Hello, I've recently joined and thought I should introduce myself.
Sorry in advance if this is long! I have a lot to get off my chest
I have been married to my husband for 4 years, we've been together for 6 years altogether. We're both in our 40s, this was our first marriage (although we both have grown-up children from previous relationships).
Since the first moment I met him, I knew he was 'special', very sensitive, almost child-like and needed someone to take care of him. Although he was very secretive about his past, I quickly gathered that he'd had a rough ride and a very chaotic life up to that point, going from bad relationship to bad relationship, never really having a home (he'd spent most of his life lodging with family members), he wasn't good at taking care of himself physically, it seemed like he'd never really been able to hold down a job for any length of time (he'd been self-employed for a few years when we met), etc.
I'm the total opposite - ordered, sensible, a bit straight-laced, I like to conform, I pay my bills on time, I've never been out of work, I've always made a home for myself, etc
I quickly fell in love with him - together, we seemed to compensate for each other's failings, I kept him organised and settled and he gave me a new child-like way of viewing the world and loosened me up (for want of a better phrase!).
After a while, I found out that he had mental health problems (I found anti-depressants in his flat) and when I dug around a bit, I learned that he'd quite recently been in the local psych. hospital after a suicide attempt. i was shocked when I found out that this period as an inpatient happened only days before we first met.
He was still secretive, but I gently persevered and learned a lot more about his past.....he confessed that he'd been making regular suicide attempts ever since he was 15 (he's now 47), occasionally wrist cutting but mostly overdoses of various chemicals and/or drugs.
I'll point out here that absolutely no-one who knows him would believe any of this to be true. He's a joker, the clown of any group, always smiling and apparently upbeat and a real people-pleaser, always the first to offer help.
Anyway, as time went on, I found out more about his illness.......I'll try to summarise......he basically can't cope with any kind of stress in his life. He described it as if his head is like a bucket; each stressful incident, no matter how trivial it would appear to other people, goes into his 'head bucket' and stays there. Eventually, the bucket overflows and the only way he knows how to make himself feel better is by attempting suicide. Normally, a suicide attempt relieves the stress and he carries on as normal, until the next time.
So we've been living on this knife-edge the whole of our married life, and for the most part, he's been coping. I think the stability of our lives together him has helped him a lot, and I also think that the fact I know all/some of his secrets and still love and accept him has kept him ticking along.
For about the past 18 months, though, things have been getting worse and worse. He thinks the main trigger was a difficult situation at work. He's made repeated suicide attempts, none of which have relieved the problem/improved his frame of mind. I've pretty much forced him to seek help (he's never sought help before, apart from when he was an inpatient), so he's been under the care of the local psych team (so far, he's seen his GP, three different consultant psychiatrists - as well as several others as part of the discharge process after his ODs - a couple of CPNs, a clinical psychologist and we've also had several visits to the crisis team). Most of the professionals just want to chuck drugs at him, and the only one that's really been a help is the clinical psychologist, who really was 'thinking outside the box' and coming up with some pretty radical ideas for treatment, but, sadly, the allotted 12 sessions have now ended.
Now, I'll get to my point....and the reason I decided to join an Asperger's forum! I've obviously been giving this loads of thought (it's the only thing on my mind most of the time) and I'm pretty convinced that my husband has Asperger's. I work with learning disabled adults, and many of them are also somewhere on the autistic spectrum or have Asperger's, so I'm pretty familiar with most of the classic traits. My husband has so many of the classic traits that I'm almost sure that he has the condition......
He's never really fitted into 'normal' society, he's not got any real friends and never has had (apart from being close to one of his brothers), he has no interest in his family (apart from said brother), he has a very bleak and negative outlook on life, he has absolutely zero empathy for others (for example, he's never cried at a sad/happy film in his whole life, nothing he sees on the news affects him, if people get upset in his company, he just ignores them, etc), until he met me, he'd never allowed a girlfriend to touch him/hold his hand/kiss him in public, he gets fixated on really trivial or strange/random things, he doesn't take care of himself physically, he's obsessed with outer-space and science but he has no real 'hobbies', he can't read a book (can't concentrate for long enough), everything is either black or white, there are no shades of grey in his mind, he is obsessive about some really insignificant (to me!) things and really couldn't care less about other things (which I'd consider to be vastly more important), he has to do everything at break-neck speed with absolutely no thought for the consequences, he has fixed habits and rituals (in fact, his suicide attempts are strictly governed by rituals), he can't have a 'normal' two-way conversation with another person because he's not in the slightest bit interested in other people's experiences, thoughts and feelings (he starts most of his sentences with "I").
There are loads of other 'traits', but I can't really think of them at the moment (my mind's a mush with everything that's going on). I know it seems unlikely, but we do have a laugh and a joke about his problems and 'strange' ways of thinking, we try to keep it light-hearted (it would be very easy for me to crumble too). He's a truly lovely, wonderful, kind, sensitive and thoughtful man. I know he loves me very much, as I do him. I actually love him more because he's quirky, and I just want to help him, but I'm at a complete loss. I'm currently encouraging him to talk to the doctor about my Asperger's theory.
So, that's a whistle-stop tour of my life with my husband! Browsing this forum has really opened my eyes, I've had so many light-bulb moments since joining, some of the posts could have been written by him, or even by me.
Thanks for reading my ramblings, you deserve a medal if you got to the end!
Chunkmonkey
