Help, Marriage Ending

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I'm one of the few who stuck together through a nasty illness juggling full time caregiving and a full time job for the better part of a year. So, yes, an Aspie can do it.

I actually think aspies are more likely to do this. At least if they have a strong connection with their partner.

I didn't want to get married because I didn't want to go through the process of a ceremony. I only agreed to it because we had a child on the way and we tied the knot at a registry office with the minimum required witnesses. I just wanted to sign the piece of paper and get the hell out of there.
When it came to divorce, I was the innocent party, I didn't lose anything, so it worked out OK for me in that respect.

Of course it could end at any time. That's half the point of dating. A sort of "try before you buy" situation. But remember, all relationships, 100% of them, WILL eventually end. I've heard that half of marriages end in divorce. Well, that means the other half end in death.

You have to assume that anyone can walk out of a relationship at any time for any reason. This is where I ask you "how many times did you beat your wife this week?" If she were abusing you or you were abusing her, it would be reasonable for one or the other to leave. If I were abusing my wife and she tried to leave me, no amount of legal acrobatics could preserve our marriage. When you're simply in the dating stages of a relationship, you lack the legal protections that married couples have. You protect yourself by not owning joint assets, by not cohabiting, by not having sex and risking pregnancy, etc. You're saying, "Um, I don't know you that well. But maybe I'll take that next step after we've been seeing each other for a while. I just need time to make sure you're not a psycho and you're the kind of person I wouldn't mind sharing my DNA with." Marriage is legally binding. It's a pain to get out of. So you'd want to make sure the person you're with doesn't end up being psychotic or come with any "extra surprises." However, marriage is preferable because it's easier to, say, buy a house and make babies on two incomes instead of just one, or have one home instead of two separate ones. Because the stakes are higher, you need the legal protections that come with the institution. Divorce is an unfortunate necessity because of how quick people are to hurt each other.

When my wife and I talked about this in years past, we came to the conclusion that if one of us were to try to leave, as good as things are between us, we'd have to be delusional or mentally ill. Whoever tries to leave is going to spend some time In the psych ward. She seriously told me to have her committed if she tries to leave. She also told me that if I try to leave, I have to take the kids.

I don't think either of us are going anywhere any time soon.


It's a good question, isn't it? Y'know, Jesus addressed this very thing. Give the gospels a good read-through sometime. It's a timeless question. If you can't handle dating/relationships/marriage, and ESPECIALLY marriage, just don't do it. I do think marriage is too difficult for most people.


The problem is anyone can leave you at ANY time in a free society. And even if you had a secret room in your basement and you kept your wife locked away and told everyone else she was dead, you might manage to use her body, but you can't make her love you. Not with her heart, not with her mind; and most of us are really after the heart and mind when we talk about love. We want EVERYTHING. So it's stupid to lock your SO in a dungeon because she might walk out on you. No, we have to be free to walk out, else it's not worth it.

What makes marriage so special is that it's a promise that you WON'T walk out, no matter what, and that you'll share everything. You agree to commit everything to it. You can't simply walk out of it without doing harm to your spouse. Divorce mitigates the mess when you screw up. It's a legal institution that empowers those who agree to it to have shared incomes, possessions, bank accounts, babies, etc. Love doesn't have to have anything to do with it, but it does help.


I can't agree with that. You can't force someone to love you. If you have to force someone, it's not really love. Persistence is ok if you're trying to get someone's attention. It's ok if you've known someone for a while. But if someone is like "NO" then it doesn't make sense to pursue that person. If someone behaves badly when you go out with her, it doesn't make sense to assume she doesn't behave badly at other times. Persistence isn't going to change someone.

If there's a sign of trouble in a relationship, you should walk out. That's reasonable. Persistence won't make it go away. Dating someone long enough to know what she's like when she doesn't know you're watching, having no problems, is a good indication that marriage is a worthwhile endeavor.


Well, there's no such thing as perfect, because people aren't perfect. People don't fundamentally change. I think a little more of their character is revealed over time. People cover up flaws all the time and try to change themselves for whatever reason, but it always comes back down to who they really are. You can't fight that. You really do have to accept yourself for who you are and hold others to the same expectation. People of contrasting interests get together all the time and it works just fine because the interests that they have, while contrasting, aren't in conflict. The only interest that really counts is the interest they have in each other. If they have nothing else in common, their mutual self-interest will win the day every single time.

