When Your Husband Is Autistic
Eleanor Vincent
Edward Hopper
Word Count 2021
“I deserve so much better,” I whispered.
It was the morning after my husband Lars stood me up for a lunch date. He’d feel cornered if I looked into his eyes, so I drew him into a hug and spoke softly into his ear.
“Yesterday you left me waiting for you at the restaurant,” I reminded him.
I had waited for an hour before eating alone. He texted me later with an offhand “Sorry, I got caught up in some work.” For the hundredth time, I felt invisible.
I was so upset that I searched the Internet for “legal separation,” and then scribbled a list of divorce lawyers on a Post-it note.
We kept hugging, his barrel chest pressed against me, the musky scent of his body wash filling my nostrils. During our courtship he hugged and kissed passionately. Where had that gone? Our marriage was only ten months old, but his eagerness had vanished, and we’d go weeks without making love.
I pulled back and our eyes met. His were blank pools, as if he almost didn’t recognize me. I had long suspected he had an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), undiagnosed officially, but probably ASD-1, formerly Asperger’s syndrome. Our health plan refused to evaluate him – they said he was too old, he couldn’t change, so why bother?
I was desperate for someone to bother. I wanted an explanation for why our sex life had fallen off a cliff, why he pounded his desk and shouted if I interrupted him, or stopped speaking to me for days, and why our faltering attempts to talk to each other ended in a swirl of escalating misunderstanding.
“You stood me up,” I said. That’s not okay!”
There was a beat of silence, then he said, “I’ll pick up groceries at Costco.”
My protest lingered in the air like the smell of burnt toast. He retreated from the kitchen. Moments later, the front door slammed.
*
We started as dance partners, both hooked on the upbeat rhythms of Zydeco, the happiest music on earth. Lars was a fabulous dancer, a passion we shared. We began dating, then broke up, but after a decent interval, we started dancing together again. Four years later, after he sacrificed a Saturday morning to fix my iPhone, I took him back.
During our courtship he was polite, solicitous, and caring. He opened doors for me, carried every bag and box, bought me silver and gold earrings, invited me on a cruise to Alaska. We had adventures. We ate delicious meals and drank great wine. We made love.
Yet, a few months after we were married, I had to beg for sex. Most evenings he’d disappear around 8:30 without saying goodnight. I’d find him snoring peacefully in our bed as if his bedtime routines or whereabouts were none of my business, as if saying goodnight was asking too much.
As our marriage faltered, I told my friend I had been lied to.
“On purpose? Do you think he intended to?
“Who knows? He masked his autism and pretended to be someone else until he couldn’t pretend anymore.”
I believed in the version of Lars I knew during our courtship, a gallant generous person who volunteered with the local Kiwanis Club. I trusted the self he had presented, his words of love, his romantic gestures.
He had been expert at giving the perfect gift, at making the right restaurant reservation. Over time, I realized he had memorized movie dialogue, had read the Kama Sutra, had gone to relationship seminars led by neurotypical gurus, but when it came to day-to-day intimacy, or the inevitable compromises of relationships, he was completely at sea.
A trip to Costco was concrete, something to accomplish. His love language was acts of service. For a while, that was enough. But as my allistic brain clashed with his autistic one again and again, it wore away my willingness to keep trying. I needed words of love, quality time, a man to invite me to go to bed with him not vanish without a word.
*
After several rounds of couples therapy, I saw that unless I learned to speak his autistic language, there would be no communication. He could not speak neurotypical. That had been a convincing act, but not one he could sustain.
If I tried to talk about our joint checking account or our spending, he would shut down and go silent, often for days. If he was working and I needed to ask him something, he would shout at me to leave him alone.
At first, if I begged for sex and cried and said how much I missed him, he’d give in. But pleading grew humiliating and I stopped asking, so our sex life, which had slowed to a trickle after our honeymoon, dried up entirely. My attempts to talk about it led to defensive stand offs. He gave only glancing kisses. He grew distant and scowled constantly.
I tiptoed around him as if he were a grenade with a pulled pin, afraid of provoking an outburst or a shutdown. At first, when he seemed so different, I was mystified.
As the distance between us grew, I searched for help, browsing autism support groups and local psychologists’ websites. Our first two attempts at couples therapy didn’t help. So, I sought out someone who had worked with other neurodiverse couples.
During one of our online sessions as our therapist was attempting to engage him in examining his feeling, Lars burst out, “Maybe I’m just a selfish bastard.”
“No, honey, your brain is wired differently,” I said, trying to reassure him.
Later, it hit me. What did it matter if he was autistic or a malignant narcissist? I was so eager to support him, I blamed everything on his brain wiring. Eventually, I’d find out about all the associated issues that tagged along with his autism: executive function and decision-making problems, anxiety, pervasive demand avoidance, depression.
We spent thousands of dollars for nine months of Zoom couple’s therapy. For a few days after our sessions, things would improve; then grow worse again. Our therapist said we were in a “loop of unresolved conflict.” Finally, I called a halt to couples counseling. Our “loops” looked like circling the drain, an exercise in futility.
