It's hard to accept someone the way they are when it destroys your own life. It's only been a few months ago after researching asperger's (ASD) deeply after H's pdoc said there was something more than ADD wrong with him & the first T I went to after leaving H 7 years ago suggested that it sounded like he had asperger's.

Great...special interest....science fiction books he could take about as if it were real life & when he was reading or watching TV it would take a baseball bad on his head to even get his attention. (I never used the baseball bat but it was sure tempting).....that didn't get the bill's paid on time nor did it get problems solved when they required telephone communication. 33+ years of thinking that he needed practice taking care of the problems that I always ended up having to clean up after him. 33+ years of a marriage that had NO emotional connection. 33+ years of him taking things he was told literally & thinking there was no way of working around what he was told when I finally would find out......I would just end up blowing up because the solution was so simple for me to handle.....& there is ALWAYS a work around.

When he believed in something there was no changing his mind....using credit cards as long as you can make the minimum monthly payment. You have to own whole life life insurance.....ugh....my mentor business professor helped me know that my H was so far off on his thinking.....but he would never change his mind on anything he thought....& then his favorite irritating issues was thinking he knew something so much that he would actually tell me as in it was a FACT....then I would find out it wasn't that way.....so I constantly felt like I was being lied to.

I lived 33 years in a marriage from hell that in so many ways felt abussive to me.......& it wasn't until a few months ago when I realized that his whole behavior patterns did in reality show aspergers in EVERY WAY....it was only then I could release the anger I felt toward him.....I still don't like his attiudes....or in reality....I really don't like him as a person to have to live with. He was a nice person & I can't say otherwise.....but living with someone & being their H is a lot different than thinking a person is a nice person......the 2 are NOT EQUAL.

My H didn't care about making the marriage work.....he didn't care about working on the things that don't work in marriage....& we both decided that it would have been much better if we had never been married.....but you can't go back 33 years & fix something that huge......& it took over 7 years of being away from him to realize that it wasn't my inability to continue tolerating him that destroyed the marriage.....as he said he expected I would do because I had tolerated him for so long. There comes a point in everyone's life when one finally has to leave the miserable situation.

I honestly wish that I had listened to that little voice inside that warned me about getting married.....but back in 1975.....asperger's wasn't much known about let alone Dx'ed....& I just sensed that something was wrong but couldn't put my finger on it.....& my mother said he would grow up & become responsible when he had to.....that was definitely not true.....& that points all that much more to the fact that I'm sure all those years it was asperger's that was messing up the marriage.

I don't think honestly even if I knew it was asperger's back in those days that it would have changed my ability to live with all the things that it caused in my life.......but maybe I would have left sooner than later & maybe I wouldn't have gone through the horrible depression & suicide attacks that I did in order to escape the bad marriage when I felt there was no way out.

There are definitely both sides to the asperger's picture. It definitely places challenges in your lives.....but those challenges were placed on others whose normal life they destroyed financially & emotionally.......& it was a struggle to figure out now a nice guy could be so impossible to be around......but the only good thing that happened in my life was leaving him & really finding out who the real ME was after all those years.