He says he still loves me after all this time

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I'm not a young gal, and he's not a young man anymore, either.

We met and bonded intensely when we were youths. We were in love. I was his first love. We lost contact for decades when we lived in different countries. We didn't break up. We never fought. We never hurt each other. We just drifted away.

Neither of us are diagnosed, partly because the diagnosis didn't exist when we were kids. We meet most of the Aspie criteria, though, and score highly on the Autism Quotient test.

I wrote to him recently and, to my surprise, he never stopped loving me. Once we started talking again, I realized I never stopped loving him, either. We "get" one another in a way nobody else ever has.

He's married, quite unhappily, to a neurotypical woman. He avoids her because all his interactions with her are draining. She treats him borderline abusively because she cannot understand him. They are basically roommates and he has endured it all because he loves his kids.

What interests me is that he considers himself married to her on paper but married to me in an emotional, loving sense. He has felt, for decades, that being with other women was fundamentally unfaithful to me. I don't blame him for being with other women, though. It would be inhuman to expect him to be alone and celibate for decades.

This situation is unusual and confusing. He is currently working on getting a divorce. He wants to be free to marry me. (We still live far from one another and have not met in person.)

How can I help support him through the divorce? Her behavior to him will almost certainly get worse. He hates conflict and avoids it. He will probably be feeling emotions that he cannot articulate. I can't hug him from here. I will need to reassure him with words.

This sort of thing happens all the time. It’s not a rare thing at all.

At this point, I would seek to be his excellent friend.

That's not healthy.

He's put you on a pedestal. He's essentially used someone to create a family and a white picket fence life whilst pining after a figment of his imagination.

Did he really make a go of it? Imagine how his poor wife feels. She thought he loved her, when all these years he's been tied to this dream in his head. Is she abusive, or just hurt and experiencing difficulty expressing herself? Is she exasperated and at the end of her tether?

You've changed over the years. You are a human being, not a muse or a dream. Will he really be satisfied with reality? What issues did they have? How do you know even with all this love bombing will he bring the issues into your relationship?

Be careful.

When every day happens, love is tough.

You have not met up in person lately or you have never met in person?

If you have literally never met in person, I would suggest being highly cautious, as you have no idea what his real situation is like (being so far removed).

When he shows up with a divorce order then you can take him -- a man whom you have never met -- seriously?

Why did you write him, and did you know he was married when you did?

On the one hand it's a big compliment that he kept a flame burning all these years carrying romantic notions of a love lost.

On the other hand, its kind of weird and not very honest with his current family. He's ignorant of the golden rule that people change over time. The girl he loved in his youth is likely not the same person she was and neither is he.