AS and Their Partners

At 50 I finally found out why I had felt “different” for half a century. My wife and I were in the car listening to an NPR interview with Dawn Prince-Huges in 2004 and as she talked about her life, how she saw the world around her and many of her feelings, I thought “that sounds just like me!” My wife—an NT—said it out loud. We both recognized almost immediately that this AS thing “fit.” I had never heard of Aspergers, but listening to Prince-Huges was all the incentive I needed to learn more, so that evening I started a search, in typical aspie style, to learn everything I could on the subject.

I didn't even hear about AS until I was in my early 30s. Back when I was having behavior problems at school starting in the late 1970s, and getting labeled a gifted child in the early 1980s, no one suggested to my parents that I was on the autistic spectrum. Instead, teachers and psychologists blamed my parents -- their divorce, their parenting, their psychological health -- for my problematic behavior, my genetics for my IQ, and my behavior issues for a failure to live up to my IQ.