Complete turn-around in relationship [First post]

[Guest guest]

Hello all, and thank you for welcoming me into this community.

I apologize for the wall of text! This is my first post and I have something of

a breakthrough to communicate to all of you.

I'm a 28 year old woman, a literature student at the PhD level in Montreal,

Canada. I'm currently in a relationship with a 29 year old man, a music &

programming graduate at the Master's level. We have always discussed and

suspected that he might have Asperger's, but until this day he remains

undiagnosed.

We've had difficult times. Constant arguing, frustration on both parts. I should

mention that my boyfriend is not so deeply affected in social areas. He

understands and uses sarcasm, and after a few drinks he seems completely normal.

This adds to the " Cassandra syndrome " in that the friends I'm not as close to

find that Asperger's is a quick diagnosis. " Your boyfriend is perfectly normal, "

they say, " he jokes around with me all the time " . Well, he's not. He rarely ever

looks me in the eye, he answers odd things when I use expressions instead of

very literal language ( " Would you like to do this for me " vs. " Please do this

for me " yields VERY different answers... " Hm, let me think, no I don't think I

would like that, no " ), etc. I won't embark on a thorough list of his mannerisms

as I'm sure most of you know them all too well already.

Anyway, my point is, we had a serious falling out lately. I told him to leave

the house despite him having nowhere to go and little money. He had been living

at my place, out of necessity but also out of love, for a while. But recently I

had been very unhappy and communicating this to him constantly, with little to

no change at all on his part. Eventually I decided that if he hadn't managed to

become independent of me, it wasn't my responsibility to baby him and keep him

in my house if I felt like the relationship wasn't bringing me anything good

anymore. And so he left the house and spent nights in coffee shops and youth

hostels for some days. I felt terrible about it, but I had to remember I wasn't

responsible for him, or for the choices he made that led him to not be able to

care for himself properly.

This led to a complete turnaround. We kept communicating, and he accepted the

Asperger's home-diagnosis in a way he hadn't before. He expressed this as having

to accept that his thought process was atypical, and to realize that he wasn't

going to function so long as he was angry at other people for not functioning

the way he does. His former obsession with work, which left me feeling lonely

and nagging for a substantial relationship, has mutated into an awareness that

programming all the time made him into a " number cruncher " and not much else,

whereas he is also a rather creative creature - with a bachelor's in music

playing cello, and a lifelong hobby of creating electronic music. He realized

that doing nothing but work left little space for inspiration, and that his life

would be more efficient if he kept certain times in his life for other

activities, from leisure to cooking and cleaning with me.

He has moved back in, but this time it isn't because I feel bad for him. It's

because I enjoy his company again. He has stopped fighting me about everything,

has started really hearing me out and trying to understand when I express my

feelings and frustrations. Myself, I have also been trying to communicate more

clearly, with literal language, and I interpret his sometimes odd behaviour less

as signs of him not caring for me, and more as symptoms of a neurological

condition. It hasn't been that long, but I know once he puts his mind to

something, he isn't likely to just let go. He's very obstinate when trying to

resolve a problem.

So, this is my story of hope. It wasn't a formal diagnosis that led us here, but

the acceptance on both our parts that he has Aspie-like traits, and that I will

never see things the way he does.

I hope this can inspire some of you struggling with this in your relationships!