trouble by over-thinking a potential opportunity that is likely to go bad, Some things are potentially good ideas, but the person needs to think through the obstacles to determine if the opportunity is worth the effort. Some friends have been thankful that someone cared enough to warn them.



Impulsive people are not always happier people than the over-analyzers. I feel relaxed that I have thought out a problem and am pleased with the solution. Some of my impulsive friends seem to experience a lot of anxiety and indecision.



I agree with the above. I watch people and am interested in their quirks. I am amazed (but not repulsed) by their negative quirks or personality traits. The more complex a person is, the more I am interested in them. But they do not have to have what is considered an "exciting" personality for me to like them. I see potental even in the person who appears average (or quiet) to most people. I don't know if it is normal to be this way.



Even though I am older, I am certain that some things still go over my head, but I understand my past experiences better. I think that I also am more aware that people have motives that are not beneficial to my well-being and so I am probably less trusting than I once was. It is very easy to be used by people even if we think we know what we are doing. I become immediately turned off by people who are too eager or exuberant about their feelings for me (or what they promise to do for me) - it just seems fake. Their spontaneous outbursts of emotion (and affection) scare me.

As for the jealous-making tactic, I can't imagine why I'd do that to my partner.



Not sure I understand this - but why would these men be in her bedroon?



Some of us don't have a jealous nature though. I always encouraged my husband to dance with other women at parties. He liked to dance and I don't know how to dance. But I think it also helped to know that he wasn't interested in being with someone else.



I sometimes think the jealous partner has already decided in his or her mind that their partner has been sexually unfaithful even when he or she has not. Nothing can change the jealous partner's mind about this. The insecurity causes him or her to create a delusional scenario that becomes a reality to him or her. [/quote]



I had a very similar situation with a fellow musician and his fiance. However I was a young widow with no boyfriend and was viewed as a threat by the fiance (and generally anyone I met during the period of several years that I had no partner.) She made it difficult for both of us by creating a jealous scene (or other disturbance) during a practice session or performance even though she was present at all times. I could no longer deal with the conflict and I decided that their relationship should take precedence over his interest in having someone to play guitar with - so I left the band.

I am aware of the perception of infidelity even if nothing is happening - and I don't appreciate being insulted by jealous partners or others who make judgments without evidence. It is good that you were also aware of the risk that your wife might misunderstand the situation between you and your musician friend.



Yes, that is the question.



I find it liberating that I can admit that some of the issues in my marriage and relationships were caused by me. Since I don't like to play the autism card ( I told my current partner about it only after a series of miscommunications and have never mentioned it again), I allow my partner to see some of my aspie traits a little at a time so he can get accustomed to the traits I can't change. I will never be able to modulate my voice or give the appropriate responses at all times (especially when I am fatigued.) I am aware that my facial expression is probably flat but don't know how to get rid of the poker face unless I am experiencing strong emotion - laughing or crying. My honesty can be annoying at times. I will be hyperactive and over-analyzing. My balance will probably always be poor - but I compensate well. But am hoping that my attempts to give attention to his emotional needs (as a partner) and appear normal (to the outside world) will not go unnoticed and that he will accept me as I am. That is all anyone can hope for.

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What you are writing here seems very much like my friends who are giving up on their partners/spouses. They seem to think that their partner no longer cares for them so they want to find someone who will nurture them and then thry will leave their partner. In some cases though, they can't see that their partner really does care for them, they just can't feel that care.

Yes I'm also a believer in "applied pessimism" as I like to call it - I'm happy with taking reasonable risks (my first instinct is to try to avoid all risk, but I fight it by looking carefully at the supposed risk and weighing up just how much of a threat it really is), but I can't understand the way so many people seem to take uncalculated risks.

