Break up

My husband's behavior towards me since he left is like a 9th grader or maybe even a 6th grader. I remember in the 6th grade when Troy Thomas and I broke up. I threw his Skaggs birthstone ring at him and it was done. We never talked again. We had nothing. That is how Scott views this relationship. He is not able to understand that we are parents together to a beautiful three-year-old daughter. He will not do anything nice or even acknowledge I exist. This is his Asperger's brain way of making sense of divorce. His twin brother used to be friends with my sister. When his brother started dating his wife, he broke up with my sister. They were not dating but he broke up with her in that 6th grade fashion. He would not acknowledge that she even existed or that they did have a great friendship, very, bizarre behavior for the rest of us and by the rest of us, I mean the NTs, the majority of the people.

pulling over

It is my husband's night to have our daughter. He is not able to deal with confrontation so he has told me to text him when she wakes up from her nap. This is because she is grumpy and he cannot deal with her right when she wakes up. Anyway, so I texted him and he said he was on his way at 6:05 pm. It should have taken him about 15 minutes to get to our house but at 6:50 pm he still hadn't shown up. I called and he answered immediately saying,"I'm almost there." Why didn't you come straight here, I ask him. He says, oh, i got tired and had to pull over. That was the story of my life with him, he was always tired. Always, lethargic, always non-responsive, always boring, always energy sucking. Why was he tired? A better thing to look into should be why am I tired?? I have a sick three year old who kept me up coughing most of the night. He on the other hand did have to work for eight hours but probably got more than eight hours of uninterrupted sleep last night with his tranquilizer he takes every night. Oh, yes, pull over dear and take a nap.

I have to admit

I am as guilty as my family at trying to figure out what it was that made my husband snap and leave me and our darling daughter. As I was changing probably the millionth diaper over 3 years I decided it was the potty training that made him leave. He did not want to be a part of it. Last night when he came to get our daughter for his routine, 3 hour visit, I told him she pee-peed on the potty and was practicing wearing panties. I asked him if he would take the potty and some panties and practice and his response was quick. I don't know if I have ever heard him say "no" so well. Good job, Scott. You are learning to say no.

lawyer, attorney, esquire. . .

Okay, so my husband mailed me divorce papers through USPS four weeks after he left. At this time he also told me I would need an attorney so I met with a fancy lawyer in a fancy office of a fancy building. It was all quite fancy. I sat in the waiting area by myself (was no one else seeing a lawyer that day at that time?). Finally the man emerged and we had a meeting for a couple of hours and I left thinking that I had hired him and that he was going to "respond" to the papers I had gotten. I only paid him $150.00, maybe that was the problem.

Fast forward three months and I find out he did not respond to those papers and he did not need to respond. My husband served with me with papers 15 days ago. Meaning that at a very inconvenient time a half drunk man who was probably on parole rang my doorbell, showed me the same papers I already had and asked if I knew this person and pointed to my husbands name.

I talked to a new attorney yesterday and he said he will "respond" to the papers. Seriously guys this is the most ridiculous goings on of three people who actually went to law school, one being my husband who just "assumed" I knew the procedure. Hey, Jackass, I am not a lawyer and do not know the p-r-o-c-e-d-u-r-e!! So, all this time my husband has been rude and passive aggressive (what he does best) because he thought I had refused to mediate and wasn't responding to the divorce papers. Hello?! No one told me what was going on. I get papers but they are not the real papers so don't do what they say, I am going to take the fake papers and the real attorney who turns out to be a fake attorney is going to do nothing because the papers are not real. What?! Tell me again, so then I get the real papers on January 7 and I am really supposed to respond this time so get your ass dressed up and get a real attorney. One that will be kind, helpful and knowledgebale and hold your had through this, that is exactly what I did. As I drove to the bank to deposit $200.00 of my grocery money into an account that I did not know existed but actually had $6,000.00 in it, I called my soon to be ex and asked him about all of this. He assumed this and thought this and did not know that. Oh okay, kind of like our marriage. This is all making sense to me now.

On a roll. . .

My husband has our daughter tonight so it allows me to do fun stuff like clean, organize, go out on the town, etc. . . Obviously since my husband just picked up and left four months ago, my family tries to figure out why he left. I do the same but my younger sister said today that she honestly believes he was not able to be a father to our 3yo daughter and it was just easier to say he did not want to be married to me. I think she might be onto something here.

He said he has been thinking of leaving for over two years. She is only 3 years old. I think being a father did not fit into his ROUTINE. He constantly talked about how hard it was to be a parent. He did not want more children. He talked about this all the time too. I wanted to adopt another child. I wanted our child to have a sibling but he did not want another one. Oh no, it might keep him from checking the baseball scores one more time per day or there might be a dirty dish in the sink. YIKES! It is a big responsibility to be a parent. I do know that. I have parented him since the day I married him.

