Sunday, May 6, 2012

3rd Anniversary Observed (Great Expectations)

This weekend, Brock came for a visit (as I've mentioned before, we live two time zones apart). We celebrated our 3rd anniversary over homemade asparagus and pancetta harsh and mimosas. Brock has wonderful taste in jewelry and gave me a beautiful necklace set with 2,000 year old Roman glass. I've been eyeing up these beauties since 2004 and casually mentioned it last time I saw him. I'd like to get Brock a nice, personalized leather dopp kit, but Brock is pretty particular about his things so I'm waiting to see if it meets his size specifications.

I absolutely adore this man, but the dude is hard to be married to.  The marriage has heretofore been a complete disaster, but I stay because I'm crazy about him.

I'm beginning to see that the disaster comes from a mismatch of expectations and what can be. Brock and I each have expectation of what a wife should be, what a husband should be, and what a marriage should be. The mismatch is two-fold. We each have different expectations of these three things and these expectations are different from what these three things realistically could be. This is where the neurodiversity comes in -- we are both limited by the configuration of our brains. I wilt without attention. Brock shuts down without enough time to himself. As of this weekend, I've pretty much given any expectations I've had about myself as a wife, Brock as a husband, and our marriage in general the heave-ho. But now that we've stripped our marriage down to studs, I'm not sure how we're supposed to build it back. There's no blueprint.

Luckily, since Brock and I don't live together, we've got some time and space to think about this.

I've been asking myself a lot, "Why did I get married?"

I finally was able to answer that last night. Because I don't want to do everything alone. I want to share my life deeply with another person. Intimacy. Connection.

But, ironically, of 300 men I could have married, I picked one particularly intimacy-disabled. C'est la vie!

The action item is to ponder what we expect of each other and of this marriage. I'll continue to share as we figure things out. This blog is a counter-narrative of what a marriage can be.

Further reading: Giving Through Relationships 


Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Empathy

After Brick was diagnosed, Brock's similarity to Brick implied that Brock is or was at some time on the Autism spectrum. Brock's mom said that as a teenager, Brock thought he might have Asperger's.

My reaction to every new thing is to learn everything I can about it. So I took to the internet and started googling. The things that come up over and over -- "lack of empathy" "impaired empathy". I freaked.

Empathy and compassion are the virtues I prize above all others. How could I have married a man that was physically incapable of feeling these things? How could I stay married to a man that could not engage with my feelings?

Fortunately, Internet Serendipity brought me to the page of Carrie Cooling, a mom with Asperger's. In her post about empathy, Carrie reassured me that people with Asperger's do feel empathy, possibly more intensely than NT people. She says that she can easily be drawn into the other's emotional state and become overwhelmed, so to combat this, she responds to other's emotions in a very factual way.

In her, I easily saw Brock. One of the reasons why Brock chose me as a mate may be because I come from a culture that is traditionally known for stoicism -- we tend to have a fairly flat affect and don't show emotion very intensely. I don't get upset very often, but when I do, Brock's response is to become Robo-Brock. He presents the facts; he looks for action items; he wants to fix. I want emotional engagement and Robo-Brock does nothing except for upset me more. I completely lose it, then Brock completely loses it, we're both miserable and nothing is accomplished. Currently, our tactic is to avoid strong emotion of any kind, but this is not tenable. Intimate relationships require the ability to connect on an emotional level.

This is really the crux of all of our previous marital problems and definitely a work in progress.

Being reassured that Brock does feel empathy has helped. We've only had one incident of Upset Trixie since we figured out the Aspie thing. During this I said out loud, "I know that you have empathy, and I understand that you are having a hard time showing it right now." This was as much to reassure myself as it was to let Brock know I understand him. It's a baby-step, but I think we're going in the right direction.