What happens is you have greedy people who don't accept themselves for who they are, imagine they can change for someone, or only show someone a facade of themselves in order to get THAT PERSON. Their character flaws always catch up with them. When that happens, we say, "you've changed." But it's a mistake to say that since people don't really change. It's more accurate to say "you are not who I thought you were." When people do "change for the better," they're merely restoring a part of themselves that was there all along. People who "change for the better" usually aren't making changes under threat of divorce or breakup. Becoming a distance runner happened because I thought it was important to support my wife in something she wanted to do--and I've ALWAYS felt that was important, and because I've always been CAPABLE of running even if I never actively explored it. I discovered a lot about myself and made many changes to my daily activity. But that was a self-discovery of what always was. It's like if I buy an acre of land and one day, decades later, discovered buried treasure. I'm not wealthier because I discovered buried treasure. I'd always been wealthy. The only thing different now is that I KNOW I'm wealthy, and I can begin making different decisions based on this knowledge.

A partner is the same way. Dating gives you the opportunity to explore who this person is and whether they might come with some nasty surprises. Chances are there's going to be SOMETHING you weren't aware of, but some imperfection might be tolerable or livable based on your values. If I know I'm getting "buried treasure" with a woman, I'm not going to waste time marrying her. If it's just a good piece of land that will support a house, then, meh, it's good enough, i.e. the woman is a good women like so many other good women. But if I'm aware that my woman is a toxic waste dump--just...NO. I shouldn't be expected to "clean a woman up" in order to love her. If I can't love her, if I have to "change" her, I'm not going to date her.

Now, I do believe in near-indiscriminate dating, and for a good reason. Because you DON'T know how a person can be. Because even a "bad person" might be entertaining on a Friday night. Someone I might have fun with for one night on a weekend but who otherwise might be an embarrassment 5-out-of-7 days of the week isn't someone I'm going to choose to spend a lot of time with! So when I stop calling her up because I've met someone nice I want to be serious with, I seriously doubt she's going to miss me because she's probably out with some other guy she's been flirting with all along. It won't bother me if she's fooling around with some other guy. It's not that kind of relationship. But if I'm with the nice girl for 6 weeks, she bails on me for a date, and I'm out and happen to see her with another guy, I'm not going to give her a hard time over it. If she's been staying over at my place, I'll pack up her toothpaste and toothbrush and whatever else she left, I'll call her up and see if she's busy tonight, and I'll calmly explain that I care about her deeply but it's just not working out. I'll wish her the best, but I'm not going out with her again. What's the diff between her and the other girl? Expectations. I know what the bad girl is. She's not hiding anything. A bad girl pretending to be a good girl and being dishonest? Bye.


Depends on what you mean by "attachment" and "connection." Co-dependency is unhealthy. If she needs me for the very air she breaths and fully demands I have the same total dependency on her, there are going to be problems. Relationships like that are often abusive, though it's always difficult to pin the blame on just one person within the relationship. I've had too many problems growing up, being bullied, etc., that I acquired a need to be better than everyone else at something. Playing piano and clarinet and writing/recording my own music was my ticket out. Being tied down to a SO doesn't work for me, and the more I allowed that for myself the more miserable I became.

I'm not "tied down" to my wife. We mutually support each other because we WANT to, not because we HAVE to.

So the "strong connection" thing is a foreign concept to me at this point in life. It's not that I have a problem with "feeling connected" with someone, or "feeling attached" to someone. I just think we mean something completely different when we talk about it. I see one side of it as extreme and dangerous, and I think aspies of all people should avoid it.

Not to mention how difficult it is for some aspies to experiences powerful emotions about certain things or people. I don't often "FEEEEEEEEL" anything for anyone--not my wife, not my kids, not even myself. Sometimes I do, but it's not some raging, burning fire deep in my soul 24/7/365. But I do know that they are MINE and that I want them. That's about as far as I can take the emotional thing.

I can see that feelings and desires and connections (in the proper sense of the word) build over time. And no, not when you get married. And no, I don't suggest you do wait for marriage for that, i.e. having feelings for someone, or feeling connected to someone.

