To think his behaviour at the zoo was OTT?

[Rizzo8]

My partner and I are on holiday and decided to go to a local zoo. I thought we'd spend some time there then have the rest of the day together to do something else. He is high functioning autistic and acts accordingly at times, so that point matters.

Turns out the zoo is huge and endless. We finally finished walking round the first side after 4 hours!! Around this time I had an Endo flare up and started feeling unwell. I was done and ready to go but partner got annoyed saying the zoo was expensive (it was) and he wanted to make sure he saw everything! He said it was important to him!

That its the same if he goes to a museum, he needs to see everything but has never acted like this. And as this can't trump me feeling ill so in the end he relented. He was nice and comforting eventually, but not before pouting about having to leave. I couldn't believe how childish this was.

AIBU? It really had me thinking twice about things.

A grown man pouting because he doesn't get to see caged animals suffering in a zoo, that he's already been looking at for several hours? Not caring that his girlfriend is feeling unwell?

Yeah, unless he's under the age of five he sounds pretty ridiculous.

I would have left for the hotel. He could catch up later.

He has a point.
If I go somewhere to visit something then I want to spend as much time as I can there / see everything there.
That's pretty normal behaviour whether you are ND or not.

Re you feeling unwell, I think that depends.
Would sitting at the hotel be any easier than sitting on a bench or in a cafe whilst he went off to see more? How far from the hotel were you ? How easy would it be for you to go back on your own ?
If I were with my partner at something they were enjoying and wanting to see more of, and I started feeling unwell, I would go and get a drink and find somewhere to sit and rest there.

@NewName24 we did have a rest, we stopped for a drink and a snack by but this didn't really help. I felt I was going to drop and it became physically difficult to keep moving. The zoo was up and down lots of hills.

In the end I went home to sleep and he came with me and fell asleep as well! Endo flare ups are exhausting for me and come out of nowhere. Sitting on a bench is not the same as being in bed.

I could have gone back on my own. The issue is I understand where he's coming from but I also can't force my body to do something it can't. The day before we walked all over the city and that was fine because no flare up.

I think yabu cos it's not as tho he didn't leave. He was just disappointed about leaving. As an autistic person I guess he just says what he feels. But he did acknowledge you feeling ill is more important than his need to see all of the zoo. And he did agree to leave.
So nothing has really happened here.
But he's autistic so you might be waiting a looong time if you expect him to automatically not express what he thinks are his logical feelings for fear it may be taken as hurtful by someone.
I'd just let this go tbh.
If he'd refused to leave and forced you to go round the whole zoo that's a different story.
But basically he just got briefly annoyed that things didn't go how he expected them to go.
I think that's probably the best you can expect. I have autistic friends who would be like this. 'High functioning' but yeah they will get annoyed if a plan changes. They had an idea of how to do things then that suddenly has to change. They paid money to do something they now won't be doing. Yeah they'd get upset.
The issue is if they carry on being unreasonable. They can't help initially getting upset about it. That's part and parcel of being autistic.

Is it Prague zoo by any chance as that zoo is a pain in the ass for walking. Honestly I’d have gone back on my own and left him to it.

I had an Endo flare up

Can someone explain what this is please?

I’d have gone back to the hotel on my own and left him to it. Ridiculous behaviour.

Endometriosis

Honestly,

If I was your OH and knew that you were 'done and ready to go and then you had a convenient flare up I'd be pretty pissy as well.

You were looking for him to understand your illness and make accommodations for it. Are you being as understanding and making accommodations for his disability as you want him to be for you?

My dh is autistic, you don't have to stay with him but if you do you do have to have a level of understanding that he does have a disability. Sometimes that disability will manifest itself in ways you find difficult to understand. He did leave with you, he did give you the 'comfort' you needed. Did you do the same for him?

Endometriosis causes pelvic pain mostly, sometimes back pain. Usually around menstruation but it can occur outside that time.

@AllHisCaterpillarFriends why? I was done and ready to go because I had a flare up. Not before.

I also felt sad and let down by my body yesterday as I wished I had been up to all of it but I just wasn't.

Like you said, he's autistic. They have obsessive behaviours and once they start something, they have this deep-seated compulsion to finish it. This was a trigger for your partner. However, he is still an adult and capable of going to a Zoo in the first place. I would have gone and sat down while he finished it by himself.

