Relationships. very complicated. I'm married( 9 years as of July 2009) and it has been a very rough and bumpy road. My husband just does NOT  get what Aspergers is. He assumes I am a self centered, rude, annoying, and childish person. It hurts when he thinks this is me. I am a very selfless, caring, helpful and kind person. I wish he could see it. We have two boys. One is 4, and NT(undiagnosed so far, but has many AS issues) and a 9 year old that has ASD-HF. My realtionships with friends is not so easy, as maintaining a friendship is alot more than I can' handle at times. I have very few friends, and I don't really trust anyone, which is a key component to friendships and relationships. I have been burned too many times in 35 years to trust anyone with every aspect of myself. I find that when I open up to people and be myself, that is when they turn on you and you realize that they see the real you as quite annoying( I talk alot when I am excited about things) and they don't want to be around you anymore. (quite depressing and very disappointing. ) It is hard to decide to be alone and lonely or stessed, but have people around.

I have been in a relationship with my husband for about seven years, and married for four and a half.  I am immensely fortunate to be married to a man who does understand AS and how it makes up part of who I am, and how it can affect our relationship.  We have our rough patches from time to time, but since we've hashed out guidelines for straightforward communication and giving each other enough space, things have been pretty good.

I'd had relationships before that, but none were particularly successful...most people tend to find my need for alone time rather off-putting, and a lot of men especially seem to have some kind of possessiveness problem with a woman wanting her own physical space, in my experience.

I'm in a wonderful relationship with my current boyfriend.  He's actually the one who first noticed that there was something wrong.  He thought it was clinical depression but my dad and i discussed it (my boyfriend pushed that i bring it up to my parents) and agreed it was probably Aspergers like my younger brother. From that I asked to get tested and a few months later I was diagnosed with Aspergers.  My boyfriend has been very supportive through it all.  Knowing now why I act someways is so helpful for us. His biggest frustration with me was that I would come to him with problems and he thought I always wanted advice, when just having him there to listen was helpful.  He's been through all of this with me and is still. Even today he will be as I'm off to try a second therapist who hopefully will know more about aspergers than the first therapist I tried, and he's accompaning me because he knows I'm scared. I couldn't have asked for a better guy who understands me.

Married twenty years to fellow Aspie. Not easy but we are committed. Perhaps we should be committed. He was my first love. Have known him half my life. We have two adopted kids.

When I think about my marriage, I feel lucky. Lucky to have this dear friend. Lucky not to be alone. It could have gone differently for me, as I know I am not easy to love.

Friendships for me are complicated. Currently most of them are because we all have autistic kids. But no one agrees on what should be done, and we tend to talk over one another, which drives me crazy! I find I want to just be "me" and not just "mom" all the time.

I miss the days when I was younger and had friends who liked me for who I am. As the kids gain independence, I am looking forward to reaching out and reinventing myself!

My ex and I have been on and off for the last 8 years. He can be my best friend and my worst enemy. Some of the things he used to say to me would tear me apart and make me feel that I didn't deserve to live. Later, when I would talk to my mum about the fight, I couldn't actually recollect WHAT he actually said, only how awful I felt inside and how worthless I began to feel. Now that we are apart, he can make a bad day better and make me feel so good about myself. Can't live with him but can't get used to living without him either. We have promised each other and ourselves to never ever get back together again but I find it hard sometimes to want to keep that promise. I hope to one day to find someone who I can be with that will always make me feel happy.

My first boyfriend at age 19 was actually a stalker on campus with me that I couldn't get to leave me alone so I gave in (triggering my PTSD caused from events when I was younger).  Then I saw someone I meet online for a few months and his mother was obsessed with marrying us and was an awful woman.  Her son and I broke up over her.  I didn't really care about dating him because of my PTSD numbness, but the change was upsetting and I was confused.  Then I dated the young man I'm with now and intend to marry.  We had to break up for awhile because his severe OCD was too much for me (or at least how he handled it), but he's a lot better now.  We met 2004 on LiveJournal and met in-person a few months later.  When we were apart I got into a terrible relationship with someone who really used and abused me.  We were friends first and it destroyed our friendship.  My now-fiance helped pull me out of that depression.