But I think the purpose of marriage should be called into question. I don't think people should ever marry for love. I do think you should only marry someone you do love, but that's not the point of marriage. If you don't love someone, you shouldn't marry them, because that's going to make marriage difficult. But...again, love or no love, THAT'S NOT THE POINT. You don't say "we love each other, now we have to get married." Loving someone doesn't obligate you to marry them. And you don't say, "I can't love you because we're not married." You don't need marriage to love someone, either. You can love someone and not be married to them. And just because YOU love someone whether they love you back or not doesn't mean they have to marry you. "Love" and "marriage" aren't one and the same. They are two separate things that may or may not be linked. You HOPE they're linked, but a link between the two aren't necessary for either to occur. You don't HAVE to love the person you're married to. You don't HAVE to marry the person you love.

You don't marry someone ONLY because you love them. You marry someone because 1) you love each other (both partners agree and consent to it), 2) You want to share all your mutual assets--money, possessions, everything, 3) You want to make lots of babies, 4) You want legal protection in case something goes wrong, 5) survivor's benefits/legacy. I can keep on going with a slough of many, many other reasons, but hopefully you get the point. Relationships are (hopefully) all about love. Marriage is about BUSINESS, specifically the business of relationships.

You've already decided and agreed on mutual values. You know you can make a life together. You don't need marriage for that. Marriage only formalizes what you already have and offers you certain legal protections. That's all marriage is. It has nothing to do with love. If you think for any reason you can't make your legal obligations to the person you pledged those obligations to, then don't freakin' get married. If you love someone and can't do the right thing over the long haul, love them enough to NOT marry them. It's really just that simple. And if she wants things you do not, love her enough to cut her loose and let her seek those things from someone else. Don't marry her. "Love," in strictly emotional terms, is a fairly tiny aspect of the big picture. It informs, we hope, all the other "big" decisions. But by itself it's really nothing.

If you are IN a marriage, the expectation is that any potential dealbreakers have already been worked out. You shouldn't compromise on anything. You shouldn't have to. You can't be expected to. She does X. I don't like X. I love her enough that I can learn to deal with X with the understanding that X will never change. Therefore, X isn't really a problem. Flip it around: I do X. She doesn't like X. She yells at me all the time because of X. I cannot change X, and I don't feel I should be expected to change X. She can't learn to deal with X without giving me grief about it. X is a real problem. Time to find a new gf. Marriage is acceptance of X and everything that goes with it, Y as well as Z and then the whole Greek alphabet after that, uppercase, lowercase, AND diacritics. In other words, everything you DIDN'T think of, including the little things you were too blinded by "love" to see. You don't get to say "I didn't sign up for this." Yes, you did. It's on your marriage license. It's all on there. So when all of a sudden X starts grating on your nerves, or you just got tired of pretending to be someone you're not, you deserve hell for it. And if you think that just divorcing all your problems away is going to cut it, you are grossly mistaken. X didn't annoy you before you got married, did it? Or if it did, you didn't say anything, right? Or if you were being fake before you got married, getting married didn't stop you from being a fake, did it? So why do you think you're going to stop lying to yourself any more divorced than when you're married? You're probably still gonna fake it when you're going after your next victim, or you're just gonna put up with abuse (or whatever, even if it's innocent) with the next person because HOLY FREAKIN' CROW you're gonna die if you don't marry her, or him. Do you REALLY think all that goes away just because you divorce one spouse? I promise you, those problems will just follow you from one failed relationship to the next because YOU are the problem, not your spouse.

Marriage changes NOTHING. And if had to go through 100, 1,000, 1,000,000, or every last woman on the planet either to find a woman worthy of me or experience the heartbreak of learning no such woman exists, I would take that over facing even ONE divorce. I would rather live out my years in complete loneliness than to be married even for one single day to a miserable person. I don't mean married to a great woman who has a bad day every now and then, but I mean a genuinely, chronically miserable person through-and-through. I don't care how many heartbreaks and breakups it takes. Find the right woman, marry her. You'll know it's her because you'll both know it together. You won't have to worry about little things that annoy the other person because those things won't matter. Marrying someone with a family history of diabetes was, and I'm not joking, a HUGE dealbreaker for me. I'd made up my mind NEVER AGAIN will I have to deal with the horrors I grew up with, living with an abusive father who made himself the center of everyone's universe while the disease and the cigarettes slowly took their toll on his body as the slow death march of sickness and decay crept over us as we lived in the shadow of constant anxiety and fear. I told myself, "Never again, and I don't care if she's the sweetest girl on the planet. I WILL NOT live through this again." I met my wife, who watched her mother slowly fall apart in much the same way, and her grandfather before her who died literally right in front of her in his wheelchair. NOPE. I'm not doing this to myself. I'm not doing this to my children.

