Use your words.
Determined to find out what that first step would be, I sat down with Kristen in our family room about a week after my diagnosis, along with my notebook and pages upon pages of information on autism spectrum conditions that I’d printed from various Internet sources. The kids were upstairs napping, and at that time of day the sunlight fell directly upon our television screen, making it impossible to watch. Kristen was relaxing with a celebrity gossip magazine and eating black olives straight from the can. I plopped down beside her on the couch and arranged my materials neatly before her on the coffee table.
“What’s all this?” she asked, leafing through my stack of papers.
“This is all the Asperger’s stuff about me that we need to fix if we want to save our marriage. You’re the expert, and I need you to show me where we’re going to start.”
I felt proud: I’m doing it! I’m stepping up! I’ll be Asperger’s-free in no time! Kristen nodded thoughtfully, then shuffled the papers together and set them aside. Then, for the third or fourth time that week, she reminded me, “We can work together to fix our marriage, Dave. This isn’t about fixing you.”
I opened up my notebook and jotted down, Fixing our marriage is about working together and managing my behaviors. Not fixing me.
“That’s good,” I said. “Keep going.”
Kristen suggested that we begin by working on communication. Our ability to talk to each other, she told me, was paramount, yet we’d been struggling with it for years. When it came to discussing anything other than what was for dinner, we fell apart.
“There are many things that we need to address in our relationship,” she said, “but we won’t get anywhere if we can’t communicate with each other. Communication has to come first, then the other pieces will start to fall into place.”
I wrote the word communication in my notebook and said that I agreed, especially considering that she was an expert on speech and communication disorders.
“Those aren’t exactly the issues we’ll be dealing with,” she said. “It’s not like you’re nonverbal.”
“No, really. I read about it.” I searched through my stack of papers. “People with Asperger syndrome have difficulty communicating. Hang on, it’s in one of these printouts.”
I found the article I was looking for and handed it to Kristen. Kristen, the actual expert on speech and communication disorders. She frowned at the title and handed the paper back to me. It was full steam ahead on the Asperger’s Express, but apparently I was the only one riding.
It was true, she explained, that people on the autism spectrum tend to have difficulty navigating social interactions. Effective communication requires more than an exchange of words; conversational partners must adequately read each other’s emotions, reactions, and underlying motives, and they must be able to understand each other’s perspective. These abilities are a product of social intuition, a resource with which people with Asperger’s tend to be relatively ill equipped. But that, Kristen told me, was something we could worry about later.
“For now, don’t worry about the implications of your diagnosis,” she said. “Yes, you have Asperger syndrome and that’s part of the barrier. But let’s face it, Dave, you can communicate. What’s holding you back are thirty years of habits. We need to practice talking to each other, that’s all.”
Though she didn’t spell it out for me, I understood exactly what Kristen meant by thirty years of habits. Growing up, I was never taught the importance of healthy, therapeutic discourse. I was discouraged from talking about negative feelings toward other people, especially family members. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all—this old chestnut was both a philosophy and a firmly enforced rule in my family. My brother and I were not allowed to argue with each other, nor were we encouraged to voice any differences of opinion with authority figures (especially my parents). The airing of grievances, we were told, amounted to whining—“bellyaching,” as my dad called it—and nothing irritated my parents more than bellyaching. If we did have a personal issue with someone we loved, we were supposed to internalize the attendant frustration and hope that, like a virus or a stomachache, it would simply run its course. This kept emotions from boiling over, but just barely. It kept the house quiet, anyway.
My parents led this crusade by example. If we had a family crest, it might bear the image of four smiling faces sweeping animosity under a rug. Which had always been fine with me, truth be told. As a child, I never (not even once) saw my parents argue. Sometimes I saw my friends’ parents argue viciously—right in front of me, their invited guest—and the tension it created was unbearable. This family sucks, I’d think. I can’t be friends with this kid. But that wouldn’t have happened at my house. My mom and dad clearly loved each other, so as I understood it, people who loved each other never argued.
