When Asperger's marries ADD

We did it in all innocence. What started as a great romance turned into 21 years of spiraling hell. I knew it was all his fault when I divorced him: he was mean, unpredictable, controlling, and a know-it-all. He was emotionally unavailable, cold, uncaring, and mechanical. It wasn't my fault I couldn't keep house or maintain any kind of order. It was his fault our finances were in ruins and the children were acting out.

Well. It's taken a few years and a lot of reading, but I now see what was going on in a different light. For one thing, it's become clear to me that I suffer from Adult ADD. And it has become clear to me that he suffers from Asperger's in addition to bipolar disorder. Somehow understanding the Asperger's makes a difference to me. Not that I want him back – we're no more suited to each other now than we ever were. But he's discovered the concept of personal growth and is really working on it, for which I applaud him. And I can't think of any way in which, even with the best counseling in the world, we could ever have had a happy marriage. ADD and Asperger's are probably the most incompatible of all possible differences.

Imagine this: I'm overwhelmed with a newborn child who never sleeps. I'm handicapped anyway when it comes to keeping house. I have never developed routines, don't know how to prioritize and have to go immediately to whatever draws my attention, in this case the non-sleeping baby. Laundry piles up everywhere; dishes pile up everywhere; papers pile up everywhere. I can't make the bed because the baby is crying. I can't clean up because the baby is crying. I can't finish anything and I lose everything because I don’t know where anything goes in my own house.

Enter the bipolar Aspergian. He craves order. He doesn't – can't – see my struggle, doesn't recognize my gestures of love (how can I love him when there are no clean socks in his dresser drawer?), thinks that every element of chaos is personally directed at him. Either he loses his temper and looms over me, screaming (bipolar), or, more often, he withdraws into the world of television or tools (Asperger's).

When he withdraws, I try to follow him and draw him out. I’m lonely. I feel unloved, unwanted, a failure. Why can't he see how much I want to do things right, and how hard it is for me? Why can't he appreciate what I do instead of focusing only on what I do wrong? I'm becoming convinced I do everything wrong.

He doesn't hear the need. He reacts to what he can only perceive as yet another attack. Why don't I see how hard he works to support the family? Why am I being so mean? And while we're at it, what am I doing with all "his" money? He cashes a few lousy checks to buy a few lousy bottles of whiskey, and now I'm complaining that there isn't enough money to pay all the bills. All I do is complain. He's a dedicated family man and would like for God's sake to have clean clothes to wear to work and a kitchen that doesn't make his skin crawl with baby food splats on the wall, and a wife who makes herself sexually available any time of the night instead of jumping out of bed to feed the baby.

We speak entirely different languages. We are light-years beyond Mars and Venus. We are from different galaxies, not planets. Our brains are wired differently and neither one of us is "normal." And, worse, we don't know it. We both believe we are normal, sort of. I grew up in an alcoholic family with a Narcissistic mother, so I was primed to take the blame for everything even when logic told me otherwise. I was needy and dependent and accustomed to an emotionally cold father, so of course I was also trying to resolve old issues through my emotionally cold and critical husband, whose parents, incidentally, tend to relate through verbally violent arguments.

In the end, we got divorced. It was traumatic. He didn't want to leave; I couldn't get him out fast enough. I'd already done my grieving for the marriage. Now, however, we are both immeasurably better off. He has discovered through his newly found church that other people do, in fact, relate lovingly, and he is trying to emulate them. When we communicate, he is courteous, even kind. He has been forced to take responsibility for his choices, because I am no longer there to blame. Meanwhile, if I am still sometimes starved for affection, at least I'm not wasting precious psychic energy trying to get it from a rock – a rock that might go volcanic at any moment. My environment has gradually calmed down as the children, who were teenagers by the time of the divorce, have also grown older and calmed down and started moving out. I have had the time and mental space I so desperately needed to start inching my way toward something resembling organization. I no longer lose bills, and only occasionally my car keys. I no longer leave the dishes in the sink for days at a time while my attention is drawn elsewhere again and again. I no longer feel like the ball in a pinball machine.

How did I figure out about the Asperger's and ADD? It started with my sister revealing my mother's diagnosis a few years ago. No one had ever told me. From learning everything I could about Narcissism and reviewing my own history in light of this new information, I went on to discover everything I could about my own disorganization. It was my lawyer who first suggested that my husband had Asperger's. I investigated Asperger's, finally reading Be Different, the Adventures of a Free Range Aspergian, which clinched it. My lawyer was right. Bipolar disorder just plain runs in the family. My step-daughter has been diagnosed with it, and half the rest of the family would be if they ever got tested. Once you know what it is, it's hard to miss, even though it comes in wildly varied expressions.

If your brain is wired differently, it's hard to be and do what the people around you expect. You might even find yourself failing your own expectations. Knowledge is power. Get information. Get as much as you can. Then live mindfully. The idea is not to live a false life for somebody else, but to live your own life well, and this includes understanding the dynamics of your relationships. Sometimes, with understanding, the relationships will work; sometimes they won't. But if they don't, you want to know why. You don’t want to spend your life trying to fix something that isn't so much broken as simply not what you thought it was, and that includes fixing yourself, as well. If you don't know what's wrong, how can you fix it? Get to the root of the problem. If you're badly disorganized, why is that? It's probably more than a "character flaw." The same applies to any other fault you can think of. There is something behind it, whether it's diagnosable or merely a lack of know-how.

It's conceivable that with the right knowledge and help, even an ADDer and an Aspergian could make a marriage work. I doubt it, really, but I can't help thinking that if we'd understood each other better, we might at least have left a lot less psychic bloodshed.