This NT loves her Aspie but....

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OK here we go...

I have been dating my wonderful Aspie for almost 3 months now and it has been wonderful. However this weekend I was thrown off track and at this moment I am freaking out.

My guy is very affectionate. He is always holding me, has his arm around me, kissing me, smelling my hair, running his fingers through my hair, or holding my hand. He is always telling me how beautiful I am etc...

We had a wondeful day together last Saturday and while cuddeling he says: "I need to tell you I am not feeling intense emotions. I am happy when I am with you, and would be sad if you left me, but I feel as if by now I should feel intense emotions." he went on to say he had been in love with a girl once and felt these so-called "intense emotions". He stated he felt bad, ashamed, and was sorry for hurting me. (because I started crying) He reassured me that he was again very happy and would be sad should we stop seeing each other. I took this as him saying he didn't love me. Although he didn't say that, for some reason I am feeling depressed and non-functional right now. He suggested he would go see a psychologist, and apologized for "not being normal" at which I replied as long as we talked through this we would be OK.

I guess what I need is someone to analyse this. I love this guy, I'm head over heels and really want him to be "the one" (I'm pathetic I know). I need advice here. All the signs say he loves me... I think.

I think he's just confused, maybe inexperienced. Every relationship is different. That specific intensity of feeling that he thinks he should be able to replicate is not possible and not necessary.

It would have been better if he had said nothing. Live and learn.
If he had talked to someone else first, he probably would have eventually figured it out.

He may simply be confused about what the feeling is. Even NTs start thinking that if they aren't feeling that first flush of infatuation all the time, they aren't "really in love" - they've "fallen out of love".

If he's into SF, I'd recommend getting him to read Heinlein's Time Enough For Love, in which several characters spend quite a long time trying to define exactly what "love" is, and Spider Robinson's Stardance, mostly for the bit in the second section when Charlie realizes the difference in what he felt for Sharra and what he feels for Norrey.

Last edited by DeaconBlues on 09 Dec 2009, 12:59 am, edited 1 time in total.

I don't know why he felt different about his ex but didn't feel the same for you. If he didn't love you, he wouldn't be doing all those wonderful things to you. Aspies tend to be brutally honest and they don't mean what they say so don't take it the wrong way. Just talk through it. Maybe he wanted you to support his problems because he was feeling ashamed for not feeling the same way for you he did for is other girl. Instead of getting comfort and support, he got tears and felt bad for it.

I can't say for sure, but I'd guess that after being "in love" or feeling these intense emotions previously, this dude probably had his heart broken to some degree by this other girl. It's likely that he has trust issues, and also likely that he is doing his best (perhaps subconsciously) to not feel these things again until he has a level of comfort and trust with you that will allow those things to come out again.

With my last girlfriend it was easily 6 months before my strongest emotions were anything besides mistrust, and close to a year before I actually developed trust in her. I was also smart enough about the situation to not mention that, ever

Three months is no time whatsoever. If you were going to bail on him at this point because of this issue, he would have been right to distrust you. But since you are actively trying to work through it, it will probably go a long way to instill the confidence he needs in you to take his feelings to the "next level", whatever that is.


Of course this is all speculation, but that's what I've learned in my own experiences (of course my own emotions are all I've got to work with).

I just got out of a one year relationship with an NT, and I have Aspergers... I can relate to how your boyfriend feels. I loved my boyfriend very much, but I wasn't IN love with him, and couldn't get to that point. All I say is, don't let the relationship drag out - That is what I did and it ended in heartbrake when I told him my feelings.

I still dream about him.

Chrissyloo - Happy 1st post! About your post - unknown.

But I might have another alternative that is not yet considered: Maybe he does love you since he's peaceful with you.

For me, if I like/love another then my (few) emotions are very calm - pacific. That's reassuring and could mean he's trusting of you where you make him feel calm. Other females might have made him feel...pressured? He's certainly expressed your beauty and he's affectionate with you - that's major for an Aspie.

For myself, calm = trust.

Have you considered this? One thing I do know is that (most) Aspies are just plain lousy at saying their emotions. So when he says 'not strong feelings,' by logic, that could mean he feels love. Love is not supposed to be tumultuous but comfort/secure. I guess infatuation, which is not necessarily love (!), means disordered emotion and I doubt either of you want that, in the long term.

His actions speak louder than words, yes?

