I married a man with Asperger’s (and he’s the perfect husband and father)
LATE Saturday afternoon and the four of us are happily decorating the cups and vases we have just made in our family pottery class. Well, Hector isn’t doing much decoration, but my one-year-old is having a lot of fun dipping his little hands into the pots of brightly-coloured poster paint on the trestle table.
It’s edging towards dinner time and, aware that the children will be getting fractious if they are not refuelled soon, I wonder how much time we have left in the ceramic studio.
We’ve already been here for a couple of hours, but nobody seems in any hurry to usher us out. How lucky, I muse aloud. The atmosphere at Center Parcs really is just as the company promised: super relaxed. I lazily throw another lump of clay on to the potter’s wheel.
And then, in a flash, the calm is gone. ‘There are no rules here!’ cries my husband, as if from nowhere, his face a mixture of exasperation and fury. ‘There are no rules at Center Parcs!’
Shock ripples through me. I know Steve likes things to be organised and predictable, but his outburst feels ridiculous, his reaction wholly inappropriate. So what if we don’t know the time the session ends? We are having quality family time, aren’t we? I stare at him in disbelief.
That scene took place two years ago and, it turned out, a couple of weeks before my husband was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a neurological disorder on the mild end of the autism spectrum.
Aspies, as they are affectionately known, often have above-average IQs and vocabularies, but find it difficult to interact in large social groups and have trouble picking up on subtle forms of communication such as body language, humour and sarcasm. They thrive on rules and a strict routine.
This certainly describes my beloved husband. Steve and I met eight years before we married, on a double date as plus- ones for my friend Jemima and his friend Tom. I was 28 and had just emerged from a dreadful long-term relationship that had left my self-esteem in tatters.
When I met Steve, a kind and diffident man, then 23, I liked him immediately. Unlike my ex, who might on the surface have appeared alluring and exciting, Steve was clearly a genuine person who didn’t have a controlling bone in his body.
But he also seemed very shy. In the months before we became a couple, we hung out with a group of other twentysomethings, sitting around campfires in the Norfolk countryside after work and at weekends and socialising in the pubs of Norwich, where we still live.
While Steve was liked and respected by the group, he also somehow seemed on its edge.
Soon, I realised there was a dichotomy between Steve’s public and private selves. He was confident in an intimate setting, particularly when chatting one-to-one, but when he was in a loud and busy place, such as a restaurant, he’d retreat — almost closing down.
I used to think it was a confidence issue, but I now know those with Asperger’s can often struggle with sounds including music, footsteps and people talking.
Even now, when we go out to a restaurant as a family, it is always me who walks in first, who asks for a table, orders and pays. Steve will sit there, his head down. At times, it feels like I am responsible for everyone and that can get tiring.
When we were dating, I sometimes found his behaviour hilarious. I’ll never forget the party where Steve was cornered by a drunk woman who was clearly attracted to him.
She was relaying something to him in a rather emotional manner and, for an hour at least, he just stood there, listening and nodding sympathetically, entirely oblivious to her advances.
He is deeply conscientious, too. At one party, we all tumbled through the door in an excited heap, keen to dance and get the wine flowing.
Instead of cracking open the bottle he’d brought, Steve made a beeline for the woman of the house, a lady in her 50s, to check that she was OK.
He talked to her for a long time and, at the end of the party, he went to the kitchen to do the washing-up. In fact, he’s always the person who does the tidying-up at the end of parties.
And who cleans the bathroom at home and counts the pennies, inside and outside of it.
My husband is the kindest, gentlest and most dependable of men. He is moral, sensible, brilliant at one-toone communication and almost incapable of subterfuge. We have been married for four years and, when I see him, my heart still jumps. Unlike past boyfriends, Steve makes me feel totally secure.
His wonderful traits are because of, not in spite of, his autism. I work as a digital manager for a multinational technology company — my job involves coaching and mentoring the firm’s IT staff, some of whom are also on the autistic spectrum. It would be hard to find a nicer bunch of people.
I’m sure my IT colleagues are fantastic parents, too. Steve read maths at university and, until recently, worked in insurance, but he left his job so he could look after our children — Belle, six, and Hector, three — full-time.
My working days were getting longer and our family life was beginning to suffer. We needed one of us to be at home, holding the fort.
The kids are lucky it’s their father who has that job.
Yes, I have to plan and diarise his days with them down to the smallest detail, and yes, it’s onerous. Steve has to know what he’s doing and where, and at what precise time: anything unplanned, beyond an impromptu light ‘hello’ at the school gate, can be distressing for him.
