Married to someone with Asperger's/ASC: support thread 6

[Daftasabroom]

New thread, and as previously:

This thread is for partners seeking to understand the dynamics of their relationship with someone with ASD. It is a support thread, and a safe space to have a bit of a rant. Avoid sweeping generalisations if possible, try and keep it specific to you and your partner. (ASD partners welcome to lurk or pop in, but please don't argue with other posters and tell them they are wrong).

Yes I recognised both of those scenarios, especially the criticism one.

There’s much in this one (asdmarriage.com/2022/03/24/the-adversarial-dynamic-of-a-neurodiverse-marriage/) that resonates with my experience with my H.

If it were simply that he felt anxious and criticised, I could have found ways

I am not sure there are ways, or if there are I have never found them. My H always thinks he is right but also feels criticised by whatever I say that is not overt praise. I can say over and over that I am trying to make things better between us, but he just angrily replies that I am not. I have never found a way around this.

I read through all that and thought ‘demand avoidance’ and then it said it at the end - DS has that.

Parts of this are true. He definitely came to see me as the enemy. He has set household tasks which he feels he should do, and doing them - in his eyes- makes him a good husband, but refuses any conversation where I seek to show him this is nowhere near half of the family load. He doesn’t see any of the work involved in having kids, so nothing I do there is even acknowledged, let alone appreciated. His chores essentially have not changed since having kids. He gets very angry if I try to talk about this and accuses me of saying he does nothing.

Its just so wearing having the exact same arguments over and over and over.

Exactly the same. DH only wants to focus on his job to the exclusion of everything and everyone else.

When I have tried to discuss it over the years I just get anger back at me. Raging anger as though I am trying to take away something fundamentally important to him. I bought him an anger management book, a book on workaholism, various other self help books. Of course he read none of them. Doesn’t want to change.

Before my mum fell ill I used to go and stay with her, take the kids. For a couple of weeks. That would knock some sense into him. He’d be alone and realise that some compromise was needed. But the compromises have been hard won.

these days I don’t bother. All the fight in me is gone. He can work himself to the bone if he wishes to and he does seem to want to do that so I let him get on with it.

The resentment it causes is huge though. We’ve been out once as a couple in the last three years. He lasted 2 hours. It was a small party on our street.

It’s the lack of attention that hurts the most. It’s like I’m invisible, like I don’t matter. Any needs I have are superfluous to his job and career. He spends all his weekends preparing for the week ahead. Going to the gym, going for a run. We have completely separate lives. He never looks after the children anymore. Never been to their birthday parties, never been to their schools. Never done anything. I have done it all. Massive resentment.

Sorry to all of you. This was my life.

Ex wanted 50/50 dc because could not understand everything I did. I even printed off the wifework list and showed it and still refused. Admitting wrong is impossible.

So we tried 50/50 living under same roof and separated but it was nightmare. Then we went to 65/35..now we are pretty much 80/20. She also does CMS maintenance amount to the exact pound because 'that's the law'.

But I'm free
DC see it for what it is. And even though they know her struggles it hurts them. But they're better off.
It's not ablest to say that. I actually feel incredibly sad she's not a great mum. I feel sad for her as I know she wants to be. But honestly it's not my lives work to support her at the detriment to myself. It also takes me away from supporting my dc emotionally. But you'll Need to work it through with a counsellor.

DW once admitted to being stubborn......

DH only got how hard it was to look after two small dcs when he ended up looking after then EOW (I was working).
Then and only then did he realise that there was a reason why there was still a few tips lying around on the floor at 8.00pm when he came back from work….

Tbh leaving him to it taught him a lot on what to do with the dcs.
AND in retrospect, MIL had done an amazing job at teaching that cooking/cleaning/parenting is the responsibility of BOTH parents

That is more than my husband has ever admitted 😂

Yes you have the feed children dinner EVERYday. This requires buying food in advance and timing it to be around normal meal times.

Yes school do send a lot of requests for money and paperwork it's not a new thing. Our DC are teens!

To be fair this is probably typical of a lot of families... difference being that usually there's some division of labour even if on sexist terms. I had no interest in being a 1950s housewife to another woman, one that is extremely difficult to live with, and it didn't even come with being financially supported as that was quite erratic too. But the capacity to see my side of the story came out in counselling. I was told to give up on her being able to cope or see this. So effectively she was let off the hook. This is extremely unfair. I get that if a disability was physical in nature then there would also be an unbalance and I'm not comparing, but it's extremely frustrating when you see them holding down a fantastic job which drains them so much they've nothing left for you but your career has been decimated by being an unofficial carer so you're stuck really!

