Married to someone with Asperger’s/ASD/ND: support thread 17

[SpecialMangeTout3]

New thread.
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This thread is for those of us seeking to explore the dynamics of long term relationships with our ND partners. Some of us are ND ourselves, very many of us have ND children. It is a support thread, and a safe space, it does get emotional at times. Avoid sweeping generalisations if possible, try and keep it specific to you and your partner.
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It's complicated and it's emotional.
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The old thread is here.
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/relationships/5355546-married-to-someone-with-aspergersasdnd-support-thread-16?page=10&reply=148665446

I've known any husband/partner of anyone else that I could spend 24 hours with, never mind a week, month or year.

I don't think it's something I tell myself because there's no way out, I think it's a judgement that I make based on balancing positives and negatives.

It helps that I've never been a great believer in romantic love being a good basis for a lifelong partnership. It also helps that the person on the spectrum who I chose is fundamentally a really nice man who wouldn't knowingly hurt a soul, and it does genuinely kill him a little bit inside every time he realises how he hurts me.

I get it, all relationships take work. I have to accept aspects of my partner that I find challenging and he in return about myself. ASD vs ADHD. But I own my challenges, my OH does not, it’s always someone else’s fault. That’s where I start to get annoyed. Same like my mother, it’s never her fault. I can’t be bothered anymore fighting with brick walls. I can work with self awareness and if they need support and help as that is what I expect. I don’t expect everyone to bow to my challenges, I’m not a child anymore. ADHD makes me great but it also makes me forgetful and that is annoying for others. It’s traumatic to make the other person at fault all the time for your challenges, stomping and shouting at children and partners. Many people on here have very non aware partners and it’s not fair.

I'm not sure the blame thing you're writing about is ASD. Mine blames himself more than he should, to the point where it can be annoying. I'm also ADHD, I think it's a common mix. To be honest, I think our partners have to be a little bit switched off otherwise they would find it hard to tolerate our excesses.

My mother is narcissistic, nothing ever her fault, and your OH sounds a bit that way. I don't think it necessarily has to be related to the ASD. I'd find that, not the ASD, impossible to live with.

Ah ok I haven’t seen it like that before. His mum is a little bit funny. I’m surrounded by slight iffy people who can’t take accountability. I do think he looks at me like what is this weird person doing running round at a million miles an hour achieving nothing, completing nothing. If not for him nothing would get finished. We might eat fancier as he chooses all beige food. He is a decent guy until he has to take accountability and then he just projects.

@SpecialMangeTout3 thanks for the reply.. one of the counsellors we had was a specialist in NT/autistic counselling and it still ended up a disaster! It starts off ok and then just gradually he takes over and my voice gets lost? It feels like all the issues I have are turned round to be my fault

ive had previous counsellors say they felt the relationship was abusive but when it comes to counselling like I say before it’s all switched to be my fault?

what’s good about the marriage- Love spending time with him, loads of shared interests, makes me laugh BUT the bad is very much starting to
out weigh the good. Just fed up really .. like a lot of people on here it seems!?

Can i join please? I think my dh has ASD. His dd has a diagnosis.
The clues are hyper fixation on his hobby to the point where it comes before anything ...even me and family despite his protestations that it dosn't. Very hurtful.
Hoarding/ anxiety about disposing of stuff although he is miles better now I have housetrained him a bit...still takes loads of effort on my part.
Otherwise he is very loving, generous and fun. He is willing to come to couples councelling as I am really struggling.

Oh god the hoarding! We had a big farmhouse. Every time he renovated an outside building, he filled it. He spent 6 months clearing before we moved and still had two years of stuff to get rid of that came here with us.

And the black depression after every clearing out session!

He filled his desk too, so I got him a second desk to keep him out of the kitchen. He filled that too and used the dining room for paperwork.

In this house I have him confined to a small study and the garage. Anything that doesn't fit in those spaces has to be got rid of, no arguments.

His fixation for several years now has been the Ukraine war. I could give you every detail about how Putin has fought that war.... Second fixation is the weather, that used to be number one.