Love for me is more like a really strong "like" feeling for an NT. I have never felt the strong emotions that NT's talk about. It sounds more like he's confused as to why he doesn't feel the way he is supposed to feel. We Aspies are really bad at conveying our feelings in a way the average NT can understand.

Welcome to WP!

I'm an aspie guy with an NT wife.

If it were me saying those things, and I have said quite similar to Kathy, I'd be wanting you to know what is really going on right here right now and the factual essence of it.

Because I love you.
And stating truth clearly is way better than pretending or assuming.

I'd be sad that I didn't have those same kind of intense emotions and I'd feel like I was somehow a failure for not having them.
Because I'm told that's the "right" thing to have.

Nevertheless, it is hard for me to grasp the nebulous, etherial, feelings and all their arcane and inscrutable mysteries.

I'd be mad at me for hurting your feelings by doing something I thought would help to not hurt your feelings.

My wife tells me she loves me very much. Our friends tell they can see how much she loves me.

It is hard for me to hear that and let it in.
Because of the aspie emotions things.

It is very very hard for me to say or "feel" love for her in the conventional ways.

So what I do is to DO my love, to "act out" my love and do very much like your guy.
That is a concrete thing - it can be seen, touched, smelled, tasted, heard.

These mysterious feelings things a person can say they have when they do not.
But when I "do" loving things for you, then you have tangible evidence to hold onto.


p.s., sometimes my NT wife says she loves her aspie butt...head, but that's probably a whole new thread, eh?

I agree with everybody but I'll give my two cents anyway. It's already been said above, but sometimes people think love = pain. What happened with the other girl? Maybe she was someone he could never really *have*, in the sense of feeling safe.

I am always analyzing my relationship with my boyfriend, trying to have casual conversations about how I don't feel like I am really in love, but sometimes I think he might be the first to ever love me, so I don't recognize the feeling. Anyway, get used to having these kinds of conversations with your boyfriend.

Okay, looked up that passage in Stardance, and found out I was mistaken - it's in section 3, on the trip to Saturn, not section 2, when they're still all in Earth orbit; and the first girl's name was Shara.

The relevant section:

"I watched Norrey some more, in a curiously detached state of mind. Considered objectively, my wife was nowhere near as stunningly beautiful as her dead sister had been. Just strikingly beautiful. And never once in the decades of our bizarre relationship had I ever felt for Norrey the kind of helpless consuming passion I had felt for Shara every minute of the few years I knew her. Thank God. I remembered that passion, that mindless worship that sees a scuff on an apartment floor and says There she placed her foot, that sees a battered camera and says With that I taped her. ... Norrey had been right, two years ago in La Maintenant; you only conceive a passion like that for someone you think you can't have. And the very worst thing that can happen to you is to be wrong.

"Shara had been very kind to me.

"The love I now shared with Norrey was much quieter, much gentler on the nervous system. Why, I'd managed to overlook it for years. But it was a richer kind of love in the end."

Every time I've been in love it's felt different. I really don't know love at all.

He probably needs to get his head round the difference between concepts of intense chemical lust and starstruckness when it first begins, and steady decades old love.

I know an NT female who fell hard for an aspie. After about 10 years, he decided that he didn't love her any more, and never had. When questioned, apparently he just didn't feel those butterflies in his tummy any more when he looked at her. So according to his logic, the love was not only over, it was never there. He's an extreme case, in his late 30s when that happened.

Your guy sounds young and if he wants to learn, still can learn to differentiate and understand.

It sounds entirely as if he has Alexithymia like most Aspies, and very possibly does not know what the emotion love is supposed to feel like. Definitely go with the psychologist idea and work through the emotions he has to identify them. Also, agree with the above, trust could very well be something he's having difficulty with as well.


EDIT: Hmm, that last sentence might've been a tad callous. Sorry, I don't know what the emotion of love is myself so I shouldn't've put that last sentence.

I think your boyfriend should be having a conversation very similar to this one, with a bunch of Aspies who are as eager to help as this bunch, but on a forum where you don't need to look at it. While dissecting your relationship may be helpful or even essential for him, it would kill the magic. Who can he talk to, other than you?

If he is a Christian (I am not) tell him to re-read the passage from Corinthians. It's the part they read at every wedding, and they do that for a reason. It is the ultimate definition of "love." Beyond that, all else is commentary (which can also be helpful). All other definitions are immature at best, and often confusing and/or harmful.

Edit: I found it: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13