Cleanliness is next to Godliness my ass

Okay maybe the title is a bit harsh but give me sex, affection, the feelings of being wanted by my husband any day over his obsession with having a clean kitchen any day!! I found these statements about Aspergers: Most Asperger husbands are reliable and responsible people. They work hard and are good providers for their families. Some of them are boyish naïve which can be very charming. Since most children in general spend more time with their mother, boys with Aspergers may have turned to their mothers for role models and there for display more feminine behavior. In adulthood Asperger husbands do not try to meet the obligations society has from men in general. They can be quite happy to help clean and cook. Most of the time when asked they are more then willing to help out with whatever task is needed. All you have to do is ask…

Yes, my husband has been an adequate provider considering his limitations. He is a lawyer and was not able to hack the firm scene. His identical twin brother was the same. Unable to hack the big firm scene. In fact, I remember my husband's brother throwing up into his garbage can at the firm because of the anxiety caused by working there. He now works for the Church as an editor and does well because it enables him to not interact much with others and just hunker down and edit his little days away.

The comment about how men with Aspergers may display more feminine behavior is true for my husband. One night at my book club, one of my fellow book club goers told me I had a wife, not a husband. She was right. I did have a wife. He loves Jane Austen books and films, he cleans the kitchen constantly including the stove and mopping the floor. He cleans his own bathroom daily. I never picked up anything after him in 8 years. Sidenote, I knew something was wrong near the end of our marriage when he left a shirt on the bed one day!

I have never known a man that was more worried about his weight or appearance other than someone who is gay. I asked my husband numerous times during our eight year marriage if he was gay because he had no desire for sex, ever!! Not even on the honeymoon, now that shows you there is really something wrong.

Dating

My husband didn't really date me before he blurted out that he loved me and wanted to marry me. He admitted he had loved me for two years but had not acted on it. This should have been a red flag but at the time I wanted to get married. I was 32 and for LDS standards getting close to "old maid" status and soon would be unmarriable. At the time of this unveiling of his love, he also admitted some physiological and psychological symptoms that he was experiencing. I told him it sounded like an anxiety disorder and got out my sister's DSM. Sure enough he felt like he had enough symptoms to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and sought a diagnosis the next day. He was not medicated until about three months later and so he did not feel any relief from his symptoms with just psychotherapy.

When he did start medication, he took Prozac and Klonipin. After nine years he is still taking both of them. I know he sedates with the Klonipin daily but am not sure about how much of the Prozac he takes. Against my inner thoughts about dating someone with an anxiety disorder, I continued to date him knowing he planned on proposing to me and marrying me. Our first phsical contact was an awful attempt at a kiss at my door one night. I was hoping it would get better and once I took control it was better. I was experienced at this and knew what I was doing. I had dated a lot and knew the sexual drives of normal men. My boyfriend was not interested in anything sexual or physical. I thought he had great self control, come to find out after we were married that he just had no interest in sex. He has an intense fear of intimacy. I do not know where it stems, he refused to go to counseling with me to communicate during our 8 year marriage. His mother is very similar. She lost all interest in her family, husband, job and religion too. They act very similar and her ex-husband told me he lived in a sexless marriage as well.

During our courtship my husband said the most romantic things to me. He was very liberal with compliments and seemed as though he knew how to woo me. He did this briefly after we were married but then stopped. He has not told me he loved me in years. Although he has not said he doesn't love me either. On our wedding day, we were at home in the afternoon and he had not tried to have sex with me. Instead we went to dinner at a great restaurant. We didn't have sex that night either. I do not remember when we actually consummated our marriage. Yes, my first time having sex was so uneventful I don't even remember it.

But . . .

I thought I was supposed to live "happily ever after". That is the farthest statement from the truth concerning my marriage to a man with undiagnosed Aspergers Syndrome. He has admitted he tricked me into marrying him over eight years ago and I have lived miserably since then in a loveless marriage. I am not an expert in Aspergers Syndrome but I am a woman with common sense and a Master's Degree in Speech Language Pathology. I am going to write of my life so that if you are in a relationship with a man and suspect he might have Aspergers you will quit wondering why the hell he ignores you all the time. In his mind, he is not ignoring you! My husband left me almost four months ago. He did this by leaving a letter on the bathroom sink of our newly purchased 5200 square foot house and went to work with two pair of underwear and a few shirts. His letter outlined that he is not gay, addicted to anything or having an affair. WHEW! Thank goodness. My journey with this man has been frustrating and demoralizing. I will tell you a bit.