22 Things a Woman Must Know If She Loves a Man with Asperger's Syndrome

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The results suggest that the detection of happy facial expressions is impaired in individuals with ASD and high ATs, which may contribute to their difficulty in creating and maintaining affiliative social relationships. What to do If you do not live together, pace yourselves in the relationship, and space your visits out, so that burn-out doesn’t happen. As for what the males themselves prefer, some say they are most comfortable with someone who accepts them exactly as they are, while others will tell you they chose their partner because she challenged him to grow and change. The book provides details of the seven different stages of the model and includes anecdotal evidence from clients who have used it and whose relationships have been greatly helped by it.

Social withdrawal, adherence to strict routines, and sensory overload, all symptoms of Asperger’s, will cause him to “retreat” on a more or less frequent basis. If his inertia is due to depression, he probably needs something he’s not getting, and as his friend, you might want to find out what it is.The explanations are clear and the advice honest and realistic but I found the positive notes rather bleak. You may be better off coming from a place of sincerity, and relaxing your efforts a little, so you don’t exhaust yourself and get tied up in mental knots. Provided you still love him, you will probably want to do something to pique his interest from time to time.

To be left this way by a man you’ve worked so hard to keep happy can leave you with bitterness and regret, anger and desperation. As for what type of challenges, they might mean physical rather than emotional challenges, like trying kung fu as opposed to talking about feelings. We take male qualities to the extreme—the independence, the stoic behavior, lack of emotion and caring.

Of course, this emotional deprivation is not the intention of the AS partner; it is due to the limitations of theory of mind caused by having AS. The positive note Marriage can and does often put pressure on people, and he wouldn’t be the first to question whether or not it is necessary. People with AS can get sensory overload quite easily, causing confusion, which can lead to emotional and physical shutdown. Temple Grandin is a fine example of someone with AS who listened to her own voice and despite being ostracized by her coworkers, eventually won their respect and changed the way that some animal-handling businesses were run (2006).