AO1501
am I looking for expressions of love through actions rather than words? I think that is the first big difference I am noticing...I am a natural writer and lover of words and part of our communication is by text and I can pour myself out on to a page, which does not fair well for him at all...I have figured this out...we now video chat in the mornings which is better but still, words are not a grand expression of adoration for him...is this true in general?
It isn't that an aspie doesn't get words - I know that when my wife and I were stuck thousands of miles apart (in the days before texts and skype) we'd email pages and pages to each other every day, but what you say and what you mean might not be what he gets from reading, and absent real-time conversations, that can make misunderstandings hard to catch and resolve before they become embedded into the relationship's history.
My own experience of relationships as an aspie male is that my partners have always needed some form of reinforcement of what I say from the things I do, and sometimes I have managed to get it, but that need has had to be really glaringly obvious for me to realise. In retrospect, my wife dropped lots of hints, which I see in hindsight, but never noticed in real time, and I can understand why that made things hard for her to understand, and harder still to believe that I felt for her what I said, but which she may well have never entirely believed, or felt comfortable believing.
She would ask me how would she know I loved her, and I'd say 'because I said so', meaning that I would never say it unless I meant it, and I couldn't figure out why that wasn't enough.
What we didn't do was talk about it, and discuss why she and I saw the relationship in different ways, even as we wanted to be in it, and to be together. We lasted 13 really good years (and a couple of not so good) however, so even with misunderstanding each other's needs and forms of expression, we got a lot right. That's why I say it can work.
The problem to me isn't the difference, it in trying not to take the failure to get what you want or need from each other as a hurt, but as the basis to explore what went wrong. Some relationships can't survive that kind of examination and will fail, but the ones that can will be much more likely to thrive on it.
On EDIT: I need to add that no, if he is not 'wordy', great words likely won't work well as a form of expression, particularly if he has found over the years that people often say one thing and mean something at least not quite the same. Aspies broadly are very practical, very engaged in the clockwork of life - the stuff that makes it tick. The grand expression of love for him (it certainly worked for me) was the simple statement 'I love you'. Simple and direct is what I always found worked, because I could understand that and know it wasn't meant to be something else. I didn't need anything else, because when I'm told something, I believe it.
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