The most difficult weekend of my life...

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Hello,

I have now idea if I will actually finish writing a post this time. I have started a few times and don't know if I'm afraid of the responses I will see or the feelings it will bring up inside of me.

I am a married 30 something Aspie with 2 children. My NT wife of 10 years and I had been going through some tough times for a couple of years before we self-diagnosed and subsequently went for help in individual counselling. While she continued on I stopped about 10 months ago because my therapist thought that I was on a good way and had the tools to move forward and work on myself while trying to re-build the emotional connections that were rocky in our relationship.
So I tried my best (I thought) to work on improving my anxiety level, negativity, sometimes thoughtless responses, and amount of involvement in the household. At the same time I tried giving her some space and support, but was still plagues by some jealousy issues and knee-jerk reactions when I felt that she wanted to do stuff with friends rather than spending time with me to work on our social connection.
Adding the stresses of buying a new house where everything that could have gone wrong went wrong, moving, and seeing 2 mortgages deplete our savings while our house didn't sell didn't help the situation and often required her to deal with my overall stress level.
When things started to normalize a bit at the end of the year, I tried to improve my efforts to get in touch with her, particularly looking forward to my vacation over Christmas. But she seemed colder emotionally and more exhausted than usual, so I tried to give her some space…
Fast forward to last week.
When I was about to leave for work in the morning something seemed wrong. The “Thank You” in response to me “I love you” triggered the realization that I hadn’t heard repeat those sweet words back to me on a few occasions and I confronted her. She said that it wasn’t working and that she was at the end of her rope and that this might be the end for us. We were going to address this on the weekend while the kids were out of the house for a sleepover. Needless to say, the next few days were plagued by emotional turmoil like I had never experienced. I felt, hurt, mistrusted, weak, angry, sad, desperate, and confused. And then there was the fear. Numbing, choking, heart-pumping fear, that made my normal level of anxiety feel like petting baby goats at the fair (don’t ask me where that metaphor came from as I have no idea).

During the weekend (I don’t know if I should congratulate or pity that you made it this far) we sat down and talked. I learned about the severity of her depression, her emotional turmoil, and the deep compassion she still has for me. I was shocked by how blind I have been trying to slowly work on myself and us by taking one step at a time and give her space while her strength was slipping away. I asked which of my behaviors hurt her and she didn’t know…
We made a plan for us to do counseling together and for me to find tools to work on my anxiety and build a social net, so my dependency would be less of a burden for her. We would learn about depression. Together. We gave us a timeline to try and make this better. Together. But I don’t know if this is going to work or if I just need to get to the level of closure that she already might have.
Then we cried. We cried together. We cried apart from each other. We both went to dark places in every sense of the word and I am grateful for her friends that picked her up out of hers more than once this fateful weekend and before. We cried about being helpless. We cried about how much we were hurting each other. I have cried before. About loss, about anger, and even about some songs and movies (yes Aspies can get quite emotional with the right trigger). But I felt that when it hit me how blind I was and how much I hurt my biggest love and best friend, without even realizing, I learned to cry for real.

I will fight for this will all that is remaining of my strength. I want to learn to be the person in whom she can find solace and strength. I have learned so much about emotions and love that I never thought possible before, so what is another little obstacle on the way to happiness?
But whatever the future brings I just want to share that I am glad that I met her. She made me to the person I am. A better person than I was before. A good person. I have my faults but I know that I have a good heart. I know that I can feel compassion and love. And I know that I can make people laugh and forget some of their worries. Thanks to her.

She is a giver and the most caring and self-less person I have ever met. I don’t feel anger anymore. I feel compassion and love and sorrow.

But I also feel fear. Fear that I won’t be able to be strong enough to let her go if I must. Fear that I will slip into resentment and hate. Fear that…

Fear that I will die alone…

Thank you for listening.
tpg

Relationship breakdowns suck. *Hugs*

It seems like she is willing to work on things. So that's great.

The only advice I have is not to stop her seeing her friends. It's important for nts to have these relationships. It's hard not to be jealous of someone's social success, but if you want to be with an nt, you have to accept it, I think.