whats it like living with an aspergers dh?

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please tell me what its like living with an aspergers dh.i am in emotional meltdown and dont know what to do.

have you just found out? what in particular?

my dh has aspergers, btw

i have seen a book on amazon about an aspergers marriage and have heard that relate offer counselling specifically for couples with an aspergers patrtner.

Has he just had a dx? When my ds was dx i had to hold onto the fact that he was the same person as he was before the dx - now we had more ways of dealing with difficult behaviour or accepting it.

The national autistic society website might be useful?

DH says that it is very reassuring as I am very very honest, but it is also frustrating as I'm not really aware of my surroundings or of what other people pick up on in conversations. I'll start talking of what others would see as irrelevant aspects of something, or I'll hyperfocus on something and not be able to see things in a different way, or reason through things when I'm hyperfocusing. I can be overly sensitive about things that others would see as minor.

my dh is very similar to you bullet123. similarly honest, will not tell lies. he also focuses intently on one topic, so much so that he can seem rude to those who aren't aware.
my dh finds it incredibly hard to be ill (more so than other men!) he focuses very intensely on patterns of numbers (algorithms?) and is very hard to 'move' off a topic.

no diagnosis.just my strong suspicions!dh has obsession he wont recognise as an obsession and it impacts my life and the dc lives as it causes huge rows.during rows i start off calm but as dh does not see my point of view or picks out wrong bit to focus on i get so frustrated that i end up crying and he loses temper.he then takes 3 or 4 days to calm down during which i am in limbo as to whats going on.i feel drained and if i try to explain later it could go either way.sometimes he will see my point days later.sometimes not at all.thanks for all your replies.lucky lady i would like to get councelling but if he wont admit problem then i cant get specialist help can i?

how do you cope luminarphrases?

I am so glad this thread has popped up, I have suspected this in my dh for ages.

He will drone on and on about one very minor topic, for instance someone is talking about rush hour traffic and dh will pick up on one particular road/street and talk non stop about that road and how the traffic was/is/will be, and he cannot be moved onto another topic.
He will not make eye contact with people he talks to, be they neighbours, salesman in car-garage, the dc's teachers at parents evening etc.
He is very blunt and will say what is on him mind (without sugarcoating it) which leads to arguments with his (very sensitive) sister.
He is obsessed with 'ordering' things, from biggest to smallest, in alphabetical order, in order of colour.
He has OCD tendencies wrt routines, for instance he works as an engineer and insists certain processes are followed to the letter, even if they don't need to be.
He has an over-active gag reflex, be it brushing his teeth, dental check-up or even the slightest bit of skin on a sausage or chewy bit of veg.

All in all though, these could not be signs of anything at all, I had not really thought about it until a year ago....

But when all is said and done, he is my dh and I love him!

thanks for joining in hippi
my dh has poor eye contact.
likes things ordered.not that they always are but this makes him distracted if you are talking as he wont listen as he can see mess!
food!!ha!lots of food issues when we got married.he would only eat certain foods and certain brands but his mum pandered to him unfortunately.
he has had lots of obsessions and what he does is get interested in something but then take it to the limits.it drives us all mad as he cant move off subject.you have to avoid mentioning subject or off he'll go!!
how do you deal with differences of opinion for instance,he wants to go on holiday to do an obsession and me and dc want to avoid that and do something else?
how would you deal with it if the obsession is sport and the kids don't want to play?
my dh is used to getting his own way,again a pandering mum!and if this is challenged it causes huge rows.
i have got to the stage now where i'm desperate for help as i feel he doesn't care about my feelings at all.he cannot put himself in anyone elses shoes.not mine or any of kids.it really hurts

Oh yes, the certain brands, I had forgotten about that!
Heaven forbid if I buy baked beans that are not Heinz, he can tell and won't eat.
Sausages have to be skinless (now there is a challenge), and meat is not allowed to have any chewy bits on or the gag reflex kicks in again.

I have no real advice for you, we manage to work around dh's 'oddities', the lack of eyecontact bugs me most as he comes across as rude.
Likewise he is always very kurt and abrubt when talking to my friends, and I find myself having to make excuses for him (he is stressed/tired etc) when in fact he is just communicating the way he does....

yes,we have lost friends in this way.he presses his opinions on people and if they dont agree he thinks less of them.he has a couple of friends he gets on well with because they are sporty.he respects their opinions which i find odd.

i am not at all sporty or competitive!!i'd rather have a coffee with friends!!

Dh almost certainly has AS. Even the Paed who dx'ed ds1 commented on it.

I can't offer any advice on the sports issue as my dh hates most sports, especially football. Dh has had a number of obsessions over the years. The deal we have is that he can get as involved as he likes with them but only if they're not expensive and as long as it's not to the detriment of everyone else. There have been a few times when he's been a bit too obsessed and I've had to say so. He initially got a bit huffy about it but would later come back and say that I had a point.

