Opinions on Maxine Aston to help with tribunal submission?

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It's not about Aspies being difficult to live with or be partners with. It's more about someone saying Asperger's causes this to happen to the partner. It's not that cut and dry. I live in a state with a very high divorce rate, one of the highest in the United States. Are all of these marriages affected by AS? That would mean a lot of people who live here have it. I'm not so sure they do.
A marriage counselor is a good thing for those seeking their insights and guidance and I am sure Maxine is prolly a great one. People have issues with her attitudes about AS and her trying to make a cottage industry out of AS marriages.
Some people are very emotionally needy for whatever reason, while others, NTs included, aren't. I know people without AS who aren't that emotionally needy and others who expect you to pretty much kowtow to every little thing and if you don't they tell others you are inconsiderate.
It's not really about "NT" versus "AS". It's about people who are unhappy in their marriages for whatever reason. They should seek counseling or divorce or work something out. Besides, marriage vows read "for better or worse" unless you make up your own and that's serious stuff, it is a vow, after all. It means you got to put up with a lot of stuff you might not like that much. That is what it means. So, if you aren't prepared to deal with the bad things as well as the good, why be married? Not every moment in life is a perfectly happy one. Not everyone gets their way all the time. No one is perfect.
No two people are perfect marriage partners. The human element is involved and when it is, it's not going to be this blissful state at all times.
Married women need to figure out how to deal with their situation. They are the ones who decided to marry, they weren't forced into it. They need to find a way around what they don't like about their marriage. That's how all married people deal with it because it isn't easy. The first thing people say about the subject of marriage "marriage isn't easy". It's not normal for two people to compromise and be agreeable and always thinking about someone else all the time.
Most of the time married people are virtual strangers anyway, compared to other people the couple have known their entire life or most of their lives, like family and close friends. These persons compete with the marriage partner, jealousy can be involved. Often, there's tension between the extended family or families and the marriage partners.
These factors can interfer with the happiness experienced by marriage partners. They might prefer their own family over their partner at times.
Another source of strain on them is financial. If they both have problems managing money that can cause a lot of arguments.

I suppose that one thing that always gets me is that, AS notwithstanding...you don't wake up one morning and realise you have been inadvertantly married to someone with AS for 10 years...

...you choose the person you marry, and for you to choose them, something in you was drawn to them (rather than anyone else), and balanced the pros and cons, and decided to go with it...

One of Maxine Aston's agenda is to (quite bizarrely) absolve the NT partner of all responsibility for choosing their partner...as though Aspies regularly con people into believing they are someone quite different to get married.

M.

When is your big day ? Please let us know how you get on in court when the day comes.

If it is in open court then do tell us if any newspaper is printing details.

Appreciate your canda on the matter. You come over as a person of integrity and I agree with the concept, when does the non AS partner take responsibilty for their actions or inactions in the relationship. If you can identify the person with AS then you are absolved from any wrong doing in the relationship. My wife did not attack or blame me for difficulties in the relationship and we have worked towards a conciliation.

Right, right, exactly! One or two of the relationships I was in turned out to be very harmful to me. But it was my decision to get involved with them, and I had everything I needed to work out that they weren't the right one for me. And nobody stopped me from leaving them when I couldn't stand it any more. I could have spent my whole life playing Cassandra. Instead, when it got too much, I quit. End of problem. And which do you think has been the more useful line of thought to me since then, to sit about demonising them, or to ponder what the hell I was thinking of to get involved in the first place? No matter how much of a bastard the other party was, it was I who chose to bond with them, and I carry the can for that.

Ditto for those who chose to get involved with me. I make no bones about my personality, I don't hide my warts. There was always ample time to try before they bought. Where I come from, people take responsibilty for their own life decisions.
End of rant.

I live in relation with a NT - and I am aware that this for both not simple. The difficulty I have with Maxine Aston is that she places all the blame on one site: The Aspie's one.

When two partners are committed to live together it is a mutual deal - what the most aspies are just asking for are practical solutions for practical problems. At the end a relation can be pin down to such questions. She also does not really recognize the benefits an Aspie can provide: Respect and less emphatic, but distanced view is in the most cases more helpful to solve problems than a emotional engagement.