That’s not to say that my parents had nothing to argue about. Far from it. They were married, and like anyone else they must have had their own needs and disappointments. I remember my mom being angry on occasion, indignantly throwing silverware into drawers, but she never told any of us what was bothering her. Not me or my brother, and certainly not my dad. And I remember noticing how my mom’s fits coincided with my dad’s own bad moods—often I found that if I had to avoid my mom, it was best to stay away from my dad, too. Beyond that, I never thought anything of it. I didn’t understand that they were unwilling to sit down and talk about whatever the problem was, just as their parents had been, and their parents before them. And now me.
“My parents never talked about their feelings,” I said to Kristen, “but they have been married almost forty years now and they’re getting happier all the time.”
“That’s because their system works for them. But look at us. Can you honestly tell me you think it’s working, all this silence?”
I sat back and propped my feet upon the coffee table, thinking of all the vacations that had been ruined over the years because I had chosen to brood for days over an issue rather than spend ten minutes confronting it. Of all the holidays and parties rendered awkward because Kristen and I hadn’t seen the point in talking to each other. The countless times Kristen had urged me to share what was on my mind and I’d simply said, “Forget it,” and walked away from her, convinced she wouldn’t understand.
“No,” I said, “it’s not working.”
Kristen pointed out, too, how damaging it is to withhold things like resentment, anger, and frustration. That doing so had already taken a toll on our relationship and that she worried it would eventually make me sick if I kept it up. I nodded and wrote down swallowing anger = swallowing poison. The other problem with saying “Forget it,” she told me, was that I wasn’t someone who knew how to forget about things that were bothering me. I took another note: She is onto you.
“If you could actually let go of an issue and put it behind you, then okay, I’d say we could just forget it once in a while,” she said. “But you retain things. If something bothers you, it gets stuck inside your head and you wind up stomping around the house in a terrible mood for days and you make everyone else miserable in the process. Most of the time, it’s something we could easily sort out if you’d just take that first step and talk to me about it.”
I agreed, though I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. It was clear that we had become the couple that couldn’t communicate with each other. Kristen and I were never supposed to be that couple.
Before we were married we always talked, and though we had different opinions about things, we never argued. She was still that girl in the high school auditorium who kept the conversation flowing, who kept my mind and my mouth involved, the girl who played with my calculator and asked me about math.
Adulthood hadn’t changed our friendship much. Our conversations centered on lighter musings: “If you could live anywhere, where would it be?” or “I once saw a guy put his entire fist inside his mouth.” Even heavier topics didn’t bother me back then because whatever we talked about bore little consequence to me personally. We were just friends, after all. (“Of course I think you should quit your job and go backpacking through Costa Rica. Why wouldn’t you?”) Perhaps most important, when we were friends it was perfectly acceptable for me to be egocentric. This quality actually seemed to make me more interesting as a conversational partner, as I was her only pal who related everything back to himself—something that, ironically, had always made her laugh: “On second thought, don’t go to Costa Rica because (a) I’ll miss you and (b) I don’t want to have to water your plants.”
Then we married each other and things changed. When you’re in love, you can’t beat the notion of two souls uniting, two lives becoming forever one. Sooner or later, though, the romance fades. One day you realize you are two souls united . . . but there’s only one cupcake left in the Tupperware container in the fridge. That’s when reality sets in: We’re going to have to deal with stuff, and it might not be easy. Whether Kristen and I were ready for it or not (which, clearly, we were not), our relationship changed after we were married, and the nature of what we needed to express changed with it: How shall we handle our finances? What’s your philosophy on child rearing? What do you mean you have interests and aspirations beyond being my wife?!
We weren’t alone. Most couples don’t consider or discuss these types of things until they have to, until they’re both staring at the same cupcake, wondering what they’ve gotten themselves into. Kristen and I would learn that these were the things we would have to talk about if we wanted our marriage to work. As we got farther into married life, we’d also discover that I was particularly unprepared—unequipped, it seemed—to do that.
