Truth about Asperger marriage failure rates?

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JacobV
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18 Mar 2014, 6:52 am

JCJC777 wrote:
I've seen various internet references to marriages in which one partner is Asperger having high failure rates. These seem to derive from this source: "Preliminary research performed in Holland suggests that the divorce rate for couples in which one partner has AS may be as high as 80%.” from "a Relate leaflet", in p42 of 'Asperger Syndrome and Long-Term Relationships', by Ashley Stanford.

However I suspect this may have been a pretty thin study. Has anyone seen any harder information?

Then we'd have a better idea about the challenge we face....

Thanks



I personaly know two aspies who are married and have been so for years. They are both women married to NT guys, one is catholic, one is jewish, and they are both religious/traditional. I think both of those things help. As for guys, well... we've got the odds stacked against us... some 80% of aspies are male, so our dreams of finding that awesome aspie-wife is unattainable. Also NT guys make more money, have larger social circles, and have more fun than we do, let's face it... it's an uphill battle. The religious thing can make relationships work tho. If you're into it and your partner is as well, it can create a strong relationship.



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18 Mar 2014, 7:13 am

I am married to an NT man. It will be 10 years this year!

I have Aspergers and Mixed Expressive Receptive Language Disorder. The latter causes more trouble than the Aspergers, honestly.

A few things that have helped us:

-we met when we were 2 and have always known each other
-he regularly travels for his job - another poor marriage statistic - many people in his line of work cannot handle it (the spouses especially) I don't know any different and quite frankly need the space

He's gone about 50-60% of the time. Truthfully, this saves him from a lot of rejection. It allows us to mostly communicate by text without it being unusual.

These two things that ordinarily don't work well--fit together--do. :)



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19 Mar 2014, 11:27 am

Falure rate? Id say 97% when it comes to NTs and aspies we tend to drive NTs nuts and they dont want to deal with our behavior and weirdness.


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JCJC777
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13 Dec 2014, 4:24 am

The_Face_of_Boo wrote:
I don't believe in AS, I believe I found out its truth.

could you expand? sounds interesting



JCJC777
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13 Dec 2014, 4:26 am

thanks everyone for the positive case studies



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13 Dec 2014, 4:07 pm

JCJC777 wrote:
thanks everyone for the positive case studies


You do realise that you started this thread 2 years ago, don't you?



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13 Dec 2014, 5:18 pm

haha yes - I'm still interested - and I still haven't seen any real data



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13 Dec 2014, 6:34 pm

JCJC777 wrote:
haha yes - I'm still interested - and I still haven't seen any real data


That's because there isn't any real data. As I've already said in the post that made in this thread 2 years ago, that 80% figure came from a Dutch study that had no control group and I don't think that that statistic is reliable. There is no other peer-reviewed research, as far as I know, that even looks at the success rates of AS/NT relationships. The situation has not changed in past 2 years since I posted that.



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13 Dec 2014, 8:08 pm

In lieu of statistical data, looks like we're stuck with anecdotal, so I'll add another anecdotal: I'm NT, my partner of 5 years is Aspie, and we've had a wonderful relationship that we both are committed to making last a lifetime. We've been through many of the big problems of life that tend to cause relationship stress (from financial difficulties to family issues to health issues and many other things) and it's all strengthened us. So, whatever the statistics are, for this NT/AS relationship, it's lasted awhile already and I firmly believe will last as long as we live.


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rdos
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14 Dec 2014, 4:35 am

A more interesting question is neurodiverse marriage failure rates, and studying neurodiverse-neurodiverse couples separately from neurodiverse-neurotypical couples as the failure rates are likely to be different. And by neurodiverse I mean using some non-biased measure of personality-traits, not a disorder diagnosis (ASD) that is biased with social failures.

The big problem with such a study is to get the neurodiverse scores for both people involved, and especially in the case of a marriage failure.



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15 Dec 2014, 3:14 am

.There is no good data out there. I have looked. I am an NT married to an Aspie. My husband and I have been together for 8 years. We married and moved in together 3.5 years ago. After moving in together I was doing research to understand some issues my stepdaughter has and I realized my husband was probably on the spectrum too. He decided to get a formal diagnosis about 6mo. ago. The divorce rate thing is the scariest part of knowing I married an aspie. I love this man with all my heart. He is kind, loyal, funny, and my best friend. None of that changed with his diagnosis. He is all that I asked for. I know being in a relationship is hard for him and we both have to make a lot of compromises. We are stronger now then we were on our wedding day. We are working hard to understand how asperger's effects our relationship. I have to believe that we are in the 20% of the 1% that can do this or whatever the number is. He is 1 in a million :D .



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16 Dec 2014, 3:35 pm

screen_name wrote:
I am married to an NT man. It will be 10 years this year!

I have Aspergers and Mixed Expressive Receptive Language Disorder. The latter causes more trouble than the Aspergers, honestly.

