Aspie survival tricks in a relationship

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This is a long post. Sorry, I probably over-elaborate. If you get bored easily, feel free to hit the back button. If you're interested in NT-AS dynamic in relationships and perhaps have your own experiences, maybe you'll find it interesting.

My aspie traits are not too pronounced. Most won't notice them because they do not get close enough to me, and I consider myself a regular chameleon. I fake NT rather well and fit in pretty much anywhere. There is, however, no fooling my boyfriend (I'm gay if it makes any difference). This is the one person who has come so close to me that he notices and is truly affected by the things that make me different. We live together after all. If it was not for him, I never would have realized I was an aspie - the relationship has been a sometimes steep learning process. We've had our stormy AS trials. We split apart for a period because of them, at a point when none of us had an idea of exactly what was the cause of the discord between us. I wondered whether others have been having the same issues as us, and how they have adjusted to them.

Here are some of our experiences:

- I am fussy and forgetful, and have a horrid memory when it comes to numbers, dates, briefly mentioned details, and so on. I very often truly believe that I get the essence of a conversation just fine, yet realize seconds after it ended that I really only have a vague concept of it. In fact, I will be completely unable to recount it properly, and if the conversation included important information or requests - ack, I'm in trouble! My boyfriend has often been offended or hurt when I simply have not caught his message as it looks to him as if I don't care about it. We try to solve this by being very conscious of the problem. If we have an important conversation, my boyfriend will work hard to talk to me in a concrete way and I might take notes. I will repeat things he says and even give him the occasional written resumé of whatever we talked about. If it is critical that something is understood correctly, that is simply what it takes to do it right.

- I am an introvert with few but close friends. I feel very out of place in crowds of people I do not know. I absolutely hate mingling because It makes me feel pathetic and lonely and pitied for it. My boyfriend is an excellent socializer, and he derives a lot of joy from it. Luckily, he leaves it completely up to me whether I want to join him or not when he has plans. I join if I know someone well there, and skip if everyone are complete strangers. I just am not able to get to know someone if I meet them in a crowd of more than three or four, and this I have made complete peace with. At least one earlier boyfriend made me feel very insufficient due to this. Many people just seem to consider socializing the finest form of art. With my current boyfriend, we make fun of it instead. I will usually tell him that I am "initiating evacuation procedures" when I get overloaded by people and want to leave, and that makes him smile.

- I get shutdowns - periods of depression and increased "introvertism". They can be initiated by many things like fatigue, forgetting to eat, stress (big one) and different kinds of negative emotional impacts as well (critique being the most common). In the beginning, I just thought this was a normal stress reaction, but when it occurred again and again, I got more and more angsty about it. I got afraid when I felt it coming on, and frightened that my moods would ruin the relationship. That amplified it a great deal, and before we split apart that one time, my months ahead of this happening was one long shutdown brinking on a nervous breakdown. Today, me and my boyfriend simply know that shutdowns come and go - they always will. My job is to tell him when one is coming on, though half the time, he'll notice ahead of me. When it happens, he simply allows me to do whatever I need to stabilize. I can take a nap, or I can need to spend three days in solitude, and I am very grateful to him that he respects this and has no problem with it. In general, I need a lot more time alone than most. I think most around here will identify with that. In fact, usually if someone cancels an appointment with me, my brain immediately goes "yay - I get to be alone!"

- My boyfriend considers my judgement severely lacking. It's sort of sad to admit this, but when I get challenged on some decisions I have made, thinking them pretty darn sound and unproblematic, I very often realize that they were not. Not by far. For some reason, I make strange prioritizations and value things very differently than my boyfriend, and he has really gotten scared by this. For instance, he says that if we had children (which we will not), he would not trust me to look out for the child alone. He honestly would expect me to at some point make a dangerous misjudgement that we all would suffer for. This is today our biggest problem, because it means that my boyfriend is afraid of leaving me with responsibility and I am afraid of taking it. In fact, he makes most decisions on our behalf because they royally stress me out, and if pressured on an opinion, I will usually just try to read his mind and choose whatever I think he'd prefer, or kamikaze-choose something to get out of the situation. We still do not completely understand exactly how our wiring differs on this, but when these misjudgements produce conflict, it is usually major stuff that requires working out. The most recent example: We got a cat. I love cats, and at the shelter, I chose the one who "needed me the most". This was a cat that was not tame at all, and like I often do, I figured "the greater the challenge, the greater the gain". I did however fail to appreciate the fact that this was an adult non-tame cat and that taming her might actually be impossible. The result was that she never let anyone touch her despite endless patience on my part and eventually escaped from "school". I will never be able to find this wild and scared cat again in a town that is close to nature and has a gazillion hiding places. Since she was too wild to sterilize yet, I will also now probably be responsible for a boatload of kittens in the time to come. Everyone wound up pretty miserable, and my boyfriend knew from the very start there could have been no other result. In fact, he had gently tried to tell me this, but I had not at all understood what he was trying to say.

I guess I'm lucky to have a boyfriend at all, but he does claim I have good sides that make up for both aspie and non-aspie bad sides. Thank God he makes misjudgements too...

Anyway, the most important thing if you have AS in a relationship is definitely being aware of it and what it does - for both parts.

What have been your greatest relationship challenges and have you found ways to deal with them?

Stop, drop and roll.