I think you need to have a firm talk with him and advise while you understand his Neurodiverse nature - He is still an adult capable of making better choices and being mindful.

I don’t really see why this was an issue. If this was my DH and me, and one of us wanted to leave, the other would just stay and we would meet at the hotel, or in a cafe later.

For me my stomach swells so I look 6 months pregnant
I get pain that is uncontrollable despite dihydrocodeine, naproxen, morphine etc
I have to be on all fours and focus on breathing through it or vocalising the pain

It can be on my period or not and I can go from fine to "please call an ambulance" in minutes

Exactly and it's the unpredictability of it that caused an issue to him as an ND person that needs to have a routine and plan the can follow.

He said I should have let him know about the flare up so we could change plans. I had to explain it was impossible for me to do this because it came out of nowhere.

I just want to add to my post and say that if you do decide to stay with him things will probably get easier. In your example after 20 odd years dh knows that I wouldn't nope out of a day out unless I was feeling really ill so straight away he would show concern and make sure I was OK. I also know dhs triggers, I know what is likely to unsettle him, know when he will be feeling overstimulated, basically I know when he needs me to show care to him.

It just took us longer to get used to each other if that is the right wording than it might do in a neurotypical couple. Having a 'firm talk' would have done nothing at all to help the situation. You can't firmly talk someone out of a disability.

Think he is reasonable in wanting to visit the whole zoo.

you say you thought you would see a bit and then spend rest of day doing something else, but had you actually discussed that before you went? or was it your presumption?

obviously your health deteriorated and you wanted to leave, but had you not been feeling unwell why would you have wanted to leave before you’d seen it all if your partner was particularly enjoying it?

maybe you could have left your partner to enjoy the rest of the zoo and reconvened later.

Ahh, yep, I recognise this! My DH is autistic and really struggles when stuff doesn't go to plan, I'm AuDHD, and I do struggle too, but I think am a little more flexible than he is. I also think I've learned (through female socialisation mainly) not to externalise how I feel if someone with me is ill or tired or something and that changes our plans. I will cope in the moment and then have a shutdown later - the anxiety and awful feelings that come up when something is changed at short notice get squished because I am absolutely able to objectively see that another person's health and wellbeing comes first. But my experience of classically autistic men is that they don't/can't filter so much - maybe partly wiring and partly male socialisation.

It sounds like he was able to externalise, cope and then step up though, which is a good thing. I completely get that an autistic reaction, to a non-autistic person, can seem childish and OTT, but it's sometimes better to self-regulate through getting the feelings out and then you can reorientate, rather than trying to fake being supportive and sulking, or bottling it up like I often do and then ending up having to go to bed for 4hrs!

Interestingly it sounds like he was quite tired too but maybe didn't realise it. That may have contributed to how he reacted too. Autistic folks often have poor interoceptive awareness, which means we are not always able to discern when hungry, tired, thirsty, etc. If you combine that with the laser focus monotropism that many of us also have, it can be a pretty bad recipe for getting very focused on a thing (such as seeing an entire zoo) and ignoring all bodily needs to achieve it. Because we can tune out messages from our own bodies until they are literally screaming at us, it can feel baffling to that a neurotypical person would need to stop a thing they really want to do because of pain or fatigue. Like, where's your override switch? Oh wait, you mean not everyone has one?! 😂

Look not all people with ASD blurt out whatever random thought they might have. They can learn what is appropriate behaviour. I know many people on the spectrum - maybe my choice of career - and they do learn appropriate behaviour.

My son is autistic and he always needs to do everything/complete things before he can leave.

By masking?

Autistic people can't just temporarily stop being autistic. We can sometimes mask but it doesn't always work. It's hard to describe to a neurotypical person just how unbearable it feels when plans are thwarted. If it's not something related to a special interest, the awful feeling subsides after a short while, but we genuinely can't help our immediate reactions. It would be even better for us than it would be for you if we could put autism on pause in these situations, so it follows that we're not reacting this way on purpose.

For me, the difference would be how he acted afterwards once he had calmed down. You haven't given much information on this but him blaming you for not letting him know about the flare up in advance seems like a bigger problem in terms of his insight into how his autism makes him think than his initial reaction at the zoo.