partner of an aspie.

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Hi my name is Amy and this is my first time on this site. i have a partner with Aspergers syndrome he has been diagnosed with it since he was 4 years old. my partner told me about this site as it has helped him in the past and is hoping that it may help me a little. we have been together for 2 yrs and our daughter is 1 yr old. it has been a few months now that we have been having difficulties with our relationship and im not sure if it is me or my partners aspergers traits that are causing the problems but things are declining rapidly for me. my partner is happy he says that he has everything he ever wanted and that I've made him happier than ever before. but for me im struggling with the fact that i cannot talk to him about things as he dosnt understand where im coming from, the bluntness of opinion that he has openly in public that comes out a little aggressive at times and embarrasses me and the fact that sometimes i feel like i have two kids instead of one and no matter how may ways i try to talk to him about it it just dosnt seem to register. so really i was just wondering if there is anybody who is working on a relationship with an aspie and has some ways of coping and if anybody understands. ive tried to talk to friends and social workers about what o do but nobody seems to understand the struggle between us. i love my partner more than words and his other traits are so amazing but i feel so alone really i just need some guidance please anyone.

Hey Amy welcome.

Hi.

I dated an Aspie for a while. No kids resulted from the union, which I think was ultimately for the better given why we broke up. Our relationship worked out not too badly until we were hit with a deal-breaker: I wanted to move for my career, he wanted to stay for his job, and neither of us could consider doing anything else. Things got tougher as my actual career move approached, but before that they were pretty good. Had I stayed in the area, I might still be with him.

The difficulty in getting an Aspie man to do emotional work in challenging situations, which is both naturally hard (because of the Asperger's) and socially discouraged (because of the gender), was probably the toughest thing before the deal-breaker came along. The way we handled that was outsourcing a lot of the emotional work to his therapists. (He had 2 at the time, one who knew him since he was a teenager and the other who met him as an adult and dealt more with issues relevant to his later life.) We would first try to talk out our issues. But if I got worked up, which would get him worked up and thus unable to make any decisions until he could calm down, which meant I had to calm down or we were stuck, we would talk it out with a therapist. That generally worked. The presence of the therapist provided an independent emotional lifeline for him, someone he felt he could be safe with. And I was probably also calmer in the presence of the therapist, because there was finally someone who could listen to me because they weren't going to get upset about the mere fact that I was upset.

I understand therapists can be a lot of money, and finding one who doesn't make unreasonable judgments can be tricky. But in situations where your partner needs more emotional work done on him than you're capable of doing, some kind of third-party intervention, if available, can be very helpful.

In the absence of therapist money, maybe you can try interacting mainly via text, or write down your feelings first and try to reason through the issue yourself before talking about it with your partner. Writing can make doing emotional work on yourself easier, creating a little bit of distance between you and the problem. Maybe you can even teach him to do it, though I wouldn't guarantee he'd agree to it or even necessarily get the concept.

Welcome to Wrong Planet!

I'm married to an NT and we have two small kids.

We had a lot of communication problems early on: I found her reasoning to be nonexistent or elusive to me, and she found mine to be "black and white" to her.

What worked for us was this: we both love and trust each other, and believe each other to be competent. So we decided to keep that in mind instead of trying to root out reasoning.

If she has an issue that's big for her, then I listen to the situation fully without trying too hard to figure out why. It doesn't matter if her reasoning makes no sense to me - she is a generally reasonable person and she is my partner.

On the other side, she gives up when my reasoning stops making sense to her. Which is fine since it saves me frustration.