I Married an Aspie - A husband's perspective on Asperger's Syndrome

Asperger's Syndrome, A husband's Perspective

(A post by Mr. Aspie Writer)

My wife asked me to write a brief blog post for our anniversary. I was shocked and honored. Shocked that she would ask me to contribute to her blog and honored that she would include me in this very personal part of her life. Her writing is part of the means by which she is using to define who she herself is. So when asked to be included, it really means to me, that I am being allowed to be included in herself in a very real, very personal way.

You might say, well aren't you taking this a little too literally? Welcome to the world of Asperger's Syndrome.  Aspies are very literal minded. Innuendo’s and phrases wrapped in dual meanings are difficult to comprehend, since in their mind, it is a form of dishonesty.  Aspies almost always say what they mean and mean what they say. Period.

What does a woman with Asperger's Syndrome look like?

I would first like to say that when considering Asperger's Syndrome, you must realize that it is a form of Autism. But if you have any preconceived notions of what an Autistic person should look or act like, go ahead and toss those out right now. I can tell you after fifteen years of marriage to an Aspie, they're all completely wrong. There is NO way to tell an Autistic person by simply looking at them.
It took me fifteen years to realize my wife had Asperger's. And initially it was based on a joke. I saw a character in a movie that had Asperger's and I saw in that character so many of my wife's traits. I said, “Look, that girl is you personified!” To which something clicked in my wife and she realized, that just maybe I was right.  (So in retrospect, it was one of the few times in our marriage that my wife could say I was right about something!)


My wife is a beautiful, intelligent, extremely loyal and devoted person. If looking at her for the first time, you would not say there goes a person with Asperger’s. You would say, wow how could I get her number?

My wife is literally the most intelligent person I know. She has a seemingly inexhaustible ability to retain information. She remembers everything she hears and most of what she reads. (Try winning an argument with someone who NEVER forgets one word you have ever said). She can research something so completely, that she will OWN the subject.  Again try winning an argument with someone who can remember every facet of something she's researched.

"She danced to the beat of her own drum..."

When we first met fifteen years ago, part of what initially attracted me to her (besides the fact that she is incredibly hot), was that she was independent and didn't seem to care what other people thought or said. She danced to the beat of her own drum so to speak. I didn't realize until much later that there was no level of compromise in this.

For example, some people may realize that their partner/boyfriend/fiancé/spouse likes them to look a certain way or is attracted to a certain fashion or style on the opposite sex. My wife almost always wore sweats and a tee with her hair pulled back, or if coming from work in a dance studio, a short skirt, high heels and a leotard top. If she was picking me up from church after work, she would come in her work clothes, which while sexy and showed off her toned legs and ample bosom, was probably inappropriate for a church setting.

When coming to pick me up from my job, where I wore a shirt and tie, she would almost always come in sweats and a tee because she was not coming from work in her “work uniform.”
When I asked why she couldn’t change before she met me so we could go out, she said, “we can go out like this, I'm comfortable. These clothes are nice and soft and I don't mind going anywhere in them.” At first, I merely thought that she didn't care enough about my feelings on the subject to compromise on it.

What became obvious later was that it wasn't that she didn't care. It was that any other material except that used in the outfits she wore, irritated her skin so badly, it would be like wearing an outfit made from sandpaper. She could not compromise on it.

Sensory Processing Disorder

One of my wife's "symptoms" is that she has hyper-senses. (Sensory Processing Disorder). She has incredibly acute senses of touch, smell, taste, hearing, and is very sensitive to light. She can hear the filaments buzzing in fluorescent tubes. She can smell the scents held in a carpet that most of us would miss entirely. She can taste odors and if in a restaurant, she can taste individual spices and recreate the dish at home. She has to use red or brown tinted sunglasses outside so she can see, and she has to use ear plugs almost all day to minimize the chaos of all the information her brain processes.

While some of these things can be great (re-creating meals I like from restaurants), they can still make living day to day a real struggle and challenge. It is hard, when you are tired, after a long day of work, to have to come home and put my tiredness aside and remind myself to consider her way of processing things when talking to her and more importantly when listening to her. Try to come home to a woman who can hear the trash truck four blocks away, and who just spent the day with a thirteen year old, an eight year old and an eighteen month old all running amok all day.

