When Eros meets autos: Marriage to someone with autism spect

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No. I doubt it.

For one, you know you have Autism and can tell your partner what you need.

My husband was diagnosed at 50. So that was 20 years of not knowing what the hell was wrong. And we went to doctors. Everyone thought it was another issue he was having.

At the end, I thought he was using drugs or had a brain tumour. His behavior was over the top for you average NT. When he had his violent meltdowns, I just left. I didn't know what was wrong, and I felt powerless to help him. I didn't holler or scream, mostly because I thought he was high and you don't argue with high. I never told him I thought he was using.

After my husband's ASD diagnosis, at least we knew what the issues are. I don't think there will be many NT/AS couples (at least in the US) in the dark anymore. Most people are upfront if they are wanting to get married.

For women with Cassandra Syndrome, ...I have hung out on those forms. The bulk of what is complain about happens in NT relationships too. I'll read some horrific entry, and find out later the ASD spouse has a drug, drink or mental illness on top of the ASD. Or some wonderful combo of all three. Some how ASD gets blamed for all the s**t behavior, when in reality substance abuse and mental illness alone can make life really miserable.

I don't doubt there are truly abusive ASD spouses, but I don't like the broad brush painting, and what about the other spouse? What are their issues? No one comes to the party bringing nothing. We all have our short comings.

Last edited by Tawaki on 14 Jul 2015, 9:48 am, edited 1 time in total.

I have been married for ever and am not abusive to my wife. There are communication issues sometimes, but I am not an abusive person and I work very, very hard to overcome those communication problems.

The people who did this study did not interview me or my wife. Even if they had, who knows what would have come out of it after the creative application of Giorgi's descriptive phenomenological method, the imaginative interpretation of selected meaning units extracted from the interviews and the analysis of that "data" with the researcher's feminist interpretive frameworks?

I think she's the kind of person who makes other feminists wish she'd just shut up and stop making everyone look bad...

I notice she didn't interview even a single couple where the female is the one with the ASD.

Look, I know women have been oppressed in the past, but that's no reason to try to oppress the men right back. We're looking for *equality* here. You know, as in "nobody actually has to be dominant". Or did you forget women are supposed to be naturally better at rejecting that kind of competitiveness?

Interesting. I never made that connection, but of course they're two manifestations of the same thing--that a person with autism is "hopeless" and can never learn unless something miraculous happens. It's why people assume that a child with autism learning anything is a miracle, when in fact it's perfectly natural and to be expected. We learn things. Gasp. How surprising.

I guess the big question with an AS/NT marriage is this: Is either of you an asshat? If not, it can work, because people with ASDs can learn and NTs can learn and both can compromise. If there's asshattery (as in, truly not caring about the other person) going on in the marriage, then yeah, it's probably doomed whether the ass in question belongs to the NT or the AS half of it; but that's for the best. With a lack of asshattery in the marriage, if the marriage breaks up, I'd expect an amicable divorce when both agree they'd prefer to be single; if they want to stay together, a stable marriage with solvable problems.

The trouble with these Cassandra quacks is that they assume people with ASDs can't care about others. But we can. We do. Sometimes more strongly than NTs do. There are people with ASDs that don't care, but it's not because they have an ASD; it's because they're people, and some people don't care. In abusive AS/NT relationships, half the time it's the NT who doesn't care. Maybe more often, considering how often we tend to attract bullies.

But those aren't the marriages I'm talking about. I'm talking about the ones where people honestly fell in love, care about each other, and are having problems because they discover one person's speaking a language the other can't understand. They need a translator, or a mediator, or a language teacher... not a divorce lawyer.

I'm very communicative about my feelings, ironically more than he is, and he's an NT. So if I do get upset about something, I'll just say. If I don't prefer to say because of knowing it might sound silly or is just not that appropriate, then I keep quiet and find a way to deal with it myself, or talk to my mum about it.

I am sometimes hyperactive, but that's not abusive or doesn't lead to abusive behaviour. So in other words I can be annoying. Or I think I give him too much love. He likes it but is sometimes too tired, even though he says (and I know anyway) that just because he's tired it doesn't mean he loves me any less. I can read him like a book now, and he says I'm a very understanding girl.

The only thing is I'm absent-minded and I also take longer than others to learn things. I hope he can live with that.

Yes, I've heard about this before. What's even more surprising is that this is a dissertation from which the author got her PhD. Funny considering that it's based on only 10 people, has a sampling bias and all sorts of things.

Also, theres the fact that people have to pay to even read the thesis. Who makes money off of a dissertation, the intellectual property usually belongs to the institution where you got your degree and for example, my MSc thesis can be read for free by anyone who has access to the internet.

Using "feminism" to hate on aspies, wonderful.

I am on the spectrum and married to an NT as well, and literally every single fight we have ever had has centered around communication!! !! !! Sometimes it is like we are speaking two entirely different languages, but because both of us sound like we are speaking English, we don't always realize each other isn't understanding! It can be just as hard for him to understand what I am trying to say as it is for me to understand what he is tryng to say! When I bottle things up I do eventually explode and can be unkind. It is not right for me to do this, and I have appologized so many times. I have tried to catch it earlier, but it appears when I am upset that I do not communicate as well so then we end up fighting which then leads to the meltdown I was trying to avoid... Counselors are NOT adept at working with ASD/NT couples. The most progress we have made is by working together to try and learn to communicate better, and trying to find a compromise on how to deal with meltdowns (if he just walks away I take that to mean that he doesn't care rather than he is getting away until I calm down....which makes me even more upset....so one compromise we have been working on is him telling me "I hear that you are upset, and I want to talk with you about it a little later, when we are calm." and then me letting it go and waiting to talk about it).

We were a lot like this in the beginnng, and it did end up working out very well for the most part. The difficult part in any marriage, but especially in an ASD/NT marriage (in my opinion) is when you have stressors come along. You might be ok for a little while, but the more stressors you add, the harder it is for anyone to cope but especially when you add ASD to the mix. In the last 8 years we: moved out of state away from family/friends, bought a house, got pregnant 3 times, had 2 children, I had cancer, we received 3 ASD diagnoses, 3 Celiac Disease diagnoses, and then 3 diagnoses of a Mast Cell disease (mine is significantly worse than the kids and has me almost homebound as well as me having a variety of extra diagnoses....spondyloarthritis, uveitis, laryngeal arthritis, etc. It has been a very HARD several years, and my mother has pointed out that my ASD has become more significant as time has gone by. But....we have stuck it out together...so clearly ASD/NT marriages aren't doomed as she seems to like to indicate

Hey wait - does the same medical establishment not claim at least 126 associated phenotypes with ASDs alone? This woman's sample group was at least thirteen times too small for the research interests she claims to represent.

It takes a signifigantly worse day than this on my part before I'll even swat flies. I hope nobody I love buys this drivel. Ten bad marriages, wow, where do those come from? Ah yes, a cursory survey of a place where people get married for economic ambition alone.

Last edited by cberg on 07 Nov 2015, 12:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.

There's less legwork in her whole PhD thesis than a month's work for me.

I've found a full copy of this thesis online that you don't have to pay for. Some of it is positively cringeworthy. I'll review some of it shortly, but in the meantime, you can take a look:

http://legacy.cf.ac.uk/infos/resource/dissertations/NPDF3.pdf