On the OTHER hand....

photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash

According to "relationship experts", one way to get over a break-up and a broken heart is to remember the reality of the relationship.  And what's a bigger break-up than dementia and death?

According to Guy Winch, PhD, licensed psychologist and author of How To Fix a Broken Heart, "Think of every annoying quality they possessed as well as all the compromises you had to make in the relationship. Keep that list on your phone so you can refer back to it whenever you start thinking they were so perfect. It’s natural to idealize both the person and the relationship." (quote from Good Housekeeping article.)

So here's a little list 😉:

1.  He was hyper-critical and often had little awareness of how his crankiness effected other people.  (He learned, however, not to criticize me.)  He once started critiquing a choir performance right to a member of said choir.  He also once blew up at my boss, COCC President Bob Barber, at a public celebration.

2. He was a kvetcher.  One day I said, "It's a beautiful day!  Look at all the flowering trees."  And he said, "But the winds coming up and they'll all blow off in the storm."  Like Eeyore,  he took pleasure in finding the worm in the apple.

3.  He was an indirect communicator and sometimes passive aggressive. The best story here is about our trip to Los Angeles.  I was hurtling us down the freeway when he said, "We just passed George Cukor's house".  This comment was supposed to tell me that I was going in the wrong direction.  It didn't.  Finally he said, "We're going in the wrong direction."  Over and over throughout our long relationship, he would try and communicate something to me far too subtly for me to comprehend.

4. He never told me I was beautiful or pretty.  Like my Mom, he occasionally told me I could be attractive when I put some work into it.  (The clothes made the woman.)

5.  He wasn't all that comfortable with a ripe female body.  He would have preferred I had a Kate Hepburn shape and sometimes, early on, compared me unfavorably. He once said, AS he was making love to me, that "More than a mouthful is wasted."  Argh!  This when I have these gazongas.  I think he was bisexual but (perhaps) too shy to have a gay relationship.  (I say perhaps because he didn't talk about his other relationships.)

6.  For the first 10 years he avoided all relationship discussion and after that it was rare and had to be forced.  I would talk about issues and want answers from him and he would say, "later" and later would never come.  When we did talk and do relationship work, his focus would disappear after awhile and if serious effort was required of him, he'd balk.

7.  He wouldn't tell me when he was sick and he hid injuries.  In this category is his hearing loss ("Students mumble!").  He was hard of hearing when he came to Bend in 1990 and it took me 10 years to convince him to let ME buy him some Costco hearing aids which he wouldn't wear.  Later, in his dementia, he lost the sight in one eye and didn't tell me.  But by then, he may not have noticed.

8.  And in the beginning, when I told him I was non-monogamous, he pretended to accept it but later on punished me emotionally when he found out that it wasn't "just a phase you were going through."

9.  He didn't like having other people in the house and didn't like most of our neighbors.

10.  He seemed to have little access to his own motivations and didn't "believe" in psychology.

So yes, he was a pain in the ass in many ways.  But I think that is because he was probably neurologically different. Several years ago, I read an article by a woman who had stumbled onto the thought, after 20 years of marriage, that her spouse has Aspergers.  A quick glance at a list compiled by psychologist Dr. George Sachs reveals a variety of clues, including:

"People on the spectrum have a tendency to go into long boring monologues on their special interests or opinions – and without an internal social meter to tell them they are not being well-received or are going on too long – they have a tendency to come across as one-sided and even sanctimonious in some cases."

"Most individuals on the Autism Spectrum have a difficulty anticipating the needs of others because of something called “mind-blindness,” an inability to place oneself in the shoes of others and anticipate their emotional state and thought processes."

"Many individuals on the spectrum do not approach romance in a “neurotypical” way. If he has told you at one point that he loves you – he may not feel the need to articulate this again unless his feeling have changed. For partners who are not on the spectrum, they often view verbal and romantic reassurance as a necessity in a relationship, while individuals on the spectrum view excessive validation as unnecessary since they believe that love should be measured in actions (concrete) rather than words (abstract)."

"Many people on the spectrum have often been accused of “not having a filter.” Despite being hypersensitive to criticism themselves (mostly because ASDs are expending a lot of mental energy trying to act “normal”), their brain is primed to concentrate on details and inconsistencies. You may have spent all day doing your nails, but your ASD partner will only comment on the tiny chip on your pinky finger or that you need botox or microneedling for your skin. Usually, these comments are not meant to hurt their partner – to the ASD brain, they’re simply just stating “facts,” even if they come across as insensitive to a neurotypical."

So now I think that Will was probably neurodivergent.  It would have helped if I'd understood this earlier on and not interpreted so much of his behavior as "my fault." Or maybe it wouldn't.  

And anyway, I'm kinda loony myself so we turned out to be a good match.