When issues arose—and believe me, when you’re married and have a mild form of autism you’re not even aware of, things tend to come up—I couldn’t talk about them constructively with Kristen. That would have required me to have the ability to understand her point of view, to consider her needs rather than mine. Which I didn’t, and couldn’t. Not only were we dealing with issues common to every marriage, we were also forced to deal with extremely bizarre challenges that plague relationships for people on the autism spectrum: my daily routines, my obsessive tendencies, my unwillingness to participate in social events.
When Kristen and I needed to talk about these things, we would almost always end up having an argument; she couldn’t believe the things she had to talk to me about (“When we have company over, it’s not okay for you to get in your car and leave for an hour, Dave. Don’t you understand that?”), and I couldn’t handle the reality of constantly—there’s no other way of saying this—fucking up. I didn’t mean to spoil the parties. I didn’t mean to cast a shadow over the entire holiday weekend because my schedule had been thrown out of whack. It just happened that way, so to Kristen I looked like a jerk, which seemed completely unfair to me.
The condition I was born with led us to these moments of heated discussion and profound misunderstanding. But the way I was raised dictated how I handled them. Because I firmly believed that arguments were symptomatic of doomed relationships, I would refuse to participate. It didn’t matter how small the disagreements were. Deciding when to have kids or selecting a laundry detergent—if we disagreed, I couldn’t handle it. I would get frustrated. By the end of our first year of marriage, I had learned that voicing frustration led to arguments, so I wouldn’t say anything. Fine, I’d think, go with the generic detergent that I wouldn’t be caught dead using. I guess it doesn’t matter which detergent I prefer. I would shut down and brood, or pout, as Kristen would say. (And, oh, how that word pout pissed me off.) As coping strategies go, brooding was one of the worst; Kristen could see right through it. She’d see that I was angry, she’d know why I was angry, and yet I would deny my feelings, insisting that nothing was wrong. Then I’d try to prove my point, I suppose, by stomping around and acting mad for a few days. Being short with her and mean to salesclerks. Throwing a temper tantrum, in other words.
By our second year of marriage, Kristen no longer saw the point in trying to get me to talk. She no longer appreciated the daily challenges and constant feuding. She no longer saw me as the wonderful man with whom she could discuss anything; instead, she saw me as this temperamental man-child who couldn’t handle the demands of real life. And who wouldn’t love going to bed with that guy every night?
Looking back, even I find it hard to believe that Kristen and I lived like this for the first five years of our marriage. Not five weeks or five months. The first five years. Let alone that our marriage survived long enough for us to turn things around. My diagnosis had made things click for us. It allowed both of us to take a deep breath, wipe the slate clean, and start thinking about our relationship in a different light. It allowed us to think about why we had stopped communicating years before and what we could do to start talking again.
The key to becoming a couple that could communicate was to communicate. (I know this is tricky stuff—try to stay with me, here.) And the key to communicating, Kristen told me, was to use my words. She used this approach when dealing with Emily, our two-year-old. Kristen had taught Emily sign language long before Emily was able to speak. She knew that many of Emily’s temper tantrums were the result of her inability to express herself; if she wanted more banana, for example, she had no way of saying it. But she could sign it. Whenever Emily wanted something and started getting frustrated, Kristen would tell her, “Use your words.” Then Emily would calm down and press her little hands together, saying, “more,” before rubbing her chest, saying, “please.” Emily quickly learned that tantrums led nowhere, but communication produced results. It was an important concept for our daughter to grasp, and at thirty years of age I was going to have to do the same.
The first opportunity came only a few days after Kristen and I agreed to start working on communication. It was Kristen’s day off, and we thought it would be fun to meet for lunch near my office with the kids. We had never done that before, and I was excited to show them where I worked. At home I wasn’t very impressive, but at the office people listened to me, and I wanted the kids to see that. Best of all, one of my coworkers was likely to high-five me right in front of them. For once, my family could see that I was totally the man.
When Kristen arrived, she pulled into a visitor parking space and called me at my desk to let me know she was there.
