My intro

[Guest guest]

Hello-

I have been reading the lists and would like to introduce myself.

I believe that my husband has some Asperger traits. Is it possible that

people can have a " mild " form of Aspergers? I have suggested this to

him but he vehemently denies that there could be anything wrong. I

dread taking him to social situations because I never know what he will

say or do to embarrass me. I have made a rule that he will never attend

a social function at work with me. When he is with my friends who accept

him and there is no anxiety, he is ok.

He was a software engineer and is now a music teacher. He had a

difficult time working and keeping jobs when he worked in a hierarchy.

He blames the software industry but I think his personality had

something to do with his job insecurity. His students seem to like him.

He is obsessed with birding, and making lists of the birds he sees.

Today he spent an entire day of his vacation on a solo bird count out in

the cold and he is very happy. His world is about birding. (I know that

many birders are this way. ) His joy in life is about collecting lists

of birds, and making spreadsheets and tables of bird sitings. He also

makes charts and tables about gas mileage, is very methodical about

these spreadsheets, and when his son was small, as a coach, his

contribution to the team was to make statistical charts of their

averages. Odd-as a young children's coach? He is very good at telling me

what the weather will be. He loves maps and borders and loves telling

me where borders exist for cities and counties. Instead of a net of

relationships he has facts and figures and tables.

He has virtually no friends. When we do see people, they are my friends.

In social situations he sometimes makes obscure jokes and comments about

little known musicians or musical subjects that no one would know

anything about and laugh to himself at his own joke…behavior that

showed he was not tuning in to the group but was in his own world. This

behavior has gotten better too because I gave him such a hard time about

it. He would ask people about locations and map oriented questions at

parties-intersections of certain roads, etc. He will direct the

conversation back to himself and talk at people, without asking them

questions, just about himself. Or he will clam up and not say anything,

and then come tag along me when I am trying to have a conversation with

someone. It feels burdensome to me that he cannot hold up his end of a

social interaction, and has to rely on me. Basically I am his world and

I do not appreciate that right now. He has gotten better because I have

given him a hard time about how to better interact with people, but it

is not great to socialize with him.

One time he made some weird joke about a menora joke to a friends

husband who is Jewish, whom he had just met, totally weird and

inappropriate. They complained that he made them uncomfortable.

I do not enjoy it when he is visiting my family because he makes very

little effort to reach out and engage people. He acts bored and

detached. He has offended people but my family is polite and they have

not complained about him. He does not know how to " grease the wheel " ,

ever. Once when we were visiting my brother's family he made a rude

gesture towards my brother's children, pretending to kick them, saying

" get out of here, kid " . So nasty and inappropriate. They were not being

bratty. I wanted to DIE! He either says he didn't remember doing that

or acts like there is nothing wrong with the way he acts. Then he just

acts like it never happened. I always thought he was just a huge jerk

and didn't own his behavior--and I have wanted to divorce him several

times. I am hoping to learn strategies to deal with this kind of stuff.

He is *very* intolerant of his 20 year old son's ADD. He never reaches

out to his family. I have to order him to make calls, etc.--not even ask

any more because he would never follow through.

The reason I am writing is he is either an incorrigible jerk or there is

something like AS that might explain these aspects of his personality.

When we are alone he can be so kind and loving. He said when he was

young people told him that he was the weirdest person they had ever met.

I hope to find more tolerance if I can identify a real problem I can

work with and understand his bad behavior. So this may sound weird but

I am actually hoping he has AS......I could find more love and

compassion for him, and less judgement, if some of these behaviors can

be explained-they are not acceptable, but more understandable....