Autism and Love

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth. I’ve been writing for Asperger’s Awareness Month on the topic of what it’s like to have Asperger’s and tonight, I’d like to write on the topic of how it relates to the idea of romantic love. I plan to take a deeper look at how it relates to marriage at a later date, maybe tomorrow provided I find the time.

Love in my case can be difficult since it’s such an emotional issue. Add in that I’m a strong perfectionist and that Aspies have an intense amount of loyalty and it gets more interesting. However, this is not to say that an Aspie cannot be romantic. Indeed, I believe my wife would certainly attest that her husband is very romantic.

I do suspect we’ll be more quiet about our romantic interests than others. After all, we have a hard enough time talking to people that we can see every day. It’s that much harder to go up to someone and ask them out on a date. Considering that there are a number of Aspies who are married, we can say that this is certainly something that is doable however, and for those of you who are in the neurotypical camp, it should be a comfort to you.

As I was saying about being loyal, it makes me want to look with absolute devotion at the person I love. There’s also the joke that nerds, like myself, are so excited when we finally have someone that we do things in an extreme way. For my dating period, I certainly made it a point to interact every day and try to catch any of the little foxes from the Song of Solomon that could enter our relationship. When the time came that I had decided to propose, I would get the ring and actually practice before my wife’s picture every night.

We also made prayer a part of our relationship and we’d call each other every night and ask how we could pray for one another. We could spend a couple of hours on the phone a few nights and personally, looking back, I have no idea what we talked about, but I just know that we talked.

To show my further seriousness also, I made it a point that just a day or so before the wedding, I wrote my own wedding vow to my Princess. Now I did not read this at the wedding, but I wrote it and put it on my Facebook as my personal promise to my Princess. We know that if we repeat what someone else says, we are not as prone to hold to it as when we write it out ourselves.

I’ve been asked before also if I have a copy of what I said at the rehearsal dinner and unfortunately, I don’t. Speaking off the cuff for me is usually better than when I speak from a script and I think I spoke for ten-fifteen minutes about how much my Princess means to me.

This is just to say that yes, we are quite capable of love and today, people often state that my wife and have one of the most romantic and devoted marriages they’ve seen. Hopefully I can write on that tomorrow.

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