And yet I married the most precious woman to ever walk the earth knowing full well the road behind her. It's hard to put down in words what inspires that kind of turnaround in thinking, but I suppose I can only sum it up as she's worth more than avoiding the fear of the disease we both carry in our DNA. And I know if the worst ever happened I'd make it to the end of my life with absolutely no regrets in having married and shared that life with her. And I believe I owed it to our children to see them born; it was the least I could do. And when you meet that kind of person, after which nothing else matters, and you both feel it and you both know it, dealbreakers aren't really dealbreakers anymore.

And so I think the ultimate cruelty in marriage is NOT being honest about the bad stuff. By that I mean allowing yourself to be blinded by your "puppy love" and desperate need for another person that you don't see just how destructive being with that person will be. You ignore all the warning signs thinking you can avoid the worst. You CAN'T avoid the worst, though. The worst is deluding yourself, thinking you can change or that you can change the other person, imagining that the kinds of things I wrote about in the previous two paragraphs are going to make you the grand exception. You can defy the odds in an almost Superman kind of way. Well...you're NOT the exception, and if I'm being honest, neither am I. I'm not going to divorce my wife if she ever does develop diabetes and her limbs start falling off. All I've done is deeply reflected for a very, very long time on exactly what she means to me and what I know I can live with. I've discovered a lot of things about myself over the course of doing that. Deep down I'm still just an angry, self-absorbed child looking for answers. I know I can't change. So I ask, "why am I so angry? Why am I so immature? Do I love this woman? It it worth it to rise above my anger and immaturity? How do I rise above it? Will being a better person be good for her? Is being with her good for me?" So I know on a great number of things I've been off-base in the past. I've been honest with myself about that. And I've been honest with her about it, too, and I've said, "these things I'm NOT EVER going to compromise on. Period. Accept it or don't. You choose." And I accept everything that she is because there is something about her that makes sense where it didn't before with anyone else. The kind of person who has done nothing wrong and you cannot chase away even at your worst is probably the best person to make a life with. That is an easy person to love even when you're not. That is someone who's not going to leave you, and you don't want to be away from. If that's the person you're with, marry her. Make some babies. Teach those babies everything and don't shield them from the realities of your relationship with their mother. Let them see every day that a healthy relationship looks like, and let them know THAT is what is expected of them. Divorce shouldn't even be a word in your vocabulary.

No, codependence is not the same thing as attachment. Rather, codependence is attachment + clinginess + controlling behavior. Controlling behavior is part of NT behavior, and so is not even typical of neurodiverse people.

I think you can equate "in love" with infatuation and "love" with attachment. When I researched infatuation & attachment in neurodiversity I used the IAS scale, which is one of few scales that seem to measure infatuation and attachment only, without bringing sexuality & attachment types or other unrelated issues into it.

According to that scale, attachment is described by the following statements:
* I feel that I can count on him/her
* I am prepared to share my possessions with him/her
* I would feel lonely without him /her
* He/she is the one for me
* He/she knows everything about me
* I hope my feelings for him/her will never end
* I feel emotionally connected to him /her
* He/she can reassure me when I am upset
* He/she is the person who can make me feel the happiest
* He/she is part of my plans for the future

Infatuation is described like this:
* I stare into the distance while I think of him/her
* I get shaky knees when I am near him/her
* My feelings for him/her reduce my appetite
* My thoughts about him/her make it difficult for me to concentrate on something else
* I am afraid that I will say something wrong when I talk to him/her
* I get clammy hands when I am near him/her
* I become tense when I am close to him /her
* I have a hard time sleeping because I am thinking of him/her
* I search for alternative meanings to his/her words
* I am shy in the presence of him/her

It's of note that the items in both scales are highly correlated and confirmatory factor analysis gives reasonable confirmation that these traits can be described based on those to factors. You may note that things that are typically part of marriage vows also are included in the attachment scale, and so given there is attachment, these vows really aren't necessary. They are not enforced because of a marriage contract, but rather because of emotional attachment.

Sounds creepy to me.