A few things that have helped us:

-we met when we were 2 and have always known each other
-he regularly travels for his job - another poor marriage statistic - many people in his line of work cannot handle it (the spouses especially) I don't know any different and quite frankly need the space


The thing is that one person's "negative" can be another person's "positive".

Quote:
He's gone about 50-60% of the time. Truthfully, this saves him from a lot of rejection. It allows us to mostly communicate by text without it being unusual.


Something which AS people can find neutral or positive. Whereas NTs tend to find negative.
Indeed this could apply to both the "space" and using only "verbal" communications methods.



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16 Dec 2014, 3:41 pm

rdos wrote:
The big problem with such a study is to get the neurodiverse scores for both people involved, and especially in the case of a marriage failure.

An even bigger problem is what is the actual definition of "failure" in the first place.
A marriage which has ended might be far better than one which continues.



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16 Dec 2014, 5:30 pm

I also have no real, heavily studied, hard statistics, but I'm a married woman with mild Asperger's, so I'll toss in my $0.02.

Hubby and I met in 1998. He was 18; I was 21. "He rode with us to Memphis, and Papa would've shot him if he knew what he'd done..." Sorry, couldn't resist. +1 if you can name that tune. I think the situation helped the relationship get started. He was 1000+ miles from home, desperately lonely, on the edge of failing out of his first semester of engineering school, and getting bullied in the dorm. I was across the county from home, desperately lonely, dragging myself up out of a long dark depression, on the edge of needing someone to help me manage my life if I was going to survive, and owned a beat-to-shit singlewide trailer. In short, we both had something the other one needed, and we were both willing to persevere despite multiple large bumps in the road and overlook or tolerate some pretty glaring flaws. We were also both young, naïve, innocent, and full of hope.

So in we jumped. Married in spirit and living together by the end of '98, still together and officially engaged (even if we fought like cats and dogs) when the new millennium rolled around...

...and six weeks pregnant with our firstborn. We moved the wedding date up, got officially hitched in March, and had our daughter in September.

Things got rough. I quit school and my self-image crashed. He stayed in school, and my patience with his academic struggles got very, very thin. We worked on it. I learned to be a little bit more patient, and also finally realized that school really did come absurdly easily to me and other people really did have to put more effort into it. He learned how to go to school. We both learned how to take care of a kid, and how to juggle a kid with college life (both classwork and social relationships). We made some mutual friends, and that made things both easier and harder.

Easier-- he had other people to help him learn how to learn, other people to share struggles in school with. That made it possible to get through. I was less lonely, and slowly learned to like myself a little bit. I had a "me" that didn't revolve around "him and her."

Harder-- we both had to learn not only how to balance kid and class, but how to balance all that with wanting to have fun. We both had to confront social stereotypes about how married mothers/fathers shouldn't have a social life, much less friends of the opposite sex. He put up with A LOT of listening to people tell him that I was either cheating or going to cheat. I don't know if I would do that-- make friends, much less friends of the opposite sex-- if I had that part of my life to live again. Between me/our relationship ALREADY not fitting the "normal" mold and the additional criticism that drew, we're lucky we made it past the seven-year mark.

The seven-year mark (2005-2008) was the worst time. We were both fed up with the communication struggles, both giving in to other peoples' judgments. Still struggling with communication and boundaries, roles and expectations. He finished school later than everyone we knew and found a job that required moving halfway across the country. There was disrespect, verbal and emotional abuse, distrust, thrown objects, threats, accusations of adultery, s**t hitting the fan from both sides.

I read up on the problems and statistics, and made a basically unilateral decision to become a totally submissive wife. I gave it five years-- if, at the end of five years, one or the other or both of us remained angry and miserable, we'd call it quits.

One way or the other, our son was born in 2007. Come what may, we both knew we wanted another kid. If we ended up having to single parent/share custody of two kids, so be it. We also both knew we wanted it to work. One other critical thing-- before he ever moved his stuff into my trailer, we talked at great length about HOW WE WOULD WANT A DIVORCE TO WORK IN THE EVENT THAT IT SHOULD HAPPEN. I think that made a lot of difference during the bad years-- neither one of us ever felt an overwhelming need to screw the other one out of self-defense. That might have been one of the things that saved us when things looked their darkest.

By 2008, things were improving. I'd realized that the whole submissive wife thing wasn't going to work for me, or for him either. I couldn't be a doormat (even if I still thought I should, basically because it compensated for Asperger's in my mind), and he really couldn't handle the crushing burden of having Godlike authority over our home. We had a long way to go, but we were communicating. Enjoying each other again. Hopeful enough to have our second daughter (third kid) in 2009.

