Me again 
As I said above, there's so much I wanted to comment on, especially as a lot of it was directed at or in reply to me. Some of the comments made have actually helped me clarify my own thoughts about my DH's Aspergers and ASD in general. So my following points come from a place of reflection, not conflict.
"In your case, I understand what you're saying about thinking the traits were non permanent problems caused by something outside the individual and that learning it's a part of them that won't change is hard to accept"
This isn't quite what I meant @Seline although I think that probably may well be the case with some people. I always thought that some of this behaviour was "a part" of my DH's character rather than outside him. But I thought it was wilfully done and that because he chose to do it, he could as easily choose not to do it. Accepting that a lot of it is down to ASD and therefore is part of how he is wired rather than due to his intentions is why I'm staying rather than leaving. It means I can understand DH and see that his intentions a lot of the time aren't, well, twatty. I can change the way I communicate with him. Now, this is in the context that (a) I love and desire my DH, (b) he brings strengths to our relationship and to our parenting that I don't have, and on balance there is a lot that is wonderful and supportive about our relationship and (c) he is willing to try and change certain destructive ways of communicating (after our child's therapist said he had to). There have been times I've wanted to leave - but I've had a 20years+ plus relationship, so not unusual surely - and I won't rule it out in the future if the certain destructive ways of communicating don't change. Everyone has their line, and all of our lines are going to be different.
Now I'll be honest. I think part of the reason I stay with a partner with ASD is because he is very, very high functioning and perhaps only does have strong traits rather than ASD. Same with my dc1- never any speech or other learning delay, communication that is over 90% higher than NT people their age, top sets in a mainstream school, never needed any one-to-one in class ... but they still have ASD and this causes them problems and causes them to exhibit behaviour that causes us as a family problems.
When my dc1 was diagnosed with ASD, they were diagnosed in London by a world-leading centre with expertise on autism. It was them who told me that 'Aspergers' was no longer a diagnosis in the diagnostic criteria because they used DCM-5. So apologies for technically getting that wrong, but I think you'll be hard pushed to find any child diagnosed in the last three years with Aspergers in the UK - as far as I can tell it's all ASD.
What's interesting for me with the terms is that traditionally Aspergers was essentially viewed as a very high-functioning subset of autism. Which is why I asked AutisticHedgehog for clarification on her statistic that under 16 per cent "of Aspies" didn't have a full-time job. She's come back and described those people as having autism rather than aspergers, which makes sense and is what I was expecting. My DH and the many people with Aspergers we know ALL have full-time jobs - in fact most of them are high-earning. This is the level of 'functioning' I'm talking about, not a partner who couldn't cope with a full-time job. I''m not in a relationship with someone with that level of need and disability.