“Come on up,” I said, peering down at our car from my fourth-story window, trying to sound indifferent. “I’ll meet you by the reception desk.” People were always milling around the reception area, and I figured at least one of them would give me that crucial high five the moment Kristen and the kids stepped off the elevator.
“Really?” Kristen said. “We’re all buckled in. It would be a lot easier if you just came down.”
“But I wanted the kids to see where I work. I thought they’d enjoy it.”
“Well, Parker is gnawing on his foot and Emily thinks we’re driving to Disney World. I doubt they would understand they’re in Daddy’s office.”
I felt a swell of disappointment as I looked around my cubicle, which I’d spent all morning cleaning in preparation for their visit. “Fine,” I said, “I’ll be right down.”
At the restaurant, I had a little temper tantrum. I ignored Kristen’s attempts at making conversation and went out of my way to be rude to our waiter. I felt I’d been made a fool and I couldn’t let it go, but I wasn’t going to bring it up and ruin our lunch with an argument. Instead, we sat for fifteen minutes in that familiar, awkward silence, watching Parker as he worked his way through some dry Cheerios and Emily as she scribbled on her place mat with a crayon. Finally, our food arrived.
“Are you going to tell me what’s the matter, Dave?” Kristen asked, cutting Emily’s chicken and broccoli into tiny, bite-size pieces.
I didn’t say anything, so she took my plate away and fired me a look that said, We are not doing this today.
“Give it back,” I said.
Kristen smiled and shook her head. “Not until you start talking.”
I quickly looked around the restaurant, hoping that none of my colleagues were there to witness what was shaping up to be a defining moment in my life.
“I’m serious,” I said, stifling a nervous grin. “Give it to me.”
Without taking her eyes off me, Kristen plucked a french fry from my plate and popped it in her mouth. “Mmm, this is so good. You should try some.”
I folded my arms and sat back in my seat, scowling at her. Emily started to ask her a question, but Kristen wouldn’t break eye contact. “Just a minute, Emily,” she said, interrupting. Slowly, she held out my plate, and when I reached for it, she pulled it back playfully.
“Gimme the damn burger,” I said.
“I will. Here, take it.”
She did it again and started laughing. She had me now, and all I could do was laugh in return. Finally, she handed back my plate, saying, “Now, use your words.”
It took a little more coaxing, but I finally explained what had been bothering me. I told Kristen that I’d cleaned my desk and that I’d planned on giving them a tour of the building. When I got to the part about the kids seeing me high-five a coworker, we both busted up laughing.
“Well, I’m sorry that we foiled your plan.” Kristen chuckled. “Why didn’t you just say that to begin with? We could have been enjoying ourselves this whole time, but instead you just sat there, brooding. That’s why you have to use your words.”
I admitted that I felt reluctant to submit to the process of communication when it mattered. I understood that we had to talk about things, but it seemed like an exercise that would invite a lot of arguments. “I don’t want to fight all the time,” I explained.
“Well, these little meltdowns are way more toxic and dramatic than the occasional argument,” Kristen said. “I can handle an argument, but I don’t do drama.”
As we ate our lunches, I noticed that I felt more relaxed having talked through my issue. My jaw wasn’t clenched, my shoulders weren’t tight. I was having lunch with my family in a crowded restaurant and I felt happy. That’s when I realized we had just experienced our first victory. When the check arrived, I wrote a note to myself on the back of the receipt: Say it, don’t show it. Talking = productive. Showing = drama. Kristen doesn’t do drama. Then I wrote, Use your words.
In that moment, I handed myself over to the process. I became more comfortable using words to express myself, Kristen became comfortable sharing her feelings with me in return, and it wasn’t long before we started seeing the rewards of our efforts. The most notable being that when something was bothering me—anger over a misunderstanding, interruptions to my daily routine, itchy shirt cuffs—I no longer felt as though anger had a physical hold on me. I no longer felt isolated, misunderstood, or hopeless. I could simply talk and know that Kristen would help me through it, no matter how big or small the problem was.