We kept working on it. PPD slowed us down. Then in 2010, my world fell apart. Within three months' time, my stepmom had a massive stroke, my father passed away suddenly, and we accidentally conceived and in short order lost a fourth child. Things got BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD. We lost most of the progress that we made, I got some really bad psychological "help" and ended up grossly overmedicated and suicidal. In the middle of that, we moved halfway back across the country. There's a huge blank spot that covers most of 2011. At the end of August of that year, I tried to kill myself and ended up in the hospital, followed by six weeks' worth of intensive therapy. His parents were watching the kids (1000 miles away-- us in PA, them in Florida).

Then HIS dad had a heart attack. I went to get the kids in the middle of October...

...and stayed until the middle of July. Both his parents were in and out of the hospital and/or couldn't keep house/stay home alone, so I stayed to do housework and lay-caregiving. In the middle of all this, we somehow managed to buy a house in PA-- and find out that I was, once again, knocked up.

We went through that entire pregnancy 1,000 miles apart. Hard for me, hard for him. We couldn't talk much-- he was busy, I was incredibly busy (now caring for three kids, keeping house, and trying to get along with his parents/care for one or the other of them). It was hard to talk when 99% of it was over the telephone. To avoid causing conflict with his parents or getting them involved in our conflicts, I slipped back into "doormat submissive wife/I hate my ret*d self and I suck mode." Well, at least I stayed in therapy :lol: . Notwithstanding, depression lingered (more like set up a permanent camp). Anything that might have passed for self-esteem on my part disappeared; the Internal Critic got big and strong and bitchy.

Our third daughter (fourth living child) came along in June of 2012. We talked about it and I got my tubes tied. Seriously, I think another kid would have been a killing strain. The baby has been a blessing, but five would have been too many times too much. I loaded a preteen, two preschoolers, and a newborn into my van in July of 2012 and drove "home" to Pennsylvania, and we starting trying to figure out how to be married again.

It's been up and down, good times and bad times. 2013 was a hard year-- our son started kindergarten in the fall of 2012 and had an awfully hard go of it. Couldn't read, couldn't sit still, couldn't shut up, couldn't take redirection without bursting into tears. I'd kind of looked at him and saw a little Aspie since he'd been about six months old. His struggles in school just confirmed it for me, and although it killed me to do it, I turned my Internal Critic loose on the boy. I was miserable, he was miserable, my husband was miserable watching it all happen.

Turns out, after seeing one "expert" in January of 2013 and another one in December, the kid has ADHD (I'm probably the only mother ever to be totally and completely thrilled to have her kid diagnosed with ADHD). You know the old saw about the adult getting diagnosed with Asperger's shortly after the kid?? Yeah, it plays with ADHD too-- turns out, by the time we got through getting the boy diagnosed and properly parented, that it was patently obvious that Hubby and his mother are ADHDers too.

That information has helped a lot. We have more compassion for each others' executive functioning fails, and try to help each other out. I've come to the realization that I HAVE to pick up my executive function skills, because he doesn't have "wonderful NT organization" that he's just refusing to use. Nope-- he struggles as much as I do; if he can continue to struggle, I can too. Both of us are less hard on ourselves. He's no longer in the position of being the "normal" one, the one who must be right. I'm no longer in the position of being the "invalid" one, the one who must be wrong. He's not the demon and I'm not the saint; I'm not the demon and he's not the saint. We're both just people, with flaws that happen to have codes in the DSM that we have, more or less, managed to figure out how to live with and work around. Sometimes more, sometimes less, we're both still learning.

Things aren't fixed, but they are better.

He maybe could have been happier with a "normal" woman.

I maybe could have been less stressed living alone.

Then again, maybe not. Easy to look into a crystal ball and pretend you know what would have happened, hard to really judge when you're not actually in that situation.

We've made it sixteen years. We've climbed a lot of mountains. I still love, like, and respect him. I still enjoy his company. He says that he loves, likes, and respects me. He says that he enjoys my company. I don't quite believe him, but I'm working on learning to take him at his word.

I note that we have sex more often than we used to.

If I ever meet Maxine Aston, I'm going to have harsh words for her. I don't think it's OK to use Asperger's as a cover for flaming misandry. She's probably done a lot of people a lot of harm.


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JCJC777
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22 Dec 2014, 1:19 pm

BuyerBeware wrote:
we talked at great length about HOW WE WOULD WANT A DIVORCE TO WORK IN THE EVENT THAT IT SHOULD HAPPEN. I think that made a lot of difference during the bad years-- neither one of us ever felt an overwhelming need to screw the other one out of self-defense. That might have been one of the things that saved us when things looked their darkest..


really interesting post. thanks - especially the above quote.

good luck for keeping it going as long as you can. I don't know if Aspies eventually just grow tired of trying, and failing, to meet the emotional needs of NTs



mpe
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22 Dec 2014, 4:07 pm

JCJC777 wrote:
I don't know if Aspies eventually just grow tired of trying, and failing, to meet the emotional needs of NTs

That sounds rather like Aspies not having emotional needs... Or should there be "and vice versa" on the end of that?