AS/NT perspective of love - was:Parting Ways

[Guest guest]

Well being AS myself my thoughts on this probably aren't worth much. HEH! Sounds like your husband is fishing for compliments. But then that may be my AS speaking. Your reasons sound like good reasons to me and sound very complimentary to him. Does he have a hard time accepting compliments? My husband could not see that I love him because he interpreted every logical factual thing I said about him through the screen of his emotional response to his nutty family. So if I said, "You are a hard worker who does quality work, anyone, anywhere would be happy to have you work for them." He heard, "I'm a failure who could never survive." Go figure. I still don't understand it but there it is. He could never accept that when I said something I meant simply and exactly what I said. I guess the baseline assumption was that I was lying politely to make him feel good. Never occurred to him that I would NOT have said 'you are a good worker' if I didn't actually KNOW that to be true. So in matters of love it didn't matter what I said or did, he simply did not believe it, ever.

I do agree that AS and NT seem to have different definitions for love. NT definition seems to be majority emotion where as AS tends to be majority reasons. Maybe what that really is is that AS are able to actually sit down and list the reasons for the emotions, where as NT can't so they say large blanket statements like 'because you are wonderful'...??

People as a whole in society seem to have lost touch with the concept that our emotions follow our thoughts. You can change your emotional response by changing your thoughts. Society seems to be of the opinion that we are held captive by our feelings. Feeling has become an excuse for all manner of rotten behavior, i.e. "I can't help it, it's just the way I feel about it." Feeling has also been the reason people rush into marriage without thought about who the other person really is. This is why a lot of churches are starting to have guidelines like they won't marry a couple until the couple has some premarital counseling where they deal with the issues that typically cause problems in marriage. In the past this was not an issue. People were not primarily emotion driven, they were primarily intellect driven.

Just my thoughts

Jennie AS

RE: Parting Ways

I think this is the hardest thing to work around in an AS-NT relationship. My husband, who is NT, is forever asking me, “Why do you love me?” I have gathered, after much discussion and fact-finding on my part, that he is looking for a certain type of answer when he asks this question. In my experience, most NT people are looking for a “soul mate”. Love is a purely emotional thing for them, proof that you are bonded, that your relationship is “meant to be”. I have always found this concept… odd.

I love my husband because:

-He helps me do the things I need to do every day

-He has good organizational skills

-He is a good father

-He makes me smile

-He tells me things that make me feel good about myself

-I have been with him since I was 16

-I am comfortable with him

Apparently, these are not the answers he wants when he asks me if I love him. I’ve never really figured out why. Are these not valid reasons to want to be with someone? We talk about these things a lot and I think that while he has accepted the fact that I DO love him, in my own way and for my own reasons, he wishes I had reasons more understandable to him. But if he was NOT able to accept this difference in viewpoints, I would not hold it against him. It is a difficult thing to work around. We have been married 12 years and it is STILL the biggest obstacle in our marriage.