The change didn’t happen overnight, of course, nor did it happen easily. The first obstacle we encountered was that I had no concept of the subtle, procedural aspects of communication—the unwritten rules of engagement—all of which had to be learned and recorded into my Journal of Best Practices. Not only did I have to learn how to express myself, I had to learn when to express myself. “Yes, we need to talk about our feelings,” Kristen whispered to me in the bathroom at my parents’ house on Easter, “but not right now at the dinner table in front of all your relatives.” Ask if it’s a good time to talk, I wrote later that evening, just beneath If you can’t tell whether you’ve offended her, just ask and Apologies do not count when you shout them.
Another challenge lay in all the misdirected rage we had to deal with. Not Kristen’s rage, of course, but mine. She had been right; bottling up my anger for three decades had been a mistake. It was as if a dam had burst. Now that we were attempting to deal with things, all the pain of being misunderstood by and misunderstanding others was breaking free. Because of this, not every conversation went smoothly. I would ask Kristen where my phone was, for instance, and within half an hour we would be examining my innermost feelings about that award I received in second grade for having the messiest desk in the classroom. Nevertheless, Kristen maintained her end of the bargain and hung in there with extraordinary patience. More than once I found myself apologizing for hours of constant swearing, yelling, and dramatic weeping, while Kristen stood by like the cartoon coyote whose face had just been blackened by an exploding bomb and replied, “It’s fine. It’s all in the name of progress.”
Asperger’s made it difficult for me to read Kristen properly—another roadblock. Using my words was one thing; interpreting hers was something else altogether. Harder still was trying to interpret what she wouldn’t say. Though I have yet to master this skill, and perhaps never will, I did commit to reaching at least a functional level of mind reading. I eventually got there, but not without months of unnecessary, painful eruptions. My tendency had been to enter into our emotional discussions like a raw nerve; nearly everything could provoke an extreme reaction. Kristen would take a second longer than I thought necessary to answer a question, and I’d explode: “Silent treatment?! Fuck it! I’m outta here.” Now that we are aware of my propensity to misread things, Kristen takes these outbursts in stride, while I do my best to preempt them: Calm down. Don’t assume you know what she’s thinking. Use your words.
To overcome all of this, Kristen suggested strategies for recognizing and dealing with my emotions in real time, telling me when I had reacted inappropriately and showing me different ways to respond to my feelings. (Again, but worth repeating, this was something that she had never bargained for.) When I came unglued one evening because the kids had gone to bed late—eight fifteen instead of the normal seven thirty bedtime, pushing my entire evening schedule back forty-five minutes—Kristen sat me down and worked me through it:
“Listen. It’s okay for you to expect a certain bedtime, and it’s okay for you to get upset. But it is not okay for you to rant and rave in front of the kids when we stay up later than usual. They’re absorbing everything you do. They’re learning by your example, so if you’re not careful we may end up with two little spazzes on our hands.”
As I cracked open my notebook to write down some thoughts, she suggested a better way of dealing with bedtime: “If you start feeling freaked out, you have to tell me, ‘It’s almost bedtime. Let’s get them ready.’” Or, she told me, if I really wanted to take a step in the right direction I could simply get the kids ready for bed myself. (Duh.)
While Kristen worked diligently with me on expressing my emotions, I began to take a keen interest in casual conversation. Before we started all of this, the ability to talk casually with people seemed to me to be on a par with the ability to juggle or to do a headstand. As my ability to express myself improved, I couldn’t help but think that I could extend this discipline to casual conversation. I figured that could make life easier for me in untold ways. I also suspected that if I were generally better at talking to people, then Kristen would like me more.
But I wasn’t born with the gift of gab. Instead, I was born with something along the lines of anti-gab: my instincts don’t just inhibit productive interaction, they defeat it altogether. I might laugh at inappropriate times, or meow. I sometimes win my audience over in one sentence and alienate them in the next: “I hope your sister is doing better since her divorce. I mean, let’s face it, she was lucky to have found anyone, really.”