It's by no means all sunshine and roses here but there has to be an element of compromise. If dh wanted us to spend our holiday doing something related to one of his interests and the rest of us didn't like the idea then I'm afraid the answer would have to be a definite no. We would try to reach an agreement if possible, eg dh could spend one or two days doing his thing while we did ours but if dh insisted that we all had to do things his way then I think we would need to have a serious talk tbh.

Dh talks a lot about his interests, even though I have absolutely no idea what he's talking about. I must confess that sometimes I discreetly read the newspaper or something while he's talking but that's usually because I know that he's not really all that bothered about whether I'm listening or not.

dh has mild AS i supect. fil is more pronounced.
fil drives me spare after a few days in his company. dh..can be hard work ... But like coppertop..i can just switch off and make the right noises .It doesn't matter if i'm not actually listening..he's only saying it for himself iykwim.

Dh hates sports aswell, especially football. He purposely winds his work colleagues up by pretending he has not got a clue what football is because he detests it so much.
In fact I think he winds his colleagues up just by existing iyswim, he just gets people's backs up almost unintentionally at times.
I do the 'switching off' thing too. Dh will come home and talk about work, and after the first half an hour I discreetly log onto MN and just make encouraging noises once in a while. Sounds dreadful, but if I try to change the topic he gets huffy.

Actually, reading these posts of mine back, my dh is hard work!! Good job I love him really...

I know what you mean. I find myself glazing over and drifting off when people start talking incessantly about their new clothes, or what this or that celebrity is up to .

r.e. the switching off thing, i suppose i'm lucky in a way, because he doesn't even notice, so it kind of works. my dh doesn't like sport, so it works out well there too

XP could have gotten a DX, easily. And he was a nigtmare to live with- completely in his own world, to the extent that he would sometimes go days without bothering to say a word. All he was interested in was ten pin bowling and he'd sit for ages working out the angle requirements (had a degree in Maths from a prestigious Uni) for various shots.

but he was an extreme case, all his idiosyncrasies had been reinforced by aprents who thought his oddities and antisocial behaviours a sign of some form of genius, so instead of teaching him to do the absics like communicate they'd praise him for it. He was also naturally lazy and the house turned into a pigsty if I wasnt there- I went around seve5ral months after I left him, and the alst carton of soya milk I'd had was still half full on the side- gross.

but Dh also ahs an obsessive thing going on, as do I at times, but because we recognise this and make the effort to communicate about it we don't find it half so challenging. I'm very funnya bout my little routines (same seat on sofa, etc etc etc) and Dh tolerates that but then I have to tolerate his lack of empathy on certain fronts. We muddle through.

DS1 is the only with a dx, he actually can be very hard to live with and I do pity any woman who takes him on if he cannot sort out his hoarding tendencies and the like.

Can I ask if any of your DH's get any external support, for example from local NAS group?
Reason I ask, is that I am beginning to realise that I have many characteristics of a person with AS. I'm currently reading Tony Attwood's Guide to Asperger's Syndrome (very hard read, anyone else found it hard going) having previously lent the book to my mum, who having read it said that it described me very well! Also other people, such as parents with children whom have an autism/AS dx have commented that I am similar to their children.

This thread is an interesting read for me, as I can relate well to many of the things you are mentioning about your DH's. I don't like sport - wonder if that is a common thing amongst men with AS.

my dh goes to an asd group every fortnight, and finds that it really helps him.

i am lucky that dh's mum was a nurse, and got him diagnosed when he was young. also, my dh told me immediately when we started going out, got me books to read on the topic, and even warned me that i shouldn't go out with him which of course made me want to go out with him even more

Dh does not have any kind of diagnosis, I am not even sure he falls under the mild aspergers category or whether he just has a string of (endearing) oddities...

I am not seeking a diagnosis either, and we don't need any outside support. Dh has a job he enjoys, a job which allows me to be a SAHM, whilst he does not have many friends he is not too bothered as he prefers to spend his limited amount of free time with me and the dc, and for us there is no need to change anything.
His routines/habits/foibles are work-roundable, and wrt the eyecontact, a swift kick in the leg under the table at parent's evening helps for a few minutes.

We sometimes go to NAS activities but that's more for our DSes than for dh. There's a social group thing for people with AS but dh finds the idea of it a bit odd, ie a social group for people with autism.

They make some allowances for him at work. They have those awful team-building policies where they have to swap places and sit at each others' desks every few weeks but dh has now been excused from this. He's also allowed to listen to music at work through earphones to block out some of the noise. He has hypersensitive hearing so a combination of being able to hear people's 'private' conversations from across the room and a tendency to peak bluntly was not a good combination.

My eye contact is terrible too, so we don't have any of those 'look at me when I'm talking to you' arguments.

I have a brother who almost certainly has AS and he is the opposite wrt sport. He not only travels across the country to watch football matches but could probably tell you every football-related statistic there is. As a MN'er on here once said, people who have an obsession with football are seen as perfectly normal whereas an obsession with something like trains or road signs is seen as weird.