My gripes at ASpartners

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My first impression of the guy was that he was a putz. I wonder if this guy used to be QPlan's cojoined twin. League_Girl, I become more ansy when it involves me and knowing what my wife wants and to be able to solve a problem or accomplish something that involves a coordinated and collaborative effort. From my point of view, she can be ambigious or I'm the bad guy when I wanted to know a quantity of something. I'm told a couple and she meant several. When I want an exact quantity I meant I wanted an exact quantity. I hate playing freaking guessing games and I'm learning to let this crap go because in the greater scheme of things it doesn't matter. All it does is makes my blood pressure and my frustration levels go up.

For whatever reason, I am expected to read my wife's mind and to know exactly what she wants and intends. I don't have telepathy. If an event is about to happen can you please tell me the freaking details so I'm not blindsided?

What your wife is doing is common in lot of women because they all expect their men to read their minds. It happens with NT men too from their wives.


Also I watched the episode on youtube and the man did remind me of me in ways like with cleaning but I am so glad I got over that. Plus he did come off as awkward and he did interrupt a lot and argued.

All those women on AS Partners are comparing him to their men. But that guy was just a control freak and he obvious has some mental illness and I wonder if controlling is a condition because it gives him anxiety if he doesn't do it and if they don't do what he wants. It's like a OCD thing.

Last edited by League_Girl on 18 Oct 2011, 1:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.

From what I read in that post, she seemed upset so she said she didn't want him contacting her and once she calmed down, she realized she didn't mean it so she tried to apologize but he won't answer.

People sometimes say things when they are very upset and then they don't mean it.

If I were her, I would have called and left him a message apologizing and explain to him I didn't mean it and I was just very upset.

League_Girl

I have the feeling that you would not expect me to read your mind. You would lay it out am I correct?

You should post this on their site to see what they say before they will take it down.

I hope their "aspies" divorce them and get alimony from them for a long time. Then those NT disfunctional b!tches will have a reason to rant on about their aspies. I hope some lawyer somewhere could sue the ASpartners web site for alienation of affection if some AS person is forced into a divorce because their spouce listen to idiots of that hate filled website.

Correct.

It be very surprising if they did approve that post because all posts must be approve first before they appear on the board. I think that is only with newbies of course.

I can't believe it took me so long to notice this on the front page:

LOL, "play by the rules" = be assimilated into our collective of sadomasochism

Well one way we could bypass that is write a bunch of bunk that sounds like what they want to hear then when it is acepted go back an use the edit function to remove the propaganda then replace it with the truth. No insults, no threats, no lies just the truth.

Ah good one. Maybe we all should go over there and troll them. But I am too lazy to do it because trolling is for people who have no lives and are bored and depressed and my life is happy and I have a job and I do have a life so trolling be of the question for me. Plus I am not good at it because I get bored with it quick when I do it and it takes too much energy to do it.

In my opinion, trolling accomplishes nothing.

One concept I really liked from "Ender's Game" was that your enemy is the best teacher you will ever have. Learn from your enemy. Only your enemy will show you where you are weak.

That's a good way to approach ASPartners. Not in the sense that they're gunning for us, but they notice things about us that we tend not to want to think about, they see limitations that we need to know about so we can stop being blindsided by them.

Their opinion of our value as persons is irrelevant, except inasmuch as it illuminates the relationship between our traits/limitations and our impact on other people (particularly NT intimate partners)

So what can we learn from these kinda-sorta-enemies? A few things off the top of my head:

1. NTs that are part of a couple tend to socialize as a couple. One partner's social limitations will tend to leave the other partner socially isolated. NTs are judged (or at least believe they are judged) not only on their own behavior but on their partner's behavior. And they are judged (or at least believe they are judged) by their partner's repeated absence from social events. They routinely report being humiliated and embarrassed by their partners' actions and social limitations.

2. NTs are very good at seeing our coping strategies (sometimes better than we ourselves are!), but generally misinterpret them.

3. Caretaking and sexual/romantic attraction are generally incompatible
3a. Explicitly spelling things out counts as caretaking.

4. Meltdowns count as emotional/verbal abuse.

5. There are many reports of aspies drastically changing their behavior right after getting married. While many of the NT partners tend to ascribe sinister motives to that, I figure it has more to do with someone moving into the aspie's space who is (theoretically) going to live in their space for life, and them being undiagnosed and not knowing until after the fact that it's going to be hard to deal with.

I think that these are all good points. The one thing that I would add is that NTs need to know their limitations too, i.e. their natural propensity to automatically interpret the behaviors of everyone and how that does not work to assign motives to autistic people. They need to have their social-emotional judgments, which they can't really control, and take many steps back from those, if they are interested in having their relationships with autistic people. They need to recognize this as their limitation, just as not picking up on social-emotional signals is a limitation that autistic people have. Even amongst each other, NTs are screwed up by this major limitation. Just ask any NT husband of an NT wife, and vice versa, I'm sure.

Wayne, I just want to reply to some of your points.

Surely, the amount of socialization that you do as a couple is open to negotiation? Being a couple doesn't mean that you have to be joined at the hip and your partner should be quite free to socialize on her own with her friends if she wanted to, and this goes for both partners. A woman can go out with her friends as much as a guy can have a drink with or watch a football match his friends. Doing this more often when one partner is an aspie can minimize social isolation.



Hang on, if caretaking is incompatible with romantic attraction then why is this principle not applied the same way to people who have partners with physical disabilities. Like if you have to help your into a wheelchair, wouldn't that also count as caretaking? Yet, people with physical disabilities still have romantic partners.

Regardless, the fact that not being able to read body language and non-verbal cues is one of the actual characteristics of AS makes an unrealistic expectation an aspie partner to just expect them to know what you want or need without telling them. I would also regard having unrealistic expectations in a relationship to be a flaw. Therefore, an NT partner who has the unrealistic expectation that their aspie partner should be able to read their mind is actually a flaw of the NT partner, just as much as not picking up on non-verbal communication is a limitation of the aspie.



Well, doing stuff to cause meltdowns can be considered emotional abuse. Also, from what I understand, aspies in relationships are often on the receiving end of abuse, including physical abuse. I've heard of this being the case specifically for some female aspies in relationships but I think male aspies might be victims of abuse too. I get the impression, for example, that some of the women on ASPartners might be abusers be we just don't hear the aspie's side of the story. Related to point 3, unrealistic expectations of a partner in a relationship can be a pretext to abuse in that the abuser justifies the abuse on the grounds that the victim is not satisfying their "needs". This is even true in abusive relationships when both partners are NT.

That's a very good question. I wonder if it has to do with the amount of outside support available, support that the spouse herself doesn't have to provide.

That would require the spectrumite to have enough social skill to negotiate in the first place. For me at least, negotiation is hard.

Which brings me to another point.. intimate relationships rely heavily on negotiation. In the case of NTs, much of that negotiation is implicit. In any case, if two people are going to participate in each other's lives to such an extensive degree and for such a long time, lots and lots of negotiation is practically unavoidable. (Well, you can always let the church or whatever lay down rules for both of you, as long as you both agree beforehand and keep on agreeing forever... but that tends to be suboptimal even when it works)