One of my closest relationships was destroyed by making it romantic, but really it was just his selfish tendencies getting more out of control when we entered a romantic relationship.  It's been the same way with him and other girls, though...  I'm sorry things have gotten bad for you in that area, Savannah:(

Sharon, I have been divorced for so long that I say I am single now.  My divorce was final in 1990.  I don't think I ever want to get married again and if things don't work out for me and my boyfriend, I don't think I want another relationship.  They are too hard and they always start out good and then go bad and it is way too hard on me.

Interesting... I've met a couple of other people on here who are US/Canadian and in relationships with someone Down Under.  Must be something in the water. 

Anyway, "married" for 6 years to my Sydneysider sweetheart.  It's an NT/Aspie match.  Not much more to say about that.  Relationships are tough for everyone, I guess, but we take it day by day.

I am married since November, we've been together for over 3 years. He's 5 years older than me. He is mostly understanding but he gets really frustrated sometimes. He needs more verbal. He says he used to have a lot of autistic traits, and a period of time when he was really functional and social, but has come back to having more traits in the past 5 years. So it's ambiguous, we're not NT-AS but we're also not really AS-AS. It's just what it is :)

Before this relationship I was with a woman for 9 years, married for less than 2. My communication and immaturity got in the way. She was 10 years older than me.

I have a lot of dependence issues, and I don't always verbalize well. I am much more comfortable with text. My current husband and I were long distance for 3 years before I moved to the US (from Canada) and married him. Now we're married, and adjusting to living together and all the real time stuff is really challenging for me. We're seeing a counsellor and I think this is a REALLY good thing. The counsellor is great, she is a good couples counsellor and she works with people with AS (individually as well) so it's like the best of both worlds. She can sometimes cut through what the issue is, sorting out what's AS and what's maybe not AS. Two thumbs up.

The local Aspergers organization here is maybe starting a group for AS women in long term relationships. Seven thumbs up!!

Like you, Savannah, people often find me outspoken and think me hard, selfish, uncaring and unemotional, until they get to know me, when they realise I am actually soft, selfless, and caring. And I feel I am so transparent, yet people don't understand me. In fact, I am too transparent, too honest for my own good, as my nearest and dearest tell me. I struggle to find the *right* approach to privacy, I think that maybe because I am open about even deeply personal issues, other (NT) people feel an intimacy between us that I never meant. This has got me into some strange and wrong relationships, especially as I make bad decisions, and find it hard to know what I want, to trust my feelings, and to express myself when I do know. This unhealthy cocktail of parameters and traits actuallly makes me very vulnerable. Which I've only just realised. My own worst enemy.

Jackie

I have had three long-term relationships.  One with a man for 21 years (married), two with women (5 and 8 years).  My last partner left me because she couldn't handle my becoming disabled.  None of them knew I had Asperger's... even I didn't understand why I was different.  I learned, at the time of the last break up (and the one before that), that she had collected resentments, nursed grudges, and had devalued me in her eyes while I confronted conflict when it happened, shared my feelings, and appreciated her more over time.  I thought we had a very loving, special relationship.

For an Aspie, I had good self esteem prior to diagnosis, a good sense of self (though I don't get what other people are seeing about me), and rare moments of depression (went through a period of significant PTSD symptoms when I became totally disabled with CFS).  I'm usually happy, and so even my anxiety, which tends to be attached to nothing, doesn't bother me.  It reads as underlying excitement (my interior experience) and not anxiety and can be channelled positively.  

I had come a long way toward accepting my differences, my not fitting in, etc. prior to diagnosis.  However, after three years of seeing the affect of being unwittingly cast in other people's re-enactments of their childhood trauma dramas, my head is spinning.  It seems that my love of life, my authenticity, my spirituality is appealing to people.  My psychologist says that narcissists and co-dependents are drawn to people with Asperger's (at least that has been his observation with his Asperger clients).  NTs who have relatives with AS tell me that this is because people can run their dramas with us because we are predictable.  They don't have to worry so much about having to work around any gaming playing we may be engaged in.  Our honesty is valued because it lets them know how good they are doing. 