To be fair; it was over twenty years ago - probably our first few weeks together.

I'm an occasional lurker but I was on the earlier incarnations of these threads.

I've been married a long, long time to, I strongly suspect, ASD DH, and we have two teens diagnosed, plus grown up children, one of whom has been diagnosed as an adult, and another who is thinking about looking into it.

I wanted to say thank you very much for the piece about adversarial partners. That describes my DH to a tee (although he is softening and easier to deal with as he gets older).

Reading that page this morning was the first time I have ever heard anyone describe or explain the behaviour that I've lived with all these years. I have literally told him that he feels like an adversary or an enemy hundreds of times. That has given me lots to think about - it never occurred to me that it was a common problem.

I remember once my husband (when we were dating) was accusing me of going on a date with another man because I'd decided to have a day in the city myself (he was overseas). When I got home I said I wanted an apology for his arsey behaviour but he wanted me to apologise first! When I said I'd not done anything wrong he said "just think of something". WTF.

I'm a long term lurker but wanted to say that the adversarial DH rings so true in our marriage. I have often said it feels like I have a (another) teenager in the house. DH only does stuff that he wants to. I have struggled to articulate what I need because to me it's just obvious basically I want a partner to share my life with but it doesn't work that way

I think the adversarial thing is adult PDA and anxiety. The 2 are one in the same. If you don't understand what's happening from a social communication perspective you jump to conclusions.
My divorce was extremely difficult for this reason. I can't post the things that happened though as too outing.
Incidentally this is why there's suspected Borderline personality disorder. It's trauma based

Omg this is my life... still my life as have to coparent! I could have written that

It's a Shame there's no tips.

The only thing that works in my experience is saying 'don't bother then' and walking away. It works some of the time but not all!

Also not expecting anything. Then if you get something it's a bonus...picking your battles.
Its pretty miserable though. I wasn't able to not care. I think where I've seen in work is in partnerships where one partner is happy to take it all on

My relationship with DW has been a journey, initially I just felt taken for granted this developed into extreme passive aggression which I never felt sat right and I thought of it more as passive control, I don't know how many times I googled adversarial defiance. Learning about pathological demand avoidance was a revelation.

But it's not consistent. If I suggest we go for a walk she will invariably turn me down, if I do convince her she will either lag back or race ahead and generally make the whole experience pretty frustrating. If a friend suggests a walk she jumps at it. It's really complex.

I learned quickly to have very firm boundaries and to never show weakness, to counter the constant gleeful refusal to be a partner. The part in that piece about the ASD partner getting a dopamine hit says it all really.

I just said 'fine', when he said no, and did it myself. When he would wrestle to car keys out of my hand, I bought my own car. When he tried to stop me accessing money, I changed jobs and earned more. I could see it was anxiety driven, but there was lots of pleasure for him in assuming he was the boss and trying to sabotage family life.

It's a shame because he missed out on so much. He is missing from so many family photos because he'd refused to come, or plenty of times he was sitting outside in the car, refusing to join in.

Funnily enough, he now hates missing out on anything. He's older and wiser.

He is also like a truculent teen on a dog walk with me, but would happily agree to trot along with anyone outside the family. The fear of being unmasked as 'not NT' is a deep one.

It's so insidious. I hadn't actually realised how shrunk my life had become. I'm finding the freedom quite scary. I'm left with few friends and have become extremely self reliant for company too.

@Anotherpairofshoes
I have struggled to articulate what I need because to me it's just obvious

I have to state exactly what I need and/or provide/organise it myself. DH is extremely unlikely to do anything spontaneously.

There's a lot in the link posted earlier. This particularly sounds like my DH -

Seeking control to cope with anxiety, and perceived injustice

This related article rings true to my relationship as well:-

asdmarriage.com/2022/01/31/the-life-cycle-of-a-neurodiverse-relationship/

This one too. (Despite saying earlier that I have to ask clearly for what I need, actually I don't ask for much compared to what I do for DH and the kids.)

asdmarriage.com/2022/01/30/why-do-nt-wives-minimize-their-needs/