Welcome to the club!

It's hard work isn't it? But gosh i do love him.
He retreats into his hobby a lot. For example ...when I say ...i need more support as im feeling stressed he will then organise more hobby stuff then I feel controlling for saying he can't.

@malificent7 How does he respond of you say you are deliberately avoiding me by doing this, it is hurtful and makes me feel you don’t care about me or my well being. Tell him you don’t need him to solve the problem but a little bit of his company would help (obviously if that’s what you need) but maybe setting parameters on how you need support rather than it just being “emotion” might make him runaway less and you get some comfort.

I've had previous counsellors say they felt the relationship was abusive but when it comes to counselling like I say before it’s all switched to be my fault?

@Han1978 I obviously cannot comment on your relationship but that sentence rings alarm bells to me.
Because the result of having counselling with an abuser is that the victim voice gets drown and they end up as the vilain. That’s why couple counselling with an abuser is never recommended.
i genuinely ont know if it’s the case for you but the switch from ‘this is abuse’ in 1-1 to ‘this all your fault/responsibility’ in couple counselling would make me want to step back a bit and try to assess further myself if issues ARE really all mines. I suspect not, at the very least because there isn’t a situation where responsibility lies only on one person.

@malificent7 retreating in a hobby could easily be his way to deal with stress and shutdown, especially if the things you need support with are things he is struggling with (with dh that was childcare….) and/or your request felt emotionally loaded to him.
Equally he could just be avoidant (on the top of being ND)

I have to say, I did the same than you. I didn’t feel I could say NO to the hobby stuff. It felt controlling.
Now that I’m years and years later, I’m looking at the consequence of letting that go and my answer would be a clear NO. I’d be very straight with dh telling him I need xyz and it has to be 1st priority.
I suspect your dh will find it very uncomfortable (mine does) but theyre also capable of adapting, growing, and feel uncomfortable at times.

I had this issue with my partner and I raised it with her (so did her parents) as it crossed the line into being an obsession… and one she put before our relationship, her work and unfortunately our toddler. In the end it broke us.

I hoped that it would make her come to her senses, but if anything its made it worse.
I have our toddler majority of the time, but she still puts her hobby before anything else and often cancels at last minute or asks her parents too take over when she’s due to look after our child. If either of us refuse, she throws a strop and sulks.

It’s not easy.

@malificent7ah it's a tricky one isnt it. My partner also retreats into his hobbies a lot, but I think it's when he's feeling overwhelmed/shut down, so I actually encourage it. If we are having a conversation and he gets very stressed about a boundary I've set/ something he sees as unresolvable, he'll then go into his office and watch YouTube and journal for however long. When he comes back he usually is much calmer and has some genuine insight into what he was stressed about and what he needs to change.

Do you notice the retreat into hobbies helps in this way too (self-regulation, calming down, etc)? I guess it's very hard though when it means they can't be there to handle daily responsibilities!

Have you guys found any ways to put your foot down about a problem that you have completely opposite views about?

My partner wants us to move to his family's country and city, I really don't, and I don't know whether it's better to completely put my foot down all in one go (e.g. "absolutely not") or gradually (e.g. "let's think about how it could work logistically over the next few months but I'm not feeling hopeful that it would work")?

Hey Everyone sending a round of hugs to all ❤️‍🩹🤗.

My view would be to stamp on it immediately, they don't hear "no" until it's said. They don't pick up on any other cues until they hear "it's not happening".

To give you my smaller level example, it became obvious 4 years ago that my DH could no longer maintain our house and we couldn't afford to live there if he didn't, even if we could find tradespeople to trust, which we couldn't.

I talked and talked about downsizing and he simply refused to engage, until one day, and I can still picture where we were on a walk when it happened, I turned to him and said "Am I house hunting for one house, or two? " and he finally got the message that continuing to live with me in the existing place was not going to happen.

Unfortunately moving after 33 years gave him a full on mental breakdown, but that another story.

