Life with a Partner or Spouse with Asperger Syndrome: Going over the Edge? by Kathy J. Marshack, is a book on handling relationship difficulties when one partner is autistic. It's written by a therapist with personal experience in autism. She's nonspecific, to protect privacy, but my guess is that in addition to having an autistic mother, she also married and then divorced an autistic man. I'll just be very polite and say, "it shows."
I try not to look up reviews by others before I read and review a book myself, because it tends to bias my understanding of the book and the author. This particular book made me very angry within the first couple chapters, though. I mentioned this to a friend, and he looked up the reviews... apparently a lot of autistic people got angry about this book.
I did find some redeemable points about it, though, so I'm still going to review it. It's just going to get a more critical treatment than most of what I read, because there were some very serious issues.
First and foremost, the author. I mentioned her background with autistic family members. This book seems like something the author wrote as part of her personal therapy. It's very raw and painful at points, something like
Lament for a Son, except destructive towards autistic people in parts, and written from a place of authority (PhD/therapist/marriage counselor).
The combination is rather horrifying to me. Lament for a Son is an excellent book, written by a grieving father who claims no particular understanding of life and death. As a marriage counselor and earner of a PhD, though, the author sits in the position of authority for the majority of this book... which, given what I'll mention next... is kind of hackles-raising.
The biggest point of contention I have with this book and its author is that, while sitting in that position of authority, they refer to autistic people as broken, and seem to imply that the autism is the failure point of these relationships. Things like "being incapable of empathy." (Easy example on page 20: "But what all those with Asperger's seem to have in common is the effect they have on their loved ones. Because they are not able to empathize, they often leave us feeling alone or crazy...")
Not able to empathize. Not able? Being autistic does not mean you lack empathy. In fact,
quite the opposite. Nor does being neurotypical
mean you're perfect at communication and have healthy expectations for people and relationships.
I've been told by a former roommate from college that she'd assumed I had no empathy, presumably because she'd been told that absurd factoid elsewhere. She never questioned it until years later. She didn't question it when I bought Easter candy and hid it around her room in a little Easter egg hunt. Didn't question it when I made time to listen to her when she was upset or wanted company. Didn't even question it when I put together music from her home church to go with her on a longer trip overseas, to help fight the homesickness while she was gone.
It was only years later, when it came up in conversation, because this kind of thing is my work, that she realized the assumption and told me about it. It was, frankly, really hurtful. It's been battered into me, while growing up, that I'm a wrong and terrible and broken, not simply "different." This friend is not a stupid person, and has plenty of empathy herself. But she'd been fed that assumption and never thought to question it. So to her, I was broken.
Needless to say, I hope, it makes me
alllll kinds of white-hot furious to see that embittered, heartless, flatly
wrong assumption parroted again, here, from a place of a
marital counselor with a PhD. If my copy wasn't a library book, I would have burned it on the spot for that vicious cruelty alone.
Once and for all, people:
Autistic people have empathy. We think and behave differently than the norm, which can mean we don't recognize a situation where empathy is appropriate, or which actions are desired upon recognizing situation that would merit an action. The safest move, when not knowing what to do, is usually to do nothing. An autistic person may also miss that a situation is upsetting to a neurotypical person, and thus be blindsided by requests for comfort, help, or a change in behavior (or in this book's case, the lack of requests, which grows into relationship problems...).
Second point: relationships are hard. You don't need autism in the mix to have massive communication failures. Half of all marriages in the US end in divorce. Half. That is far too many for it to be "autism ruins everything." For all this book's insistence that neurotypical norms and expectations are reasonable (and autistic ones aren't?), they often aren't reasonable at all. If they were, the divorce rate wouldn't be so high. The author may specialize in marriage counseling for people with autism or married to someone with autism, but at least in this book, they place far too high a value on normalcy. Sometimes personalities clash. Sometimes expectations shift. Sometimes situations change. And sometimes, people can't reconcile those changes. That's life.
Before I married my spouse, we had some serious talks about lifetime type issues. Kids, chores, balance of responsibilities, etc. We had pre-marital counseling. We had fights about things, from important stuff like "who does what chores when and how often" to "does the toilet seat stay up or stay down?" I'm autistic. I have trouble communicating. That makes this whole relationship thing harder. I try to help counter it by laying out my expectations and trying to hear his expectations. Talking about our differences. Putting our compromises on paper, and then trying to stick to them.
Y'know who apparently didn't do this? The main example people, "Helen" (NT wife) and "Grant" (autistic husband). The author goes on and on about Grant's controlling personality, his preoccupation with work, and the painful situations that result. Not so much in focus? Helen's self-martyrization and apparent inability to tell her spouse what she wants from him. She can tell her therapist just fine, right up to and including "isn't it so crazy that he doesn't just do this already?" But apparently it would be beyond the pale to actually, I don't know, use those vaunted neurotypical communication skills to communicate those things?
I'm extremely unimpressed with either of them. Helen needs to quit running herself ragged, making excuses for her spouse, acting the martyr, and staying quiet about what things she needs from Grant, emotionally. Grant needs to detach from work to spend time with his family, learn a bit about neurotypical-handling, take his spouse and her concerns seriously, and learn more appropriate behaviors in the various situations he fails at in this book. This morass of a situation described in this book doesn't need to happen, and certainly doesn't need to continue.
Third point: the book counsels "detachment" as an answer to relationship problems with an autistic spouse. Detachment: distancing yourself from the situation and your spouse.
Y'know what that is? It's
the Fourth Horseman of Broken Relationships. Seriously, I cannot stress enough that you should not do this unless you see zero hope for success in the relationship.