Luckily, my brain does an excellent job of observing people and memorizing and copying their behaviors. Kristen has said that I sometimes resemble someone with a multiple personality disorder and that I should be grateful for it, and I suppose she’s right. I use the characteristics I observe in other people to create characters that I can assume at will: Outgoing Man, Boyfriend Guy, Quiet Dude. This ability helps me to seem normal enough to get by in life, but I knew that I could do better, especially considering the progress I’d made in the first couple of months after my diagnosis.
I decided that I needed a role model—someone I could study, from whom I could learn. I had always listened to Howard Stern in the mornings, and if he could earn millions of dollars for making four-hour conversations sound interesting, it seemed a good place to start. I began taking notes about what made Howard so effective at communicating, though this was always at the expense of being on time for work. My boss wanted to know why he could see me sitting in my car in the parking lot at ten o’clock on a Monday morning, nodding my head and scribbling in a notebook. I suppose he thought I should be attending his weekly department meeting, but I had something more important to do: Howard works methodically through his anecdotes and uses interruptions by others to his advantage. Pacing and flexibility = critical.
Then I expanded my range. I studied David Letterman, Oprah Winfrey, Regis Philbin. Emulating these talk-show celebrities may sound corny, but these people made conversing look so easy on their shows. These were the leading experts. These were the people from whom I needed to learn.
Because I’m typically on the fringe of a discussion, nodding my head and praying for it to be over, or at least for it to be my turn to talk about something, I am completely fascinated by those who can do it with ease. Watching a great conversationalist in action is, to me, as captivating and entertaining as watching top athletes or ballroom dancers. Great conversationalists engage with their entire bodies. They supplement their words with calculated, expressive eye contact. They don’t judge the people they’re talking to, but rather encourage honest and open discourse. Great conversationalists ask questions that motivate others to keep speaking, rather than questions that can be answered with a terminating yes or no. When it comes to personal questions, they know the difference between those that are relevant and those that seem creepy and intrusive; they avoid the latter. If they aren’t intrinsically interested in a person or a topic, they don’t turn around and walk away midsentence like I do. They feign interest, and they do it convincingly: “Now, was this the first time your mother had ever been to Duluth?” They finish their sentences, and they know when to move on. In other words, they do everything I don’t.
Conversation involves reciprocity and timing—neither of which comes naturally to me. So I absorbed the patterns that emerged between my new role models and their celebrity guests. I learned to integrate the rhythms and the melodies of their voices. And then I’d try out the patterns with various people throughout my day.
I was Regis discussing a recent bus accident with Kristen: “You know, I was watching the news earlier this morning, the coverage of the bus collision, and I have to tell you . . . sometimes tragedy strikes and you wonder how something like this could happen to so many innocent people. My thoughts and prayers are certainly with the victims and their families.” Prompting Kristen’s “What on earth are you talking about?”
I was Howard getting to the bottom of a coworker’s love life: “Now, let me back up for just a second, if I may. You said—because we’ve talked about this in the past, and I think it’s an important point, in the sense that . . . you say you need to feel loved by women. Would you say this is true? In other words, you feel as though you need a woman to be interested in you. Am I right about this? So, when did you start to sense that your girlfriend was interested in you sexually? And I’ll tell you why I’m asking . . .” Prompting, “Dude, seriously?”
I was Oprah giving a lecture on digital audio topics to an audience of technology directors and engineering managers: “We’re talking today about digital audio technology, a topic which is at the forefront of today’s consumer landscape. It’s in our cars, it’s in our phones, it’s in our fire alarms . . . people, and yet, many of us don’t realize just how many formats are available. Well, today, we’re having a discussion about where some of these audio formats came from, and what we can expect . . . in the not-too-distant future. Let’s take a look.” This, for some reason, prompted a request for a bathroom break and my boss’s quiet recommendation that I tone it down and act more normal.
