Is this guy Aspie or just deliberately being nasty?

Post Reply New Topic

Been spending a lot of time with a man I liked for almost 5 years...it took him that long to overcome his assumption I was a stalker and talk to me, lol.
Anyway, in spite of being on the spectrum myself and having studied it a lot, I cannot work out if he is or is not.
He basically is obsessed with the money system and how it works, and is hyper critical and negative, and has been attacked physically many times for his tendency to just speak his mind no matter how it affects others.

He has walked hand in hand with me, and started asking me if I want anything when we go out( we have not done anything beyond that and he has been alone for 20 years), but then he will suddenly become negative and rant on about love, relationships and sex being rubbish and telling me I should stay free, single and happy. It is quite confusing because it is always him who asks if we shall meet the next day.

He will take me somewhere on a day out, as he did recently, and buy me candyfloss and a coffee, then the next evening, out of the blue while walking along, turn to me and say 'you have ape-like features, Has anyone ever told you that?', which naturally provokes a negative response in myself. He seems not to be able to grasp why anyone let's words hurt them when he has been physically hurt and attacked, which to him renders emotional hurt a load of rubbish.

He once told me, in response to my saying I didn't mind if he cooked for me or not, 'starve then, no one will care, not me, not your mum, not your dad'.

Yet at times he seems aware of what he is doing, as he says things about wanting to see how I react. He really seems to despise emotions and feelings, and anything pertaining to them. I do not know if the things he says are coming from aspergers, or from simply being a bitter individual, tainted by decades of being attacked by others for being different...and he has said he was always different to others.

I would try to forget about him if I were you. I've been in a similar situation before and forgetting was the best thing I ever did.

(((((((Graelwyn))))))) that sounds terrible, and only I think when you rid yourself of him will you realise how unacceptable and awful that treatment and behaviour is. I think when you are in the situation it can become normal to have that sort of thing all the time, but it will take distance and time to really see that sort of thing for what it really is.

He is intentionally being abusive. Tell him you will not be an object for him to test his cruel behavior on just to see how you will respond emotionally. This sadistic science experiment brings him pleasure as he wants you to feel as poorly as he does. It is really sick how the only person who cares to be in his presence is the one he mistreats. He sounds like a sociopath and they don't care how others feel. It is not AS. Please don't become a co-dependent. Wish him well and move on. Take care of yourself and don't feel the need to save him. He is out of his mind and needs professional help.

in my honest blunt opinion... he sounds more like an as*hole than an aspie, although he could be both. aspies make situations awkward and may be too outspoken, and might even say mean things unintentionally. but a person who says something like, 'you have ape-like features, Has anyone ever told you that?' has gone beyond any typical aspie behaviour. that is really unnecessarily mean and nobody should be told things like that. i wonder why he would want to get such negative reactions from you or from other people?

maybe if he has been hurt a lot in the past due to being different, he needs to work on fixing his own problems before he would be ready for a relationship. i don't see why you should have to suffer emotionally because of him. probably best to move on and forget about him, unless you can stand being hurt like that.

Whether he's Aspie or not is entirely besides the point. He is abusive. Right now it is verbal abuse. You're in an abusive relationship. Proceed accordingly.

i agree with the above posters. whether he's aspie or not is completely irrelevant. he is abusive and is "not fit for consumption (TM)".

Postures, Molly, Wildcat, Zen, Dryad and Hyper, thankyou for your responses.

I suppose, I wanted to see if I am being oversensitive and overreactive, as he has said to me I am too sensitive and so touchy I am abnormal.
I suppose I am not accustomed to this sort of behaviour from anyone, I know some people grow up in an environment where a lot of teasing and bullying occurs (he is of a family of 7 siblings), so it was hard for me to know where the line is between abusive and just being raised a certain way. He keeps telling me I take life too seriously and have no sense of humour whenever the things he says leave me reacting badly (I tend to hit my head if something upsets me badly). Personally, I do my utmost to avoid saying things that might hurt someone else in my interractions these days, unless someone really makes me angry, so it is hard to understand that some people will go out of their way to say things that will bring about a negative response.

He once said I will never survive out there, as sensitive as I am, and I suppose I convinced myself that maybe he was trying to force me to toughen up by saying a lot of hurtful things to me. I tend to analyse situations to see if there is any positive way I can view them before I walk away.

In this case, I think you are all right, I shall have to quietly move on as I am not strong enough to hear this sort of comment on a regular basis, and be swung between extremes of treatment. It is difficult as I liked him for a long time and felt sure he was a decent human being at some level, and by all accounts, I am the only woman he has allowed in his home or talked to regularly, or walked around with, in 20 years, but I now believe, after 11 weeks of talking and spending time together, that he is too damaged to be able to sustain anything positive with another human being. As soon as he moves closer, or starts displaying feelings for me, he says negative things to counterract it the next day and create distance.

I think because I tend to analyse, I got home and thought, could he simply have been making an observation of my face, and not felt it should have hurt me? Would others have reacted badly if it had been said to them, or would they have been able to simply laugh and throw something back ?

He's bitter and needs help, but that's no excuse. As inhuman as it may sound, you should kick him.

He sounds like an ass.

Doesn't surprise me at all that he's been alone for 20 years. He's just plain abusive, like previous posters have said. Do yourself a favor and run away from this guy. Guys like that are worse than the plague.

I don't think I have enough information to know this guy's intent.

I don't know if he's AS. I don't know if it's intentional, if so the reason behind it is difficult to pinpoint. If it's not intentional my guess is he has no filter between his head to his mouth.

Either way, it is a serious issue. It's ultimately your call, though.

GoatOnFire, I cannot work out any intent.
On the one hand, he has done a lot of things for me, fixing my bike, cleaning my kitchen without being asked, taking a day off a job course to take me somewhere and cooking me meals, ensuring I have eaten and such practicalities, but on the other, he says things the like of which I have mentioned, and says some very harsh things, that suggest he is very bitter about people and the world in general. He has always told me that people have no friends in life and that he realised that when he almost died after being attacked, and no-one came to help. He frquently asks me why he was attacked and what he did to deserve being attacked and I cannot answer, because in truth, I think it is because he challenges everyone, challenges peoples ways of living and thinking, and does not hold back. I have seen him jump to help elderly people, and listened to him rant on about all the murders and rapes and loss of naturability in life for evenings at a time.

I think the difficulty I am having is that he has done all of these things for me, took me to his family home where I met his mother and a few of his siblings, and playfully touches me a lot, then he comes out with things that I would have thought most people would realise are hurtful. Then tells me I take words too seriously, take people too seriously. Once when he had had rather a lot of wine, he told me he is terrified of falling in love, and that no-one should need anyone, people should focus on their own lives and leave others alone... a contradiction really, because the choice is always left with him as to whether he sees me or not and he has always chosen to continue seeing me.

He has had one relationship in his life, and that produced a little girl, and it went wrong or something and they parted when she was three. He talks about his child a lot, and it is the only time I see any sign of happiness in him to be honest. So maybe it is that which has left him the way he is.

Either way, I am stepping away at this time and focussing on myself, as regardless of the reasoning behind his behaviour, it is becoming too draining for me to deal with on a daily basis. I dont like walking away from people I have spent so much time with, but sometimes you have no choice.