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 

80%

A study out of The Netherlands estimates that 80% of Aspie-NT marriages end in divorce.

That is a huge challenge to be up against. And looking on the internet for support hasn't been very promising. Most of the advice I encountered amounted to:

"Get out now while you still can."

But in the face of this evidence, I'm still hopeful we can make this work.

First, I'm a scientist. I haven't been able to get my hands on the original study, but I bet there's some ascertainment bias in the selection of the couples. Since Asperger's has only been something you could be diagnosed with since 1994, pretty much every Aspie over 25 is undiagnosed. Unless they have a child on the Autism spectrum, which anecdotes suggest is the most common path to diagnosis in Autism in adults. My guess is the majority of couples in this study have a child on the Autism spectrum, which already predisposes them to divorce. An Asperger's diagnosis could also come up in the course of marriage counseling, thus the couples in this study may have had more severe marital issues. All and all, I doubt that the study is generalizable to all Aspie-NT marriages.

Second, we've only been married three years. In that time, we've moved, changed jobs, started school, lived apart -- we haven't really had the chance to create the marriage we want. Currently, Brock and I live in separate states -- far enough apart that we need to take planes to visit each other. When we are able to live in proximity again, it will be like starting over.

Third, both of us are willing to work hard for what we want in life. We've always wanted a marriage where both parties flourish. The next step is execution.