Aspergers Relationships: A Guide for the Neurotypical

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Greetings!

I'm an NT who's been in relationship with an Aspie for 4 years. We've had our ups and downs for sure. I've gotten really great feedback from those with ASD on various forums and I've read a ton!

I just discovered I cannot link to my new blog post because I'm a new user, but wanting to share the material. It's too long to outline here. I wrote a guide for NTs who are romantically involved with someone on the spectrum. Check out my site TheMentalHealthBlog.com. Under the Neurodiversity category you can find a couple of article's I've written on the subject.

I would love to make even a small difference for those of us in these mixed relationships because they can be so challenging. I hope some of you will check out the articles and provide me with feedback.

Peace

Why do you call them "mixed" relationships??? Are we black people and NTs white?

The constant swapping of "he" and "she" to describe an aspie partner is too much. Just use "they" or "he".

Also, that aspies don't lie and are logical are gross generalisations. I'll say it straight up: I'm sick of seeing people say this and it's total BS.

And IMO, using "your aspie" sounds like we are pet dogs to take care of.

Sorry, but that article rubbed me up the wrong way. There's some good things in it, like not to ask open-ended questions.

You crack me up - anyone spending 2 or 3 days on this site will know how right you are

I'm capable of lying and I certainly have before, but I hate the feeling of it and I try to avoid lying if at all possible.

I suppose it's a misinterpretation of factual (as opposed to emotional) communication style.
We can lie but we usually have to do it conciously. There is no "I meant X but I said Y to communicate the emotion of Z (and it's obvious, as my mother would add)".

Thanks for the info. Will have a look. Have quite a bit of experience with AS-NT relationships myself. Currently looking for another person with HFA/Asperger's, because I haven't had the best luck with NTs.

I read this and quite honestly I think it's mostly correct. It's presented at a high level and mostly deals with generalities. That's fine so long as the author suggests further reading, which she does. One item she doesn't say much about is sex, to be specific that I don't think a man who is on the spectrum can understand a partner who withholds sex as a way to assert control in a relationship. Similarly, he won't understand his partner's need to be in the right mood before being receptive to sex and won't intuitively know how to go about getting her into the mood. If the woman has prior experience with men who are good at this, her relationship with her aspie partner will deteriorate into a nightmare of mutual recriminations very quickly.

I found the article very helpful in explaining what the other half might be going through. I'll keep that in mind in my future relationships.

My girlfriend is an Aspie who is incapable of lying. She can lie by omission or let others do the talking for her but she cant lie herself. However I'm an Aspie who can lie & is fairly good at it. I just usually don't see much of a reason to. I was in trouble aLOT as a kid & people didn't listen to me or understand when I tried to explain what was really going on. I kinda learned to make up stories that were sometimes more believable & made me look less bad. I know I sometimes deserved to be in trouble but lots of times I was just reacting to things around me or I couldn't get my needs met & others did NOT understand that so i had to come up with explanations that were understandable & believable.

Is this for a class project? The layout is clean, but it doesn't add anything new or insightful. It isn't bad, I just don't see it being a value add in terms of the blogosphere if you are looking for and revenue or sustainability.

The stock photos were unpleasant to look at. They left me disinterested in the topic. Lightbulb man could have just as easily been Dr. Manhattan. That actually would have been pretty cool.

A more common and more precise term for "these mixed relationships" is "neurodiverse couples."

Anyhow, thanks for posting this! I'll add your articles to my list of pages of constructive advice for neurodiverse couples, a list I'll eventually publish on my website.

A few suggestions about your article Aspergers Relationships: A Guide for the Neurotypical:

1) Make it clearer that autism, including the subset that used to be called "Aspergers," is very heterogeneous. For example, instead of just saying, "Aspies tend to be logical and literal," perhaps say, "Many (though not all) Aspies tend to be logical and literal." Likewise, instead of "One amazing quality that Aspie partners have is the virtual inability to lie," perhaps say, "One amazing quality that many (though not all!) Aspie partners have is the virtual inability to lie."

2) You have a paragraph that says, "Communication may also be hampered by alexithymia. Alexithymia is the difficulty identifying and expressing emotions. Many people on the autistic spectrum experience alexithymia," ending with a comma rather than a period. I wonder if you meant to say more in that last sentence but inadvertantly left it out.

3) About "mind-blindness": While some of this is intrinsic to some neurological traits of some autistic people, such as alexithymia and attention issues, a large part of so-called "mind-blindness" is really just due to the fact that people in general, NT's as well as autistic people, have difficulty empathizing with people who are very different from themselves. (For example, many NT's have difficulty empathizing even with other NT's who are of different cultural backgrounds or of different socioeconomic classes.) Thus there is a big mutual empathy problem between NT's and autistic people simply because of being very different from each other. So there is mutual "mind-blindness," not just Aspie "mind-blindness" -- and, from the NT's side, it's exacerbated by NT privilege. I think it's important to point out the mutual empathy problem in your article, so that NT's realize that they too need to learn to empathize with their Aspie partners, rather than blaming the latter for all misunderstandings.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 24 Feb 2020, 4:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The companion article Neurotypicals in Love: Why Do They Do That? similarly uses the phrase "your NT" a lot. So they're mutual pets, I guess?

I too would find the phrase "your Aspie" objectionable were it not for that symmetry. But with that symmetry, it's less objectionable.

It would be good if each article could end with a link to the other one.

Anyhow, the article for Aspies contains the following:


Yes, made my head spin. Good example -- if indeed most NT's can actually perceive all those things simultaneously, even among people they don't already personally know very well. Can they? (The example didn't specify how well all these hypothetical people knew each other.)

Not sure all NTs can do all that. Based on my observations, many can. It would require a couple of minutes to perceive all these interactions, but it would be natural for the NT. It might be instantaneous if this was a group which knew one another very well.