my fiance does something annoying please explain

Post Reply New Topic

HI, I have a fiance with asperger's. I have bipolar. He does something that gets on my nerves that is probably related to the asperger's. When I ask him a question about something, like say a computer issue, what colors he wants for the candles in our wedding, where he wants to go to eat, which outfit he likes better on me, to fill me in on what happened in the movie when I was gone, to help me find my cellphone, asking what herbs he used to season foods he's cooked, what time he works tomorrow, and a variety of numerous other situations, or if I call out to him to find out if he is in the house, he will take FOREVER to answer me!! ! It is so irritating! It's like he is ignoring me, because when I go, "helloooo, earth to randy!" or, "did you HEAR what I just said?" or the most effective, "Yes or no! Just tell me YES or NO!! !! It's not hard!!"(to which he'll answer with a 1 second answer after waiting 2 minutes as opposed to usual 5! In an irritated blowing me off tone of voice), or, "why do you keep IGNORING me!" or, "stop blowing me off! He denies it and says, "I'm just thinking!! !" or, "give me a chance to answer you you are so impatient, did you take your meds today!" which is infuriating and I'm like, "theres nothing wrong with me you just don't like what I said!" It's like what I am sayiong is not important and I am sure instead of thinking of an answer he is thinking about something else he'd RATHER think about or daydreaming about some dumb thing, which he denies when I tell him I think that....
well WHAT THE HELL!!
Both me and anyone else I have ever met answer these questions in a fraction of the time it takes him to!!
WHHYYYY!! ! I am so frustrated with this!!
I can get him to answer me faster if I say "honey" in front of everything I say, for some weird reason.
Can someone help me get him to answer faster?

haha I take forever to answer because.. It's like I don't know. Why? Because I lack the emotion to make a decision. We get stuck on making a LOGICAL decision because our emotional thingy in the brain does not work very well.


In a bipolar brain, it's the emotional sector that impacts your thoughts into one extreme or another..

In an aspie brain, the emotional thingy is very stiff and does not go either way, so we get stuck in between the two choices.

Same problem, just different results.

Wow. Simply reading the original post made me uncomfortable. I don't even want to try to imagine what actually hearing that would be like. I'm surprised he'll answer in even five minutes; I would have left the room.

lol He's probably trying to calm down before he answers you.

Read the second last line of your post and realise you've just answered your own question.

never mind the negative posts. We ALL do something right and something we need to change. Let's be nice to the OP and help her try to think in slightly different ways.

I would keep asking until I get it and start shouting the questions if he doesn't answer and not shut up until he answers it. That's what I do when people ignore me.

when you call him "Honey" he realizes his relationship with you. If you don't remind us, we forget. When he hears his 'honey' calling him 'honey' he remembers.

If I am deep in thought (and believe me, we can go to the end of the metallic, coppery end of the universe and beyond) we have to change alot of gears to remember what we did in the time and space you are asking about. Resentment creeps in when we are disturbed, and ideas run side by side. I usually have to let it all go before I can talk to someone I care about.

so. When you call him honey, he remembers he wants to communicate with you. Sounds like he will finally come around to answering you, so, when you know you want to ask him something, plan something to do while you wait.

all the best,

Merle

Last edited by sinsboldly on 16 Jun 2009, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Well, I can tell you that I take ages to answer some types of questions, specially when it is related to something that I know I should say (to please the other person) but I just can't.

Example: liked my dress? (Oh, God, no, I don't, but I can't say that!). I get really slippery when things like this happen.

This is today, after a marriage, having a daughter, etc. Things that really changed me. Before that, things were harder.
So, yes, he was probably thinking if he said so... but from my experience, yes, he can do better, but it needs a lot of effort, it's not easy to come out sometimes.

Talk to him, ask for a little effort, but not in a judgemental way. For me, it kills the conversation. Over, nothing else said after that will help.

Hope that helps.

Edit -- you can believe in what sinsboldly says in the second paragraph! Miles and miles away takes time to come back!

I wish the person will let the other person know they are thinking by saying "Let me think" "Mmmmmm."

