TOUGH LOVE

When dating a closet aspie trying to pass as an NT, there will come a point in your courtship when you will realize that the more you've gotten to know your partner, the more she's distanced herself.

Now I am sure there are plenty of aspies on the market who are aware of and willing to talk (on and on and on and on) about their diagnosis, but Grace hadn't ever heard of Asperger's during the infancy of our courtship. She just felt like an alien (and sometimes acted like one) and wanted to keep these feelings and behaviors hushed.

The closer Grace and I became, the more I realized how aloof and private she was. There is always a shadow of mystery surrounding someone new you're dating... but after six months of dating, it isn't mysterious. It's just odd.

"Modern Love: Somewhere Inside, a Path to Empathy," is a great article about aspies and their partners (thanks to M. Chu for sending it to me), and it offers insight from the aspie point of view. David Finch is the fellow aspie; Kristen is his distraught wife, searching for reasons to understand why her husband has begun to feel like a stranger after two years of marriage:

“I don’t know when things got bad,” Kristen said, wiping away tears. “I feel like I’ve lost you and I don’t know what will bring you back.”

In reality she hadn’t lost me. She’d found me. The facade of semi-normalcy I’d struggled to maintain was falling away, revealing the person I’d been since childhood... During the years Kristen and I dated, I was on my best behavior. When I slipped, she seemed to find my eccentricity endearing... On a friendly level, and for short periods of time, I was able to sustain a wonderful version of myself... But Kristen was living with me [now, and] there was no longer anywhere ... to hide. [Read the entire article at here.]

Grace has restless leg syndrome (a condition where those suffering from it feel tingling sensations in their legs and incidentally need to jolt to shake out the tingling), and initially she would refuse to sleep next to me whenever she had really bad bouts of it. Sometimes she would just get up in the middle of the night to sleep on the couch. One night while grumbling and gathering her pillow to sleep outside, I told her, "Grace, if you need to kick it out, just kick it out!" And to this day I'll get startled awake to her rapid, Chun-Li kicks in bed.

And this is also how I approached her Asperger's. When I first became suspicious, I attempted to really embrace all of her odd behavior so that she didn't feel that she needed to hide away or be alone to be comfortable. And once you establish that trust (I won't get irritated when you start kicking your legs into the night. I won't make fun of your obsession with yo-yos. I will listen intently to your fun aspie fact of the day), she will gladly share her entire life with you.

My apologies for the infrequent updates.

I've become acquainted with a woman who married an aspie and bore an aspie son. My interview with her to come in the next few weeks!