I was Letterman being overly affable and playfully condescending at a summertime picnic with Kristen’s entire family: “Oh, my goodness, what do we have here? Man oh man, I don’t care how many times I’ve said it, I don’t care how many bowls I’ve eaten, I don’t care if it’s served hot, or cold, or stirred up in the pot there . . . I’ll say it again, boys and girls: I love a green bean casserole. Who’s with me?” While that line may have garnered Letterman a bass-guitar rip and a rim shot, it got me only a few uneasy chuckles and an extra helping.
I thought I’d come up with a clever strategy, something that I could use in any social situation, but Kristen quickly put an end to it. At home, anyway. It was for the best. Every time she opened her mouth, I would talk-show her to death. “What, am I on set now?” she’d ask. “Can I talk a few minutes longer or do you need to go to commercial?”
I now use the technique only when Kristen’s not around, mostly for business meetings and phone calls. I’ve even expanded the idea to include behind-the-scenes preparation and research. Successful talk-show hosts always have their material ready—they do their homework and are well-versed in their subject matter. Before any important phone call or meeting, I now take an hour or two—however long it takes, really—to think about and research whatever subject I’ll be discussing. It’s also helpful to script out a number of possible conversations, using what I feel would be potential questions from the other parties: What do you hope to achieve in this meeting? Who should be involved in this decision? Is the sombrero idea really necessary? It helps me to organize my thoughts and to feel more prepared. More confident.
I use a similar strategy to sort out complex personal issues, often when I’m in the shower. If I need to get to the bottom of something—my true feelings about capitalism, for instance—I interview myself. I become the host and the guest simultaneously, and usually by the time my segment comes to an end, I’ve made a number of profound personal discoveries.
Kristen, the kids, and I were driving to my parents’ house one afternoon a few months after my diagnosis when I pointed out what I felt was the final stumbling block in our quest to improve communication. Namely, I worried that by talking more, we would uncover things about ourselves that were best left unexplored.
“Like what?” she asked.
Without going into specifics, I told her that I knew at some point I’d have to talk about some difficult things: my own feelings of inadequacy, feelings of regret for not being the husband I thought she should have, feelings of disappointment in our marriage. Thoughts that had been occupying my mind for months—some of them for years—and I didn’t want to carry them around any longer. They were a burden, and I didn’t know if I should consult her, or a doctor, or what.
“Okay,” she said, carefully applying some eyeliner in the visor mirror. Apparently my revelation was nothing earth-shattering.
“The thing is,” I continued, “I don’t know how I can sort out these things without talking to you, and if I can’t resolve these particular issues, then we’ll always be facing the same problems over and over.”
She adjusted the visor and checked her lipstick. “You have to understand that if there’s something that’s really bothering you, then you can always—no matter what—come to me and discuss it,” she said. “We both have issues, and that’s why we’re doing all of this. So we can talk about it.”
“Right,” I said. “I’m just afraid that if I open all these doors, then you’re going to see some pretty heavy things and . . . you know . . .”
“And what?” she asked, closing the visor. She was looking at me now. Out of nowhere, my eyes started watering up. She grabbed my hand and held it in her lap. “What is it?”
“I’m afraid that if I bring all this shit to you, you’re going to think I’m a total freak and leave me, and I swear to God, I can’t do this without you. You can’t leave me. But I don’t know who else to talk to about this stuff.” I was crying now, and we were three minutes from my parents’ house. I’ve got Asperger syndrome, but it doesn’t have me!
“Dave,” she said, “first of all, do you know me? You have to know that I will never leave you. For any reason. And second of all, I’m not going to judge you for what’s on your mind. I’m willing to talk about anything, especially something that’s important to you.”
I nodded and watched as the pavement, trees, and rooftops melted and blurred through my tears. “So, it’s not crazy to talk to you about my insecurities?”
“No crazier than pretending to be a talk-show host all day long.”
I kissed her hand. “I love you so much.” We drove a few more minutes, circling the neighborhood in silence while I pulled myself together. There was so much to say, so much to thank her for, and yet, at that moment, so few words I needed to use.