The reason I don't repeat my question over and over til he answers(which I think most people would do) and yell is because I tried that and learned quickly it doesn't work! I am commited to getting along with my fiance and not starting fights. So besides saying honey all the time, or going yes no, I think asking him to tell me "I am thinking of an answer" which I still don't like...I wish he would tell me his whole internal dialogue while making the decision so I'd get less bored and anxious and not feel ignored while I am waiting for an answer. I have tried finding something to do while I wait, but it doesn't work because I either forget what I was saying(I have bad short-term memory) or...if I wait patiently, he often just doesn't answer and talks about something else if I don't ask a second time...as if he HOPES I'll forget what I was saying! Then when I remember later what I forgot earlier and think, wait...I don't think he ever answered that!. It just gives me the feeling that what I said doesn't matter. I am always asking him what he is thinking...but maybe I will just ask more. I used to have a problem where I said everything I thought constantly, and it really irritated people. Now instead of saying everything I am thinking all the time, I just express it extra strongly on my face. People will know what I am thinking without me telling them. I am a very open book. People always know what I'm thinking or how I'm feeling or what my opinion is. He does not tell me what he is thinking...but he also has a hard to read face. So when I ask, I am often surprised and disappointed that when his face looks deep in thought, he turns out to not really be deep in thought. To me, knowing the thought process behind his decisions is important. Remember in math where the teacher would put, "show your work"? Well that is exactly my attitude when it comes to his thoughts!! ! lol. I'll have to be satisfied with asking him to tell me that he is thinking, and then that he is STILL thinking. If someone is reading a newspaper and I say something to them they don't care about, I'd rather have them say, "yeah sure whatever mmhmm...I'm busy" than to just say nothing. I just like plain honest candid 100% straight answers since I am that way. Not everyone is like me. I am the "brutally honest" type and I like others to be that way with me. I have very bad social skills myself. I actually have no friends. not because I'm a bad person, but once I make a potential friend for some reason i fail to keep in contact within the usual time range. I don't have asperger's, but this relationship teaches me alot about how to get along with other people and understand a completely different point of view. We share all the same interests and beliefs, but psychologically we are like night and day! He is my first long term relationship i have had, and I think learning to bridge our communication gap is an exciting challenge despite being frustrating. If he was EXACTLY like me...well, I might get bored, but more importantly I'd have no idea how to get along with anyone that doesn't think exactly like me!!

I'd describe him as two things, 100% fascinating, and 100% confusing!! I love an exciting man!

I'm the same as your fiance with being slow to answer questions. This is because answering requires a few things that take me more time than they take most people.

1. I need to register that someone's said something, and that it was addressed to me. Unless they get my attention first by saying my name, the question just comes into my head as background noise, because my brain doesn't perceive human sounds as more important than other environmental sounds. (That might be why he responds when you say "honey" before things: it cues him in to the fact that you want his attention.)

2. I need to process what's been said. I have both an auditory processing delay, which is where it takes some time for one's brain to make sense of what's been said, and poor speech processing, which is where human speech sounds like gibberish a lot more often than it should.

3. My brain needs to change gear from what I was already thinking about, otherwise the person asking a question about, for example, what I want for dinner, will get a totally unrelated answer like “I think I'll send my Pikachu out first” or “I need to rework the string parts, they were very clumsily written”.

4. I need to remember how to talk.

5. I need to remember my words.

6. I need to get my words lined up in the right order, unless the person wants to hear something like “Uh...I... something....dinner.... potatoes... want... umm.... I don't know.”, or unless they just want their question echoed back at them.

Because of all this, answering a simple question is not simple. It's a complicated and difficult process that needs patience to work properly.
Having someone obnxiously demanding an answer (yes, the way you've described your behaviour sounds extremely obnoxious; if you did it to me you'd get something thrown at you) interrupts the whole process and makes communication impossible. Even if I could remember how to talk under those circumstances, there's no way I'd be able to process what was said (if someone's talking, it interferes with my speech processing) and think about how to reply.

Try being quiet for a few minutes after asking a question and giving your fiance time to think instead of bombarding him with demands to answer “RIGHT NOW, THIS MINUTE”. Another good idea would be to stop expecting people to have the same abilities as you and “everyone else”. Can you control your moods without medication? Why not? Everyone else does it. It's not like it's difficult, just get some self-control!(See what I did there? Exactly what you do to your fiance, and which you see nothing wrong with doing. ) Your fiance is not everyone else. He has AS, which comes with communication difficulties. A bit of patience (probably more than you'd think was necessary) will go a long way toward making communication easier.

It is probably because he doesn’t have an answer. I really hate people insisting on questions I'm not sure about. In some cases you are interested in a specific answer "does this outfit look good on me?", etc.

If you are getting anxious waiting for him answer that implies you have some neurosis, and you need too much reassurance from other people.

yeah that makes a lot of sense!

actually, I always thought til this year that no one else could control their emotions either since emotions are an instinctive reaction. I thought for awhile also, that what the meds did was, just to make me have less of the emotions I have since I had too much of them. Are you saying you can decide not to feel sad if someone tells you something sad, or decide to not feel angry if someone tells you something that makes you angry? If I was other people and I could do that, i would make myself always feel happy no matter what! If other people could control their emotions without medications, why don't they choose to be happy all the time? why is there sadness in the world if they could make themselves feel happy no matter what happens?

I can't control my initial reaction to things, but I can put my emotions aside for the purpose of being able to function, and I can decide to a fair degree (I don't have total control over it) whether or not to feel something. It's not possible to have total control (and mental illnesses such as depression or bipolar make getting control a lot harder, as you're trying to control a brain that isn't working as it should), but a lot of control can be achieved. The reason why many people don't have this degree of control is that it never occurs to them to try.
The "emotional control" part of my 1st post in the thread wasn't an attack on you, just a reframing of what your fiance is experiencing, put into a frame of reference that I thought you'd understand.