Overcoming Relationship Communication Challenges

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I really appreciated this.

I ... am wondering if your wife has any thoughts about being sad because she wanted to share that experience with you especially ...?

This is Ara, I’m Michael’s wife and he asked me if I would answer your question.

I will answer your question in two parts. The first part is my initial realization that I was going to have to take my abstract or more conceptional conversation to my non-spectrum friends. This realization depressed me for about six months. Every time something came up that I wanted to share with him, I would stop myself and evaluate it. I would ask myself, “Is this really important to me?” Because if it was abstract in nature or primarily about my own perception of my experience and it didn’t hit a 9 on the scale of importance, I took it elsewhere. This meant that I was for the first time taking the majority of the things I care about, the majority of my personal experience, elsewhere. And so, yes, this was initially very lonely and sad.

But along with this sadness there were several added benefits that began to accumulate, as Michael expressed in the video. One was that the daily fights disappeared. Also, because I was sharing these stories with other (as Atwood puts it) Extreme NTs, I was getting the reaction I had longed for and didn’t get from Michael.

In reality, the communication issues Michael and I were experiencing were ones that most NTs and NT couples encounter. It is amplified when a couple includes someone on the spectrum.

And lastly, once I made the choice to take my conceptual conversations elsewhere. the communication that was based on Michael’s and my shared experience came to the forefront. This is something that is a little bit difficult for me to describe, but I can give an example. The thing is, most Aspie’s are extremely articulate and are often able to play with language… in Michael’s case, he is also quite funny and so when he plays with language he often does it with humor, adding another layer of meaning.

The best example I can give is one where Michael and I saw a play in Chicago called Waiting for Godot. In the play, two people for the entire play are waiting for someone who never shows up or who was there the whole time depending on how you want to look at it. They never leave the stage and no one else ever enters. To be an actor in this play takes brilliance and tremendous craft to keep an audience captivated by speaking for two hours with nothing else happening.

After the performance we had an opportunity to see one of the actors. We thanked him and then interestingly both of us spontaneously sort of bowed to him in a sort of reverence for what he had just done. The actors response was, “It was my difficult pleasure.” We were both blown away by his words, because of how true it was to the task we had just witnessed. But we also remarked at the line as we were leaving because it was very fitting a line to explain how we felt about each other in our marriage.

Over the years, at different times, Michael has found ways to say that line and always does so poignantly. He is threading it through. But this is one example of Michael fully and completely understanding something conceptual — but it isn’t me trying to convey a personal experience to him — it is us having a shared experience. That is something he is fully capable of doing. There are hundreds, rather, thousands of examples… and they are all complexly and elegantly woven into a unique vocabulary of our shared experience.

Compounding this, as Michael explains in his videos, we had a long series of difficult unfortunate circumstances. My illness in particular, combined with his being on the spectrum, isolated us for almost a decade. So much so that almost all of our experiences involved just the two of us… making it very much as if our world was just our world. We often felt as if there were only a few close friends who had any true understanding of our lives.

It is true that there is much that I don’t share with Michael about my day to day experience. But it has made what we do share more about our unique life together and has made our relationship life and shared language stronger and richer. And in the end, comforting rather than sad.