They usually don't like change, ASD people. Your DH sounds as though he is trying to get back to something he thinks he knows. Is there an underlying reason why he's looking for that security blanket?

@Imdunfer
much the same here,
We moved away to a very rural area in our late 50’s and agreed that we would move back nearer to my sons and civilisation within 10 years - which H conveniently forgot, despite me bringing it up a few times. 9 years in, after several episodes of for him of illness/ injury/ hospital appointments where he was unable to drive, and I was doing all the house and garden maintenance, dog walking and 2 hour round trips to hospitals, I wanted to put the house on the market. He said no, and I said “fine, let’s divorce, sell the house and I’ll buy something for me”. He was utterly shocked, but agreed to move, although he found the process extremely stressful.
2 years on and he’s rewritten history, telling people that he made the decision to move.

Like @Imdunfer i found I needed to be very clear and say NO.
And be ready to act on what No meant - separate if dh thought it was too important for him.

To be fair, I think the move issue is one you can have with NT-NT relationship and one that can be hard make or break type of stuff.
But giving hints and going in gently and softly doesn’t work with ASD imo.

I don't know about quite 'opposite' but at times DH has had an idea I have thought was awful, I feel tempted to blurt out that it's an awful idea and why but realised that just makes anyone defensive. More effective is to talk about all the benefits of my perspective/idea rather than focusing on 'what's wrong' with his. The hardest one to square is getting DH to have realistic expectations of DS academically - I have had some success in getting him to understand that what he thinks are 'bad results' are just average and won't impact DS much and that plenty of people who didn't do well academically still have good careers.

I’m not sure it will help @Echobelly but my DH had atrocious results at GCSE, got told he wasn’t fit for higher education and yet he got into uni on a Btec, got a first and a PhD, he found his niche and has been very successful in his career and is well respected in his field. He’d still cheerfully burn his secondary school to the ground. We’ve ended up doing Home Ed for our DS (AuDHD) partly because of my DH’s experiences of being treated like shit because he couldn’t fit their mould. So when school was no longer a humane option for us he was fully supportive of HE so we can do things at the pace our son can cope with. No criticism of anyone who chooses school, (I had a great time and very much believe it’s horses for courses) but societal expectations are just that and need to be challenged. The idea that you must have done xyz by the age of 16 is not always realistic or helpful and he should question why he holds those views and examine his prejudices because we all have them.
I know not following the herd is very scary and by not banging the drum of you must get all A’s he likely feels he’s setting your DS up for failure, which isn’t the case.

Can we compare notes on the strangest change that's upset yours?

Mine became increasingly disturbed that patches of woodland around us were being felled to prevent the spread of disease. We couldn't see any of them from the house, only when driving/walking out in one direction. It was as if he never expected anyone to cut commercial forested trees down, even though that's usually why they're planted in the first place. He still talks about it 4 years after moving.

I did tell him the other day, that if I wanted to, I could accuse him of not trying and just wanting to live off my money and stay home all the time - that I don't feel that way, but I could make the choice to say that to him feeling it might spur him on somehow. But that I understand about the ADHD and a tough job market. But he is blaming DS for not doing well rather than understanding exams are a big struggle for him. He was in an awful mood so didn't take it very well though.

@Echobellythanks for the advice, I'll remember that!

Regarding DS's exam results, can you show DH a youtube video explainer/article that summarises the scientific evidence showing that praising kids for their effort rather than results (ie exam results) is a much more effective long term strategy to get kids motivated and do well in exams and succeed in general?

Just thinking that maybe DH would "believe in" that approach if they see it validated with "science"?

Don't remember who said it earlier in this thread, but it really stuck with me how you compared your DH with ASD to other NT husbands and realised you wouldn't want to be with most NY husbands either...

Just wondering if, in your experience, lack of emotional validation/intelligence is actually pretty standard among NT men too, not just ASD.

When I think of my friends' NT DH's, they also aren't particularly supportive, especially when it comes to pulling their weight raising kids, but don't know if that's just my friendship group