I'm often loathe to interfere when friends seem about to risk too much....it probably has its roots in my reluctance to contradict, which I used to take to ridiculous extremes. These days I'm more likely to speak out if I think they're headed for a fall. In relationships, once they're well-established, I'm a lot more likely to speak out...I guess it's because I always feel very protective towards a partner, and if they suffer then I suffer too. Also I think that I'm often more directly vulnerable to the result of a partner's recklessness - so besides my compassion, there's also the understanding that their failure or misery is probably going to impact on me......e.g. financial decisions. But I always feel very reluctant to warn of what I see as sexual dangers, even though they can impact on me terribly. I think that's because of my experiences of trying to do that in the past, because my warnings were often met with contempt....I was sometimes labelled as possessive. The scenario of desperately trying to convince a partner that they're playing with sexual fire, while they practically laugh in your face, is not one I ever want to bring onto myself again. Luckily, I'm gradually becoming aware that I'm carrying some heavy emotional baggage there, and there are signs that I'm starting to grow out of it. I'd hate to think that a partner had made such a mistake when they would have listened to my warnings if only I'd spoken.


Strange isn't it? I suppose the impulsive behaviour is more of a frequent aberration in their personalities, rather than a general gung-ho outlook on life, or they'd not worry. I do have a trace of impulsiveness myself, and it seems to happen when I momentarily lose patience with my own procrastination.

I think it's quite common for Aspies to have "alternative people preferences." Looking at my current small batch of friends, they mostly don't appear all that popular with the mainstream, but I think they're fascinating. Quiet people usually seem to simply get overlooked, but they're often the ones who get my attention first. I suspect it's because of my direct empathy with people who are prone to get left out by the common herd. It's as if the mainstream is in such a hurry that they don't bother to look beneath the surface, so they miss a lot of goodies.


I too don't trust over-demonstrative people. I suppose the clue is that they don't know me, so their eagerness makes no sense, and therefore is probably fake. And although affection is very important to me, if it comes too thick and fast from an unexpected direction, it throws me and I can't reciprocate.


Agreed, I think it's a deeply unhealthy thing to do. I'm pretty sure that one or two past partners have done that to me, though I'll never know for sure because they never admitted it. I would soon detach from any partner who tried the things itemised on these Web pages:
http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Guy-Jealous
http://www.practicalhappiness.com/shoul ... m-jealous/
http://ezinearticles.com/?How-To-Make-A ... &id=879854
Personally I can't see the point - if they were doing it because they were somehow underwhelmed by my behaviour towards them, why couldn't they just tell me that? As I said to one of them, "a woman may think she's finding out how much I care about her by doing that, but all she's really finding out is how much I used to care about her before I showed me how cruel and dishonest you were."


For the same reasons they would be in her living room - they just don't see bedrooms as having any sexual connotations. I was quite suspicious at first, but they were so relaxed about it that I soon stopped worrying. Don't get me wrong - they'd never have hung about if she'd wanted to get changed or go to bed. And as far as they were concerned, they were close relatives and the taboo on any sexual interaction would have been essentially an incest taboo, i.e. very strong.


With me it depends completely on the kind of dancing. Some kinds have strong sexual connotations....in some cultures dancing is very much seen as a precursor to sexual involvement, and some dances would seem designed to arouse.



Yes, it does seem to resemble paranoid delusion in some people. It's as if, for an insecure male, the whole male world is just waiting to get his partner into bed, and that his partner either wants this to happen, or just doesn't see any risk at all. Sadly, the guy's behaviour then deteriorates, which harms the couple's bonds and increases the very risk he's so desperate to avoid. But I also think it's often hard for the lady to understand, that behaviour which doesn't seem scary to her (because she knows there's nothing in it) can seem terrifying to a partner who doesn't know what to make of it.


Yes, people really can get scared, can't they? Though I think it's a lot to ask of a partner - not necessarily too much, but perhaps it expects a level of trust that many couples don't have....maybe it's one of those modern things that at one time very few people would have seen as quite proper, in the days when men and women were a lot more segregated. People now seem to just take a lot of freedoms like that for granted, and assume it's not going to rock the boat. It's interesting that the segregation culture just melted away without (as far as I know) any public debate about the emotional consequenses, safeguards, etc. As if nobody wanted to publicly admit that the change scared them at all.