*
I drove to the freeway in a trance, barely seeing the trees lining Olympic Boulevard, the bicyclists in the bike lane, the other drivers heading to Highway 24. The ground was dropping out from under me.
I had just told my attorney, “File! I want a divorce!”
I called my sister. “I have to save myself,” I said, fighting back tears.
“Stay strong! You are doing the right thing,” she said.
In the final months, our marriage crumbled like a sandcastle hit by a wave at high tide, leaving only the faintest outline behind. I had to accept the truth: Lars’ primary need was for autonomy, while mine was for connection. We were pulling in opposite directions.
We agreed to separate in June 2023.
Once I initiated the legal process, my husband disappeared into his office and began obsessively entering and rearranging financial data in his QuickBooks application. We stopped speaking. Our home became a war zone.
*
When I told a friend that I had filed for divorce she said, “How can a love that seemed so perfect turn into a bad dream?”
Lars was high masking, meaning he could successfully disguise his autism by copying the behavior of neurotypicals. The illusion he created was a form of theater, a Kabuki performance, where I became his special interest during our courtship, only to be quickly replaced by his computer once we were married.
Like many autistic people, he was teased as a kid. He felt like an outsider. To survive, he became skilled at masking, camouflaging his neurodivergence, an exhausting enterprise. Being neurodivergent is often lonely and confusing. But being in a neurodiverse marriage became a Tower of Babel, where words did not mean the same thing to us, where even my compassion was used against me. The harder I tried to save our marriage, the more he saw me as his enemy.
*
When I announced that I had found a rental unit and would move in a few weeks, Lars refused to let me take an area rug I asked for. Then he told me I couldn’t take my motorized sit-stand desk because he had selected it online and paid for it with his credit card.
“Take the desk,” my attorney advised.
“I’m waiting for him to ask for the engagement ring back,” I said.
“That’s one of the few things in family law that’s crystal clear,” my lawyer said. “You get to keep the rings.”
The six weeks we lived together while legally separated were like burning in Purgatory. When I discovered that Lars had given a private code, including the last four digits of my Social Security number, to a stranger, I lost it. I overheard this as he was talking on his phone. It was one more boundary violation in an endless string of them. When I challenged him, he went on a diatribe about how he had a perfect right to do it.
“I’m getting a new accountant,” he explained. “He asked to view our return.”
“Just shut up!” I hissed, leaping to my feet, unable to tolerate his rationalizations.
“You are violating my privacy,” I fumed. “Call our accountant. Get your own code!”
The next day, I booked two Lugg movers and a huge van and did a partial move, taking only my desk, my mattress, some clothes, a few kitchen basics and books, and my cat Marlowe.
The movers came at the end of the week and took the rest of my furniture, plants, art, and books. At last, I could breathe! I had secured a refuge.
*
When we were still sleeping in the same bed, and I woke in the night I’d sometimes wish Lars would have a sudden heart attack and die. That would be much simpler than divorce, than selling the house, than turning my life upside down. My instinct was prescient.
Lars has thrown one obstacle after another in the path of our divorce. You’d almost think he didn’t want a divorce. What he does want is half the proceeds of the sale of our house. I provided the entire six-figure down payment, and I deserve that back, but not in his eyes.
My husband was never one to talk about difficult subjects. Ask him about an obscure Greek philosopher or a nerdy science discovery and he’ll talk your ear off. On anything about us, or our marriage, or about all the ways I tried to save it, he’s mum.
One person who’s neurodivergent herself says that autism isn’t what caused our marriage to fail. It was Lars’ unwillingness to learn how to be a better partner. But wasn’t his brain wiring what led to his unwillingness? Teasing out the strands in the complexities of our marriage feels like a Herculean task, one I’ll never finish.
Without Lars, life is peaceful, but less rich materially and intellectually. I couldn’t live with him, yet it is also hard living with his absence. I miss the Lars from the early months, the man who treated me like a treasure, who danced me off my feet, who could tell me how the sun and the moon worked or figure out the most complex jigsaw puzzle.
Like a game of peek-a-boo, he was there and then he wasn’t. Sometimes I wonder if I really knew him at all. Who was the Lars I was in love with?
I know from my reading and my work in support groups that our marriage was typical of neurodiverse relationships. Some partners give up their dreams of emotional closeness and an active sex life. I couldn’t, yet some part of me thinks maybe I should have. In the end, we both had to be fully ourselves.
Our marriage will eventually be archived in memory, but there will be times when I will keep pulling at the threads, trying to unravel its unsolved mystery.
Eleanor's new memoir, Disconnected: Portrait of a Neurodiverse Marriage, is forthcoming from Vine Leaves Press. It tells the story of her gradual discovery that her husband was on the autism spectrum and of how she tried to survive a loveless marriage. Her earlier memoir, Swimming with Maya, poignantly describes the death of her 19-year-old daughter in a horse riding accident and the subsequent donation of Maya’s organs to strangers in need. Vincent’s essays appear in several collections, including Creative Nonfiction’s anthology, At the End of Life. and This I Believe: On Motherhood. She holds an MFA from Mills College, and lives in Walnut Creek, Califorinia