Relationships
What It’s Likes to Have an Autistic Fiancé
He barks like a dog and I love it!
Boom! Bang! Boooooom!
“What the heck is that?” I yell as I run to the front door. It sounds like a bomb has gone off in the middle of our front porch.
And, well, it kind of has.
“Wait, seriously? Nick!”
The porch looks like a smoky scene from an apocalypse movie.
Smoke creeps out in every direction as if someone has set up Halloween fog machine in the middle of summer. I’m sure the neighbors are thrilled.
My ever-curious fiancé has been experimenting with dry ice bottle bombs. And now, he’s trying to light some kind of rusty old mining lantern that needs chemicals I can’t pronounce.
I think he ordered the chemicals on Amazon…maybe?
The house is still standing. This is good.
Nick turns around and smiles, his big brown eyes lighting up with the wonder of a 10-year-old. Anger quickly fades to that soft, melty feeling I get every time I look at him.
God, I’m in love with him.
My fiancé, Nick, has what was once Asperger’s.
He’s like a Rubik's cube that I always want to solve but never quite can, an intricately woven wonder of the most magical kind of madness imaginable.
But don’t think for a minute that our complex love story as a neurodiverse couple is easy.
It’s not.
Being in love with an autistic person can be a lot of things. It can be exciting, maddening, frustrating and fulfilling — all at the same time.
Nick is a whole new kind of weird that I never knew existed. He’s the strangest dude I’ve ever met.
For example, he likes chucking lasagna and other raccoon treats into his already-overgrown bamboo forest that is 15 feet tall. (Yes, we have a very fat and happy raccoon population in our neighborhood thanks to my always-curious fiancé.)
It’s a bit like living on a roller coaster that never stops. Nick’s mind never slows down. And because his mind is so active, he can rarely sit still. That’s why he’s always experimenting with things.
We could be talking about something important like, I don’t know, the end of the world, and he will get up and walk out of the room in the middle of the conversation.
Communication is also difficult for Nick.
He struggles with eye contact. If you’re having a conversation and you don’t know him well, he will look left, right, up and down but never at you.
And he has his own little method of communicating to take the edge off.
Are you ready for this? Brace yourself, folks.
Nick’s default language is barking like a dog.
True story. I couldn’t make something this wild up. Sometimes I have to do a double take to see who’s barking, Nick or the dog.
A deep after-work conversation might look a little something like this:
“How was your day?”
“Bark. Good.”
“I missed you today.”
“Ruff.”
“I love you.“
“Woof. You too. Bark?”
I don’t speak bark. It wasn’t on our list of foreign languages in high school.
Nick also says the weirdest things at the most inappropriate times.
Someone could be dying, and Nick might tell them his bamboo looks great this year.
He was once at a party with neighbors and matter-of-factly told a sort of elderly woman he barely knows that she has very big boobs.
He had no idea he had said anything inappropriate.
He also has a lot of special interests. That’s a thing with autistic people.
Nick tends to get narrowly focused on a few, um, strange things.
Actually, “focused” is an understatement. It’s more like obsessed, a passion on crack.
Bamboo (yes, bamboo) tops the list. I remember being on one of our first dates, all dressed up, thinking we were going out, and he walked over and handed me a hose.
“What’s this for?“ I asked.
“Ruff, water the bamboo,” he responded.
I can think of a whole lot of strange things I’ve done on dates, but I can guarantee you, watering bamboo while being barked at was not one of them.
He’s also obsessed with YouTube videos, especially when it comes to airplane crashes.
In fact, he once watched plane crash videos during takeoff on a routine commercial flight.
The friend he was traveling with tried to quiet him as he gave play-by-play details of each crash scene.
Can you imagine? I’m sure the other passengers were very comforted.
He sometimes melts down, too.
Nick can’t talk about serious things. He walks around and paces for a little bit and then leaves the room. And if you press him too long, he will melt down.
He used to throw himself on the floor like a toddler, but started refraining from that activity after I started doing it, too.
Every time he would throw himself down on the floor, I would throw myself down right next to him and then sit on him until he stood up.
It worked! He’s only done it once since then.
It’s always been interesting to me that every meltdown is followed by a reset.
It took me a long time to understand that meltdowns are forgotten about the next day. Two days max.
Nick has an automatic reset button. Everyone else is angry the morning after a meltdown, but he’s happy and chipper, ready to bark and go along on his merry way.
There are also a lot of really neat upsides to his autism.
People with Asperger’s have an insanely cool ability to recognize patterns.
Nick has built-in GPS. It’s kind of his superpower. He can do it anywhere, even on planes.
I’ll never forget when he showed me the GoPro footage of his flight on a 100-year-old airplane. It wasn’t the historic wings of the plane that got my attention. Rather, it was his ability to identify every major object underneath him in a town we don’t live in.
And, he’s sort of a genius.
I remember organizing things we want to keep and finding his ACT scores. Not only did he score well, he scored a perfect 36 in reading, and he didn’t even realize it.
His intellect amazes me every single day. But what amazes me more is that he could solve just about any problem in the world, but talking to someone he doesn’t know is nearly impossible for him. If he has to give a public speech, he sweats buckets.
It’s difficult being in love with a man with autism, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Nick is my barking guy and I can’t imagine life without him. Sure it’s complex, but he’s my other half. He had me at, well, bark.
Ruff!