I read the whole book, and the author seems to slowly redefines "detachment" as "not taking your spouse's autism-related failings/behaviors personally" and "redefining your expectations for your partner and yourself." That is not how English works, and it strikes me as a very dangerous path to take. Especially, as mentioned, when speaking as a marital counselor.
There's a chapter on sex, too, which of course places autism as the point of failure when a NT spouse feels unfulfilled, unromanced, etc. Let's talk about this for a moment.
Popular culture has a lot of messages for us about how sex should be. The focus is pretty much always on penis-haver. As the owner of female parts, I learned basically nothing about them, what to do with them, or how to experience pleasure with them. To be blunt and uncouth, pop culture, sex ed class, and porn instructed me that my parts are only for being a cocksleeve, and my sexual pleasure is irrelevant.
Is it any wonder, then, that couples have so much trouble with mutually-satisfying sex? This isn't an autism thing, it's a cultural thing. We're so uncomfortable talking about and portraying sex, that all you get are bare bones details unless you do some serious searching online and get lucky enough to find some of my generation's work on it.
This is all massively unhelpful for any relationship. There's a huge industry around satisfying unfulfilled lovers with either anatomy, with everything from sex toys to self-help books to making infidelity faster and easier than ever before.
When it comes down to it, what you actually need is for people to talk about their preferences in sex and intimacy, and be willing to try new things. I have a friend (who is married to another vagina-haver), who tells me they pity straight couples. In gay and lesbian relationships, there aren't so many norms, and it's basically required that you talk about what kinds of sex, touch, and intimacy you like. Straight couples don't do that nearly as much, if at all, and the results of poor communication are... well, predictable.
In the end, everyone should talk about these things with their spouses. Everyone should figure out what they like and don't, and give directions and follow directions. Autistic people just need more directions than most.
The book seems to have an undercurrent of "I can't believe autistic people can't see all these signals we put out" even though it's stated repeatedly, that this is the truth. It's as if the author can't entirely believe it herself. It's also as if the author, despite being a marriage counselor, doesn't understand that even if the signals are put out, they aren't necessarily read correctly or at all by a neurotypical spouse, either. Frankly, it boggles my mind. If y'all were the magical thought-reading genius-psychics this book seems to imply is normal, there wouldn't be so many divorces between purely NT partners.
Two quick notes before I move on. First, this book has a section subtitled "Can you be NT in an Aspie World?" This is an absurdity. There is no Aspie world. We are essentially aliens, strangers in a strange land. There are only pockets in the vast NT world where autistic people may sometimes find respite to be ourselves. Neurotypical people are the vast majority, and they shaped the world we live in. Playing the victim because things aren't exactly as you'd like them is worse than wrong, it's abusive. Like we don't have enough to deal with.
Second, there's a small incident with a fictitious Justine (NT) and Edwin (autistic) having a minor argument. Justine says to Edwin, "You think other people should think like you, don't you?" He responds in the positive, and the book says, "As long as Edwin has that point of view, there is no reason for Justine to argue another view. She will lose."
I hate to shatter anyone's beautiful illusions here, but "assuming other people think like you and that your way of thinking is best" is literally the default human state. That isn't an autistic thing. It's a people thing. What makes autistic people have so much more trouble with it is that we're so very different that it's much more of a stretch to imagine a "normal" viewpoint, transitioning between points of view can be difficult, and we're sometimes prone to black-and-white thinking.
I've been pretty critical of this book thus far, and fairly so, in my opinion. But I'd be doing a disservice to the book and its author if I didn't point out that it gets some of its stuff right. In general, the "Lessons Learned" bullet point section at the end of each chapter has the broad therapeutic brushstrokes correct.
Things like "seek professional help from someone qualified," "if your partner doesn't understand you, stop and explain yourself in simple and concrete details," and "don't be offended if they miss your cues. Be explicit. Use words to explain your emotional state and your needs and wants..." The ugly accusations, like the supposed lack of empathy, supposed abusive tendencies, and blaming the autistic person or the autism itself for everything going wrong in a relationship, usually don't make it into these. Usually.
This book is perhaps a good example of how marriages can go very wrong when autistic people are involved. As a practicing marriage counselor, the author has seen lots of those, and the example couples seem more or less realistic. In that capacity, it has value, and if your marriage woes resemble any of the examples' woes, then perhaps the book might be helpful.
If you can somehow shrug off all the other things I've complained about.
Read This Book If
I try really hard to find redeemable points in a book, and if I find none, I don't write a review for it. This book came to the bleeding edge of that limit.
I can see this book having value for someone who is very like the author, who I'm guessing resembles her fictitious "Helen" in a lot more ways than she say directly. People with an autistic spouse, prone to internalizing their marriage woes, rather than talking about them with their spouses, professionals, or even friends and family. People prone to valuing the appearance of happiness, and sacrificing themselves and their needs and wants on the altar of self-martyrdom rather than admit that something's wrong and seek solutions.
For anyone else... find something else to read.
This book outright calls autistic people broken and incapable of empathy. It seems to fight with itself as to whether we're the villains or to be pitied and helped. Frankly, it reads like the author wants to have her cake and eat it too. She still seems to have lot of feelings about her divorce and her autistic mother that, I would say, she put into her writing here. But in this book, she writes as the authority, the therapist, the PhD, the person in the place of power and knowledge. And while she does so, her bitterness poisons and twists the narrative and even the therapeutic recommendations, destroying any good the book might have offered couples in need of help. Find something else to read.
