Suspected ASD DH, not sure I can handle it anymore

[Itsonthetopshelf]

Been with DH 10 years, married for 5 and we have a small DC under 1. DH has always been quirky and quite selfish but I think since DC it’s all become a lot more apparent and his lack of empathy, particularly towards me, is pushing me to think about ending the marriage. I am 100% sure DH has undiagnosed ASD (and I think ADHD too, I know they are often linked) and so I feel that this is just the way he is and he will never change.

I’d love to know if anyone else has had children with diagnosed or undiagnosed ASD DH/DP and how this was for you - did things get better as DC got older?

also any experiences of separating with a very small child - the idea of a shared custody arrangement kills me and I do 99% of DC care, I don’t think overnight stays etc without me at this point would be appropriate or kind to DC. What arrangements did you have?

I have tried to keep this brief but there are endless things DH does that are just getting me to the end of my tether e.g obsessions with hobbies, collecting and hoarding expensive items, lack of understanding of anyone else’s experiences or feelings, lack of friends, strange social behaviour etc.

At this point the only thing keeping me in the marriage is not wanting to rip up our ‘nice’ life, lose our home and enter into a difficult custody arrangement.

OP, several people on this thread have suggested therapy or relationship counselling. I would strongly advise against this unless you are working with a counsellor who specialises in autism, and preferable how it affects relationships.

Oh and OP, don't listen to the smears against the support thread. Give it a go and form your own opinion.

yes give it a go, it’s been helpful to me. I am diagnosed ADHD but still I struggle with my partners traits. It is good to get as many different perspectives as possible and then fit them in with your life and make a personalised path to go forward. People’s opinions are that, opinions, they are not facts.

I think my husband probably has ASD. Although that is an armchair diagnosis we have 2 children with ASD and I diagnose ASD for a living, so I think it is pretty accurate.

I remember when my littlest was a few months old. My mum agreed to have my oldest three overnight before mother's day. I was exhausted due to having 4 under 7. The baby woke at 5am and I breastfed him for about 40 minutes. At that point, I thought, it's mother's Day, the baby is fed, the elder three aren't here. I could sleep!. I woke up my husband and asked him to take the baby for me so I could sleep. He said no because I had not given him warning the night before so he wasn't prepared. He rolled over and went back to sleep. I remember taking the baby downstairs and crying with him on the sofa and thinking that I should end it because he clearly didn't care for me. If I put that story on AIBU, I would be told to leave him.

However, the back story is that he is an evening person and I am a morning person. I routinely wake at five. I have always gotten up with the children. He would plan when to go to sleep depending on when he was going to wake up. If I wanted a lay in, and I told him so, he would go to bed earlier. In his head, the routine and the procedure hadn't been followed, so he didn't get up. He didn't think twice about it. He did usually do all getting up with the children at night before about 1-2am because he was up (apart from for breast feeds obviously).

Tbf he finds things I do absolutely infuriating. Such as stacking obligations one after the other, so we are rushing about all day. I can't stop doing it because I get bad FOMO. Drives him crazy, but he puts up with it because he knows that I kind of can't help it.

If something really bothers me. I draw a really clear line in the sand. But this tends to be when he's having a go at something im doing rather than getting him to change.

Your choice here (whether or not your husband has ASD), is whether you can accept the difference and roll with the punches or whether you can't. And to be honest, he has the same choice. I love my husband and our quirky family, so if I want a lie in, I give him notice. He does love me and just sighs and asks for a list when I tell him we have 14 things going on next Saturday.

Our children are a delightful mix of his rigidity and my chaos. Amusingly, he is much more understanding of their chaos than me and I'm much more understanding of their rigidity than him.

https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/professional-practice/autism-and-empathy

If you are thinking this is unbearable at this stage, just wait until your DC gets older.

It will be like pushing water uphill.

I would get out now before your DC becomes aware of a very unhappy household.

Sorry, I don’t know how to do a partial quote. My DH could NOT give me a lie in when the kids were babies. But he’s a night owl so I would sleep 830-3am and he would stay up until 3am. It took lots of tries and anger before we found that

This.

and this.