I think my own insecurities very much helped me to remain mindful of how my own liberal behaviour might frighten my partner. There was also the problem that one of my musician friend's songs turned out to be about her problems with her boyfriend, who was ignoring her emotional needs! I didn't know it was about him until halfway through the sessions, when my wife asked her outright - so I'd unwittingly sailed rather close to the wind in terms of emotional infidelity. Strangely my wife never complained or tried to point out that what we'd been doing wasn't really right (I guess there was some palpable emotional infidelity going on there, in the light of who her song was about) - but that particular wife was very "modern" in that way, and didn't really think in terms of emotional infidelity at all.


I think for me it's just that I hate and fear rejection on a very deep level....it seems that as a young child I was rejected a lot by my mother, who would very easily get angry and withdraw affection at the drop of a hat. So if I back off quickly, I avoid the risk of reaching for somebody in earnest and getting pushed away....logically it's really silly to blow my chances rather than risk a bit of humiliation, but it seems my emotions would rather I die lonely than go through that. Though, like most of the things where I've worked out what's causing the problem, I find I'm gradually beginning to grow out of it.

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Yes it is liberating to admit weaknesses and mistakes, in fact I can't see how anybody can ever hope to grow without doing that. I think you're also right about tending to emotional needs being the main thing in relationships....to my mind, if a couple can get that right, other problems will all become soluble. Strangely, I've never needed my partners to appear normal to others - probably it's an Aspie thing, having been so much on the fringe of society for so long that I see it as a virtue to be strange. My wife clearly wants me to seem normal, and I try to comply to some extent, but it's difficult because to me it's the "normal" people who seem the most weird.


Yes I think it's often down to bad communication. And a partner can care marvellously about their mate, but if that caring isn't expressed in the mate's terms, it can fall on deaf ears. I'm reminded of my current wife's story of her ex, who she felt had cruelly failed to reciprocate her nurturance.....but the only things she cited in support of her assertion that she nurtured him well were cleaning his house, buying "proper" clothes for him, cooking, and ironing. I wouldn't want to knock those kind, practical things, or the people who love them, but I think that the main food of relationships is emotional nurturance. Perhaps that's why her previous partners nearly all ended up having affairs. But I just don't work that way.

Many of the normal people I know aer quick to give unsolicitded and unwanted advice - they are more like busy bodies who need to control the actions of others. Many times I am opposite of those normal people - and I'm told that I don't care enough. But I can't see that annoying people with my opinions is helping them. And I don't know the whole story about their situations.



I know more quirky people than normal people - but I'm not sure I know what normal is anymore.



I can't react quickly because I can't determine intent. By the time I have figured out what is going on, the moment has passed.



Just the other day, a friend of my partner began talking to me in a very familiar way and I have been taking it as a joke. My partner asked me why his friend says those things to me and I told him that I don't know but it doesn't mean anything to me so I ignore the comments. If it begins to bother me, I will tell my partner it bothers me so we can find a way to deal with it without embarrassing his friend.



From what you have described, it does not appear that you were being emotionally unfaithful, however your friend was just about to cross the line into emotional infidelity.




Do you find it easier now to accept the rejection?



I understand now that my practical ways of showing my late husband I cared was not enough. But I don't think I understood at the time that he was really a very emotionally sensitive man. I'm sure that he thought I didn't care for him. But I did not know then how to relate well on an emotional level. Should I say it? - sometimes I feel that I am emotionally ret*d. Learning to show emotional care requires that we pay attention to what our partner is saying when he or she is telling us (verbally and non-verbally) what they want from us. If we care enough for our partners, we will pay attention and try to meet most of those needs.

