My H had one girl friend before me but she was NOT a real GF either as they only dated a few times before she basically dumped him. I thought it was because he was focused on school....but now I understand a bit more about his issues & his lack ability to connect with people......should have used that as another red flag.

I understand the put down's though....when we first got married all he ever did was use sarcasm on me & I found myself fighting back with sarcasm on him.....& I hated the person it was making me into....while he had no sense of anything connected with that.....another indication of what he was never diagnosed with. It irritated me because I was getting my degree & I had a higher GPA than he ever thought of having & I knew that I was just as smart if not smarter because at least I had common sense while all he could do was calculus......so I wasn't about to continue allowing him to put me down like that so I got out my fly swatter & let him have it. It took about a year of continually having to remind him that the door was right there if he chose to continue. Unfortunately part of his issues don't allow him to understand the body language of other people & he was always totally unaware of what anyone around him was thinking or feeling....it was like he was in his own little world & would interface in a very impersonal way to everyone including me.

I can't recall ever seeing H's body language either......interesting how the results can end up being similar even though the ways of getting there are different & the causes for getting there are all different.

My H would hide in his sci fi books & no one could get through to him...not even with a baseball bat. He claimed that it came from living in a family of 3 other kids growing up.....but I am sure there was a lot more to it than just that.....it also goes along with the diagnosis that I'm sure was missing all his life.......H wanted to hide from everyone....his escape was into his own made up life inside of his own brain & never touched on anyone's life outside of that.

Dang....if he had let it go outside of the marriage....I would have left earlier.....but neither of us believed on cheating within the marriage....but it didn't mean that I didn't want out....I just didn't believe in finding someone else to use to get me out.....I wanted to get out for myself & not because I got involved with someone else as those just aren't my values & they weren't his either along with the fact that he wasn't capable of connecting with others on that kind of level either.....he never even connected in our marriage in the normal way that a marriage would connect.

Body language & any kind of language was pretty much NON-EXISTANT in our marriage other than my yelling at him for not paying attention, not listening, not doing things he said he would do.....it's not surprising that I initially thought that there was a lot of passive-aggressive issues....there were but it didn't explain 100% what was really going on.

It's strange to be in a marriage where there is NO communication of any sort & what communication he had most of the time was not fitting for the situation...fighting the "not being heard" was definitely irritating no matter where it came from.....& I definitely attacked it because I wasn't willing to tolerate it especially when there didn't seem like there was a logical reason for why he was that way.....with a high IQ & supposedly very smart....I had a hard time buying that any guy with his abilities could logically be the way he was.....it's clearer as to why now....but it sure wasn't...& I'm not willing to even go back there ever. I want NOTHING to do with him even if he were to get the problem diagnosed.....I got so burned for all those years.....I wouldn't be willing to put myself back anywhere close to him even if he did change....there were just too many other things on top of it all that caused me to want & need it to end.