That's a perfectly natural feeling, those of us who have seoerated with children go through all the stages of grief, guilt, shame etc. It's not what anybody plans. How much custody would he realistically ask for?
I have autistic 6 year old who sees her dad twice a week, once for tea, and one overnight stay

I've been in a very similar situation to you. Kids are now early teens and if I could wish for something, more than anything in the world it's that I'd got out of this relationship when the kids were very young. It's so hard to live with someone who is like this.

I live with my ex and am literally counting down the years until I can get out ('only' 9 years to go ..) and I'm gutted that I will have wasted so much of my life living with this man. His autism wasn't an issue until my middle child was a toddler and since then he has got worse and worse. Definitely having kids and living in a family triggered him and he cannot tolerate being with other people at all.

It may be worth reading up on "the double empathy problem" OP. Some of the other posters on the thread could do with doing so as well, clearly!

www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/professional-practice/double-empathy

It's exhausting OP. You won't research your way out of it unfortunately. I highly doubt you can therapy your way out of it either. You're not the only one to be in this position, and you really can't understand it until you've experienced it, but there are definitely people out there who hear you and do understand how helpless and alone you feel. It is maddening and desperately sad. I have never tried harder at anything in my life than making that marraige work, but it takes two putting in equal effort and when one is oblivious to any issue you're left with throwing your hands up and accepting a lifetime of loneliness and desperation and what feels like madness, or you save yourself and you walk away.

I am happily divorced, truly, and there is not a second that has passed since where I wonder if I did the right thing. It would have been a terrible waste of life, and a shocking example to give DC of what a loving communicative healthy muturally supportive relationship should look like. I tried, believe me, everything I could think of, for several years and it just deteriorated overall with intermittent spikes of what was seemingly understanding which would then wane and back to square one. It's hard to know exactly what was going on, it is nothing I've experienced before, or since, and it's not a situation I would ever wish on anyone.

Do what you need to do, you will get through it, I would suggest that divorce is harder on DC with every year that passes.

I sound like your DH! Ex-DW and I separated late last year after approx 9 years together and DD was 5. From what you wrote and my experience separation is probably the best option - it just won't improve.

I would say we were just incompatible and I was just as miserable as she was but I could never talk about it. Now she seems happy to have her freedom and her house how she likes it, none of my endless stuff increasing by the week!

It has certainly been hard for me, a year on and whilst I'm happier my life is still chaotic and I haven't been able to fully establish a new routine so feel like I'm winging various important tasks on a week by week basis. I have DD most weekends Friday to Sunday.

One thing that frustrates me on a lot of these threads is the use of Autism and lack of empathy to justify selfish, mean and generally awful behaviour - typically by the man and the woman has no choice but to deal with it.

Those behaviours are nothing to do with Autism or even related to empathy?

If the person is successful in their work then surely they have an ability to adapt to external changes. It might be very difficult, it was for me, but as a capable adult I worked it out and pushed through. I quite often have to walk away in the house on the verge of a panic attack but I don't just opt out of parenting.

Also reading up to understand the interaction of autism and empathy. It is not straightforward. Many non-autistic people have lower levels emotional or cognitive empathy, or both, than a particular autistic person may have because empathy isn't part of the diagnostic criteria for autism therefore of course there will be huge variations between empathy levels in all individuals whether autistic or not.

However, autistic people tend to have higher emotional empathy than the average non-autistic person, meaning they "feel others' pain" more intensely. This also explains why autistic people go to such great lengths to comply with the preferences and expectations of others to the extent that it causes damage to their health and often total burnout. This finding of higher than average EE in autistic people demonstrates that the characterisation of austistic people as selfish or not caring about others is simply not true, quite the opposite. Of course SOME autistic people may be like that, but they are an anomaly as you'd have in any group of people on any characteristic, and it has nothing to do with them being autistic: such a person would be an outlier in the autistic population.

Non-autistic people tend to have higher cognitive empathy and lower emotional empathy (cognitive empathy essentially being able to tell what other people are thinking. Hardly surprising that NT people score higher on this because NT people are the majority and it's easier for them to understand each other whereas autistic people often find their behaviour very confusing so obviously will score lower on CE because the majority of people are less similar to them so are more difficult to understand!).