I think also with me it's something to do with the way I feel when others give me advice. I feel overloaded and obliged to comply with their recommendations.......it feels very awkward if next time they see me I haven't done what they thought I should. So I guess I tend to project those feelings onto others and imagine that they'd feel as anxious about advice from me as I would if it were the other way round. Possibly the whole thing is again related to my upbringing, when parental "advice" was really demands.


I don't think I know anybody who is "normal" - possibly I'm something of an Aspie magnet - and without information from the "normal" type, it is indeed very hard to know what it normal. So many NT traits are for me just theoretical concepts I've read about....it must be quite a shock to meet somebody who actually lives by some of those strange methods.

Yes, time comes into it for me too. As a young teenager I was approached by a girl who asked me out. I blew her off quite unkindly, and then spent the rest of the week kicking myself and wondering why I'd rejected her. In those days all I wanted was a girlfriend, but even the answer to my prayers was too much for me to handle if it was delivered without any warning.

That seems strange. I don't see how it could be done as a joke. Maybe he's just inconsistent?

I think she might have been struggling to keep to the rules......I've still got the demo cassette tape she originally gave me, and the song in question has a date written next to it that was before she met her partner. Either a typo, or she was trying to avoid my knowing who it was about, until my wife forced her to choose between a direct lie and spilling the beans. It still seems weird to me that nobody mentioned the now-obvious connotations of all this......I was fairly naive at the time, but even I could feel that there was something not quite right about the situation in terms of partner loyalty.

I was later rather glad I'd stuck to the straight and narrow though. Somehow, by that time, she'd built up a large collection of friends, and the couple held a party at which she was horrible to her partner - giving attention to everybody else there while completely ignoring him. The following morning she idly announced that he'd make advances towards her that night but she'd pushed him away. I guess it was all down to the guy having previously ignored her needs so much. It was quite a shock because she'd always seemed so nice before. I remember thinking that I could have been the victim if I'd had a relationship with her and hadn't been able to tear myself away from my special interests for her quickly enough.

It's hard to tell, because I'm still so emotionally well-defended that I don't seem to get rejected very noticeably. But I eventually began to notice the downside, and after that my carefully-guarded "comfort zone" started to look like a liability. Then I'd occasionally find myself taking a few risks. Actually, looking back, even in my teens I recall one event that makes me wonder how new this thing is - there was a girl who seemed attracted to me but then she appeared to lose interest......a mutual friend recommended that I went to see her. At first I felt it would be way too risky, but after a day or two of misery, I happened to see a TV play in which a similarly "unwanted" guy paid his lady friend an impromptu visit. So I finally got it into my head to do the same thing, and the result was that I won my first girlfriend. But that's the only example of that kind of risk-taking I can find in my early life. Since then I've done that "approach" thing a few times and the result has always been good. I suppose, scientifically, I need to increase the risk-taking until it becomes "symmetrical" - i.e. the expected harm from risking rejection should equal the expected harm from the risks of not asking for what I want. I guess if I never experience rejection, I can't be asking for enough friendship yet.

Men are notorious for being unable to express their emotional needs. I've read that until quite recently, the man's dependency needs were generally "masked" - i.e. the wife would cater for them so completely that he would never need to own those needs, and could keep them a secret, even from himself. Not that I'm saying your late husband was like that. Just that it's a rare man who will simply tell his partner what he wants, in emotional terms. I think women indicate a lot more than men, though I usually need to put on a completely different pair of eye-glasses to translate their overtures. I think a lot of men get stuck on the "logic" of what's happening, and will readily "prove" that their partner is being silly and irrational, when a view through those "emotional eye-glasses" could easily make sense of the whole problem.

For me, I think I can fathom the emotional view of a relationship reasonably well these days, but only if I'm given enough time. Without that, I'd be labelled as an emotional ret*d very easily. I think a lot of people don't understand that they will often have to wait a while for the response they want. I also believe that, as with practical expertise, I might be slow, but when I do get there, I've usually soaked up the ideas more thoroughly than the quick people have.