Life Together: The Prologue

I think this will be a multi-part series, not sure how many parts it will have, but this is the Prologue. Let’s start with how I will relate to you our general personalities and I will, over the series attempt to communicate to you how as a married couple we interact and get along through life, with a lot of weight on my experience and perspective as an Aspie.

Clare is very much a free spirit. At times, when we were dating I thought she was a hippie. She likes to be on the go, she is not much for organization, she likes to go with her heart, she is an excellent source of common sense and she is very street wise. She loves to shop, especially for bargains. She is quite capable of reading people, it’s an amazing gift she has. Her social capabilities are on par with special forces commandos who have seen years of combat. She has the ability to fit into almost any social situation, and is quite comfortable walking into a room full of strangers. Conversation for her is an art form, and we are not talking shallow, façade types of conversation, we are talking the ability to get down to the nitty, gritty details. I would liken her at times to a veteran counselor, even though she has never had any schooling or training on such things. Yes, its possible for people to attain high levels of skill in areas and never set foot in a university, (I would love to write more on that later).

She likes to be outside, caring for her plants and her gardens, but let’s be clear, she is not such an outdoors person that camping or spending the night outside in the woods would be her thing. She needs a hotel room with a shower, fluffy bed and a clean bathroom. If it has to do with living outdoors with wild animals and bugs, she doesn’t want any part of it (Still don't know whats wrong with wild animals and bugs, they are fascinating).

She also has of lately developed her artistic side, which she always thought she wasn't very artistic. I kept telling her “You've got it”. She is very crafty, and artistic especially with re-purposing discarded material from almost anything. I am always excited to see what she will come up with next.

Then there is her heart, I mean her spiritual core, who she is as a person, is very other centered. Most of her life is spent serving others. Yes there are things she loves to do, she has interests, hobbies, wants and needs, but more often than not, her mind is on other people and their successes and struggles. She used to carry heavy burdens of others. It was an issue, if someone was going through something difficult or painful, she took it as her own, and it would cause her almost as much distress as the person going through it. She is very emphatic. In some cases, taken too far, this could be unhealthy. Over the years, as she has grown in wisdom, she has learned how to deal with this much better, but she still does wrestle with it quite a bit, because she loves people.

I would also like to add, to my shame as an adult male, but also in very deep sincere gratitude, she does a lot for me. She fixes my coffee and protein shake for me every morning before I go to work. She does my laundry, cleans the house, and raises the children. More often than not when I get home from work, supper is ready within an hour or so... and on the set table. Sometimes I feel like an invalid three year old, all that she does for me, and not to mention the kids. So in other words, if you ever hear me complain about my wife, call the psychiatric hospital, because I have lost my mind.

Even though I handle all the money, budgeting and bill-paying, she makes the calls, if any need to be made, which inevitably they do. See I hate talking on the phone. Especially to someone I don’t know. I always feel like they are going to spring something on me or I will say something wrong, plus there is no way for me to analyze them, their facial expressions or body language, something I didn’t know how to do 20 years ago. Clare is the negotiator, the great communicator who is patient and definitely has a way with speaking. I on the other hand I could lose my temper fairly quickly over something that is really trivial, especially on the phone and spew forth all sorts of colorful metaphors from my gaping maw. So she handles all communications, and I do all the background work. It makes a good team.

So, am I putting her on a pedestal? Maybe it would seem that way to one who hasn’t lived with her for 21 years, but I am just relating to you what I have witnessed firsthand. You can certainly determine your own opinion if you met her and got to know her.

Myself on the other hand, I am introverted, isolationist, and inward focused, just being honest. I get along better with machines and animals than I do with people. Yes, I consider my computers close friends. And my dogs and cats are people to me. I do not spend as much time as I should with either my wife or my children. I am more often than not, in front of a computer. If it needs to be done by a certain time, I have issues leaving it. I can become obsessed with certain things, like game modding. Just playing with programming code and seeing the result in the game engine's behavior is fascinating. I can't stop writing or “drawing”, which used to be on paper but now is all on computer. I have so many images in my head of worlds, or better, universes I have developed since childhood, that at times it can be overwhelming.

I work too much. This was just one of the many reasons I left engineering for several years, because I am one of those workaholics you hear about. For the last twenty years in that field I have worked a lot of 70 to 80 hour weeks, especially when I was younger. I have to now, make a concerted, conscientious effort to limit my overtime, otherwise I can fall into the same trap again like I used to, just never ending working, never stopping and I don't even really enjoy that type of “work”. I think I feed off the challenge to beat schedules and produce accurate work, putting a lot of pressure on myself to not screw up. Perfection and precision at times is not enough. I set unreachable, inhuman levels of performance for myself. Yes, it can be exhausting and if you don't know what its like, you really have no idea what life is when you are a performance hog and everything must be right at all times, and efficiency is a paramount goal. Not to mention how difficult it can be when you actually do mess up, which will happen and the pieces need to be cleaned up.

To say the least, my mind never stops running like a computer. Without the years of therapy and medication I am on now, I would never sleep because I would always be working on something.

I do like to be outside as long as it has purpose, like hiking in the woods and if it’s not over 80 degrees outside. I love thunderstorms, rain, blizzards, ice, hail, etc.… well anything to do with snow and ice. I love the cold. I should be living in an old cabin in Alaska, chopping wood all year, but I could never talk Clare into this, not sure what her deal is.

Now in terms of socialization, I will attempt to “summarize”, but more on this will be coming later. I do prefer to be alone, but with the great irony of Asperger's this is certainly not consistent. I do like to be around people, sometimes, but I need long breaks. I can't be with people all the time. Its just too much. I think or hope most people would agree with that. But, I definitely need more away time than the average neurotypical male, and what could be considered by people by me being isolationist, is actually a natural function of my being, Most of my childhood and young adulthood was spent “alone”, yet inside my mind, I built universes. It can be hard for neurotypicals to understand this.

I can also have light conversation. I have learned some of this myself, but Clare has taught me a lot about it as well. Its what I categorize as “sincere reciprocal conversation” (another few blog posts are coming about this too). This is a skill that I have been working on for over 30 years. I have seen great development in the last 20 years or so (Wow, about the same time I have been married... imagine that...).

I can also be empathetic. Now this may not be true for all Aspies, because I cannot speak for all of us. Since I was very young, I have had tremendous empathy for people. A sensitivity to those who were being persecuted, or going through trials, or suffering. I will repeat again, tremendous empathy. In fact, there have been recent studies that seem to explain this, suggesting that the reason Aspies seek isolation is because of the tremendous empathy they can have for others, almost as though they can sense what people are going through. In turn this can cause an Aspie great distress and a lot of mental and physical anguish (more posts coming …. again). So, to bring this idea around, social situations can be very exhausting for me. It simply goes to the point that why, after a long exhausting week at work, would I want to further my exhaustion by continuing engagement with people? But again, this is not consistent in my experience for two basic reasons. My wife is a social animal, and I want to be with her, so I will go. Also, I do care about people and have developed meaningful relationships, and I have really analyzed myself that in some way “I owe” those friends social contact to maintain the friendship.

So there you go, there is a basic underpinning of our personalities, and then some. Clare is for the most part a “normal” person, or the straight man of the comedy team. I on the other hand was at a very young age keenly aware that I was different from everyone else, the foreign alien stumbling through a neurotypical world, at one time who tried to “fit in”, but gave up and had to find peace with who he was.

To be continued…