It is the relationship between how much EE and CE a specific person has, and how much of each the person they are interacting with has, that is important for mutual empathy and understanding in a relationship. It fundamentally misrepresents the issue to characterise a lack of mutual understanding as a problem with the autistic person because they don't conform to a specific NT person's preferences for how empathetic responses should be expressed when it is simply a mismatch that is the issue (which could - and frequently does - also occur between two mismatched people who are both NT and have different balances of EE and EC).

There is a lot of evidence now that the stereotypical and inaccurate claims that autistic people lack empathy are (ironically) often made by people who lack empathy themselves and are therefore unable to understand that different people express empathy in different ways. These types of people generally also struggle to interact and build lasting relationships with other NT people who are very different to them, not just with ND people.

Absolutely.

I hope you’re doing okay @Itsonthetopshelf and that the shared experiences and solidarity have been useful 💐

Do you are making (false and horrendous) generalisations about autistic people based on a husband you had who had no autism diagnosis, because you thought that you could attiribute his unpleasant character to autism. Yeah... exactly the point. You are denigrating autistic people on the basis pf a sample of one person who only has your armchair diagnosis of autism. And based on the comments you make about autistic people and your misconceptions about it, may well not be autistic at all because most of what you site as the reasons for believing he is autistic have nothing at all to do with autism. 🤦🏻‍♀️

I also hope you're ok @Itsonthetopshelf . Sadly much of this thread has been taken over by the army of people from the toxic "support group" of people who write horrific things about their partners attributing them to autism, when many of their partners haven't even been diagnosed with autism and the behaviours they describe are nothing to do with autism. It's awful misinformation and prejudice is spread in this manner, but also quite sad for them that they've convinced themselves that autism is the thing they can hate and hang their bitterness on when in fact it has no relevance to their circumstances in most cases.

Your situation sounds very difficult, and I hope that the invasion of bitter people who hate autistic people hasn't made things worse when you were looking for support and practical ideas.

I think understanding each other is critical. Therapy is a really good idea. If you believe your husband is autistic then encourage him to seek diagnosis because the self-understanding that comes with that can be transformational for him, and for your relationship. Also seek therapy as a couple to work through these issues. But whether he's autistic or not, the first couple of years with a young baby are incredibly hard for most people. It's a huge adjustment and a new phase of life and often both parents are exhausted and stressed and people have different coping mechanisms that may clash so communication is key and therapy may well help you reestablish that.

Personally I'd not be breaking up a family in what is expected to be a period of turmoil without working on things first as what you're experiencing is far from abnormal for the period immediately after a baby arrives. It's not the time for life-altering choices (for your child as well) when everything has been thrown up in the air.

Life is long (if we're lucky) and rash decisions don't tend to play out well in general.

I don't think that anywhere I have armchair diagnosed anyone with ASD. I merely recognise the OP's predicament. I said he was undiagnosed, because he is undiagnosed, but he could very well be diagnosed with any number of things, all of them equally as difficult to remain married to.

...in addition, he didn't particularly have an unpleasant character. Just a complete and utter incomprehension of the situation that presented itself often, and an inability to be able transfer his thoughts and feelings and behaviour from one situation to another. It was a bit like being married to a robot that hadn't had the full programme uploaded correctly, if that rings a bell for you then so be it.

Someone above mentioned that if someone is successful at work then surely they would be able to try a bit harder at home and make things work. Not the case on the ground unfortunately, although you would think so wouldn't you.

Similar here. Hubby asd , 2 kids too. It's a new discovery after 18 years together and I am seeing our life in a whole new way... the past 18 years have been the " me " show, he just follows me along. I just thought he was quiet and laid back, but it's caused me a tonne of stress. I am the only neurotypical in the house. We make it work because I have to run everything it's exhausting. But... we make it work to keep the family together. We have became more like friends now...a different type of love I feel for him. Yes I have made the choice to love him as a family and friend but we have no romantic life ( I pulled away and use the excuse of being too stressed with out asd kids, which is true) it's how I make it work and keep us all together.

To add he is OK with us not being romantic and lovey dovey, as long as I give him some affection occasionally lol. We have come to an agreement I guess that this is how our relationship has become. It is sad. But I'm constantly in survival mode.

In my case I had no knowledge of asd or that he was that until our 1st was diagnosed at age 9. Too late by that point, but... what was meant to be an all that ! It's hard being a human lol