At least I know that my partner has here a deficit from my side, but I also have no difficulties, when he get this "emotional units" he needs to function in other places.

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Also: In my long term observation, with other marriages (and the marriage of parents and grand parents) I allways had the impression that mutual respect is more important for the functioning of a relation than any other factor. "Passion", to quote Maxine Aston, goes away over the years, it is not a really reliable basis on the long term. Respect and a clear understanding of the mutual benefits are a much more solid foundation of a shared live.

I have with this lady the strong impression that she is just a hopeless romantic, who does not understand the real mechanism behind a successful long term relation, which are after all very well able to be rationally defined.

And if it's true that she started all this Cassandra stuff after a failed relationship with an Aspie, I begin to wonder who exactly is in need of counselling here - her clients or herself? It would be a classic example of rationalisation on her part wouldn't it? And for every client she reassures of blamelessness with her Cassandra diagnosis, she would receive from their gratitude another affirmation that she herself had been blameless. I'd love to be proved wrong.

I even think the problem goes a bit deeper: The question of the very nature of a relation. Previous societies often provided the marriage with clear framework with defined responsibilities and duties. This framework is gone for the good, but has been replaced with a lot of people with an ideas about an ongoing romantic love with all the madness involved.

An ongoing romantic love is in my experience and observation unrealistic. It may be the case that this is more obvious in a relation with an Aspie than with an NT, but is more deeper problem of a discrepancy between the picture of society (and the adoption of this picture by single members of the society) of the nature of a relationship versus the reality.

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BTW: When I was a child I grow up on the country side and when I listen to the especially older women how they defined a good husband, their criteria were that he had an orderly life, provided enough financial fonts for the household and (of upper most importance) did not interfere with running the household. Such criteria could be easily matched by an Aspie.

^
I think it was Engels who coined the term "bourgeois romantic" and de-bunked a lot of misconceptions about sexual relationships. Perhaps it's mostly the modern middle class of the developed world who imagine that it can be all happily ever after in a bed of roses with infinite, unconditional love.

I'm something of a mixture myself - I know I can't live in a perpetual state of infatuation, but somehow I always find myself returning to a state which is rather like falling in love all over again, just for a while, every now and then. The rest of the time, I'm Mr. Matter Of Fact, cool and calculated, forgetting to buy flowers, logical to a fault. I got very bored with my first wife, but after that my affections became more sustainable.

There's this idea afoot that the marriage must be *the* relationship, always trumping any other interest. That's nonsense if a partner has chldren from previous relationships - when the chips are down, the parent-child bond tends to prove the stronger, blood being ultimately thicker than water for most people. That's true of me even though my son is grown up - if he were to be in dire need of me and my wife were to try to override that, she would lose - I'd feel terrible about it, but she would lose. I don't think there's anything Aspie about that. Or even male - there aren't many mothers around who would sacrifice their children's welfare for a partner's sake, and that's probably no bad thing.

a newer blog post than abfh's blog post:

http://autismnaturalvariation.blogspot. ... level.html by a guy called Joseph (he may or may not be on wrongplanet!)

hope this is what you were looking for? (i think?)

http://stanford.wellsphere.com/autism-a ... out/617523 this post also touched me. what a terrible, horrible situation. i assume this is not maxine herself, but a person running a group under her name. this is an example of what happens when an unsupported "syndrome" is allowed to run rife, and with no boundaries to keep people accountable.

What kind of case and what country?

-Ari

I thought it was universally accepted that for a partner to jump out of one relationship into another, without spending any time in between as an unattached person, is a dangerous solution, an easy option that is borrowing emotional capital at an eye-watering interest rate. It's a very easy thing to do, if the opportunity arises, but there's no time for readjustment. This new couple will probably reap what they have, in their stupidity, sown. And that's to say nothing of the anguish dumped onto the deserted partner, who has to cope with the double whammy of desertion and intense jealousy feelings. To say nothing of the poor daughter who may quite likely be screwed up for life. Some counsellor, eh? I know, it's all blindingly obvious, but this kind of thing makes me so angry that I just had to wade in and say it. Some psychology professionals haven't progressed one iota from the dark age of Sigmund Freud.