I've been fortunate not to have a con artist hit on me.  Well, my last was a con, but the con was more her thinking that my love of life would rub off on her without her doing any work.  When she left without even attempting couples' counseling, she said, "I know myself.  I wouldn't do the work."  Thing was, I could look back and see that just as we were making progress in that first year of our relationships (having the arguments that help work through and clarify conflict style and resolution) she stopped working.  I have to wonder why I was so surprised then when she said she knew she wouldn't do the work if we went to counseling.

Here's why:  I trust completely and I give people the benefit of the doubt.  I can hardly do otherwise because I am so dependent on words and unable to attend to other cues.  And when I see them, I can be confused by the meaning.  Contempt can look like someone is stifling a sneeze and displeasure can look like an upset stomach.  Worse yet, is having the presence of mind to identify what I see and bring it to the front of my brain where I might actually do something about it.  Then, even if I am able to do that, since I focus on words, people who are people pleasing avoiders (people who typically become passive aggressive and hold grudges) will deny what I see, and so I feel like I have no choice but to believe them.  

That's the other thing: I tend to see the best in people and so when their behavior is not in line with that it just becomes odd to me and gets put in an odd box in my head to be made sense of later when I have more "evidence."  But none of the pieces ever get put together.  One and one and one equals one odd not some picture of what might be happening.  That is, the odd stuff doesn't make sense until I am hit with a baseball bat.  Then, over the years that follow, understanding falls into place.

So right now I cannot imagine getting involved with someone ever again.  I can't imagine trusting someone ever again.  I can't imagine having friends I can trust.  (It was the bizarre behavior of two friends who ended up blaming me for all sorts of bad in their life that finally has me throwing in the towel on people, and three years of baseball bats helped my psychologist make a diagnosis.)  Yet, I know I need to get through this and develop, as best as I am able, my ability to use and listen to my gut.  

I am hoping that my knowing I have Asperger's and any future partner knowing I have Asperger's will help.

I have never been able to move beyond friendship with anybody. I don't have any romantic experience whatsoever and I am in my second year of college. I almost had a boyfriend five years ago, but my social skills were not advanced enough to know what I was supposed to do.

I've been in two relationships, both lasting about five years.  I'm single now and 58, and I don't like it. 

The first relationship, I broke it off because he became verbally abusive and controlling.  I'm really thankful that we weren't living together and he didn't have the key to my place.

The second, if he isn't an Aspie, he has strong tendencies.  He has a PhD in Philosophy and I met him when he was my Philosophy professor.  We lived together for five years, but I ended it because he was such an emotional cripple.  I just couldn't reach him emotionally.  We're still friends and I love him dearly, but we didn't work as a couple.  I didn't function well enough emotionally to be able to reach him. 

I went through a six-year stretch with disabling, untreated pain, when I wasn't socializing at all because of the pain.  When it ended the economy was tanking, and not having really worked for the six years, I've had trouble finding work, which means I can't afford to go out and mingle with people any place where it costs significant money.  I've joined Meet-Up and I joined a local singles group, but it isn't very Aspie friendly.  I don't drink, and a lot of their meet-ups are in pubs where you're expected to drink and there is a lot of noise.  And I'm not good at navigating a situation like that, a large number of people I don't know.  I get selective mutism sometimes when I feel put on the spot, and when I'm meeting new people or it's a charged situation in some way, I go mute.  I've joined a couple of free online dating sites, but got creeped out and dropped out.  I contacted one local man in one group a while back because we seemed to have a lot in common.  We emailed back and forth, and when he gave me his real name, I did an Internet search on him.  He'd been claiming to be single on the dating site, but I discovered that he isn't single.  He's lying about it.  And I would get messages from guys that, as I said, just creeped me out.  So I've stopped visiting the sites.  I'm in a couple of meet-ups that have some possibilities for meeting men I have something in common with, and I'm hoping I do meet someone and start dating.  I'm hoping I'll meet someone who understands my need to be alone at times, my special interests, my mutism, my awkwardness, and the other issues I have, because I don't like being alone.  I'm also a tactile and physical person, and I want a good, robust sex life. 

I have to check guys out for a time before I let them too close to me, because I've been abused and betrayed by too many people.  I have trust issues.  And I will not abide controlling, domineering men at all. 

September, I think this is true--that is, it is easier to disclose and get along when someone isn't exactly neurotypical.  I think my best friends are probably AC's.  Asperger's cousins... somewhere between NT and AS.  At least this seems to be true for me.