But the reward for my endeavours is enormous. Unlike a lot of dads, Steve simply doesn’t get bored looking after his offspring.
Science and facts are the lens through which Steve sees the world. He spends hours taking Belle and Hector on nature walks, teaching them the Latin words for flora and fauna they happen across, explaining the life cycle of the caterpillar or woodlouse they’ve spotted.
He shows them the world in a way I have neither the patience nor knowledge to do. With him at their side, everything becomes an exciting lesson — although, of course, they
Steve’s always the one tidying up after parties He simply doesn’t get bored looking after our children
don’t realise they are learning. The other week, for example, we had a funeral to attend and Steve plainly and calmly explained to the children that the coffin being lowered into the ground contained a person who had died and that, one day, this would happen to all of us.
There was no talk of heaven, just a rational, non-emotive explanation of what happens when people die. The children absorbed their father’s account in the manner in which it had been delivered, and now, I’m fairly sure, have no fear of death. That feels very significant.
Steve and I balance each other out perfectly. I am gregarious and emotional, and he anchors my extremes.
Last month, we were looking to buy a new car, and I got so absorbed in the design and colour of the vehicles I’d fallen for that I lost sight of the practical reasons our family needed new wheels. Steve produced a list of the criteria we needed to consider: cost, fuel economy and whether we could comfortably fit the kids in the back.
He wasn’t being patronising, rather purposeful, and that was exactly what was required. Once he had taken the emotion out of the purchase, I soon abandoned all thoughts of the sports cars I had been ogling, and we settled on something much more sensible. Of course, it is not always possible to remove feelings from a situation.
Because Steve finds it hard to read facial expressions and body language, whenever I am annoyed by something, he immediately presumes it’s because of something he has done.
Usually, it’s nothing to do with him: maybe the garden fence has broken or the neighbours’ plants are encroaching on our path. But as he knows he can misjudge situations, Steve, like other Aspies, is often nervous about expressing his feelings.
His instinctive reaction to tension is to remove himself from the situation and me, and do something helpful, such as mop a floor.
More than once, he has said: ‘I’m just scared of everything, Hannah.’ I can only imagine how scared he was on our wedding day. For him, being the centre of attention and having to publicly declare your love pretty much defines terror.
He coped brilliantly. His wedding speech was short, but he made a couple of jokes, thanked everyone for coming and referred to me as his wife. While he may not have literally uttered the words ‘I love you’, his love shone through his nervous body language and the several funny anecdotes he relayed. I was very proud of him.
I hadn’t expected him to say those three words, in any case. In our 12-year relationship, Steve has said he loves me, but I could probably count the times on one hand.
He needs to be in the moment. When he is, the words come from his whole body and his face glows with pleasure and feeling. His declaration is all the more meaningful for it.
In everyday life, he expresses his feelings through actions, often by doing something sweet, such as buying flowers and saying: ‘The children got these for you.’ Straightforward romance is hard for him.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was me who first asked him out all those years ago. I’d been on holiday and decided that when I returned, I would tell him how I felt. When I did, I looked him in the eye and told the truth. Steve’s response? He just said: ‘OK.’ But he did so with a huge smile, and that was all the confirmation I needed.
People on the spectrum often need loved ones to infer, interpret and assume their feelings.
The idea he might be on the spectrum first came from Steve, as did the search for a diagnosis.
Early on in our relationship, I used to say to him in a jokey way: ‘There’s something going on with you, isn’t there?’ The ‘something’ was hiding a serious question, for sure, but I didn’t suspect autism.
That came from Steve, who, ever the scientist, was keen to understand the reasons for the on- off depression from which he, and countless other Aspies, suffer.
And there was another impetus for his investigations, too. I was pregnant with Belle at the time, and Steve was concerned about the inheritance factor.
His first meeting with a doctor was almost textbook. Steve was wearing a T- shirt with a maths equation on the front and, by the end of the session, he was helping the doctor fix her computer.
Three years after that visit, and a few weeks after his Center Parcs meltdown, we got confirmation of his Asperger’s syndrome. It’s too early to say whether Belle is also on the spectrum. Like her clever dad, she loves systemising things and has his kind, gentle personality.
But do I care that my husband is autistic? Do I ever wish I was with someone more easy-going? No and no. Steve is all you could ever want from a husband, and I love him for every aspect of who he is.
He’s all you could ever want from a husband