Try constantly trying to tell those same children that mommy needs to have some peace and quiet in order not to have a meltdown.  And then try to have to reassure your wife that she shouldn't feel guilty about needing some peace and quiet when she has three boys. And all this after a long day at work.

Life can be hard--Is your Aspie worth it?

 
Something to take away from this may be a bit obvious but I think it needs to be reinforced. You chose to be with your Aspie. If you married her, whether or not you knew at the time what you were getting into, remember, that she is worth fighting for!  If you are in a relationship, one thing I've learned is that Aspie women are fiercely loyal. And they expect that same loyalty to be returned. And she, more than any other woman you probably know, is worth the fight.

 COMMUNICATE with her. Let her know in no uncertain terms what you are feeling and why. Then help her to find a situation that you know she's been in which made her feel similar to what you are feeling. This will help her understand and relate to your feelings better. Aspies are not the unfeeling machines which the media makes them out to be. In fact they feel EVERYTHING twenty times more intensely than you do. Mostly the problem comes in their  realizing why you may feel as you do and responding in a manner that you may feel is more appropriate.

And finally learn all you can about Aspergers. Some great books, which are easy to read and understand are "Aspergirls" and "22 Things a Woman with Asperger's Syndrome Wants Her Partner to Know", by Rudy Simone. These are two books which helped shed tremendous amounts of light on the subject for me. They helped to see things from their perspective and made it easier for me to look at the world through my wife's beautiful eyes.

Ask yourself, if it's hard for you to relate to her, how much harder is it for her to relate to you? You may know your reasons for doing and feeling  whatever you do, but do you think it makes sense to her? Ask her and find out.

Can you really say you are trying to understand her and her Asperger's? What have you done to do so? What more can you do?

Marketing: Long Game Discoverability Article by Randy Ingermanson

Hello everyone;

     I  am republishing an article from one of my favorite e-zines Advanced Fiction Writing. (Author's permission statement is published at the end of the post.) The subject of marketing in the world of new media is timely and appropriate, and hopefully of particular interest to my New Media Writing classmates.  Enjoy!  ~ Aspie Writer

Marketing: Long Game Discoverability
by Randy Ingermanson

The buzzword that authors and publishers are using these days is "discoverability." Is this sensible, or is this just the latest quackery?

I'll give you my opinion, but first some context.

An enormous number of books get published every single day of the year. How is any one book supposed to stand out in the crowd when the crowd gets bigger and noisier every year? That is the problem of "discoverability."

In the old days (say two or three years ago), publishers and authors had a few standard tools for getting a book discovered. Publishers sent their books to the major reviewers. They paid hefty money to buy placement on the front table at Barnes & Noble and Borders and other booksellers. They paid publicists to get their authors on radio or TV. Authors held booksignings at bookstores. They put up web sites and blogs. They went on speaking tours. They hit the social media networks.The purpose behind all of these methods was to get word-of-mouth going. Quickly.

The problem is that the old ways aren't working as well as they used to. There are far more books than there used to be. Truth be told, the old ways never worked very well in the first place. For every success, there were plenty more failures, with no rhyme, no reason to explain the difference between success and failure. Notice that most of the methods I mentioned above are actions with short-term effects. The review magazines have an influence for the month they're printed. After that, not so much. Placement on the front table works for as many as days as you keep paying for that front table real estate. After that, not at all. A radio or TV interview is on today, gone tonight.

A booksigning works for the three hours you're in the store. After that, the bookstore people might remember you, maybe. When you give a talk, you can move a lot of copies at the back of the room today. As soon as you leave the venue, you don't move any copies.

A tweet has an effect for a few hours and then it's gone. Short-term marketing made sense in the old days. Back then, a book had a shelf life of a few weeks. If it hadn't been discovered by then, the bookstore sent it back to the publisher for full credit and the book disappeared. Publishers and authors had to play a short game because that was the only game in town. They hoped that somehow, playing the short game hard enough would generate word of mouth. Sometimes it did, and when it did, great things happened. But the short game has always been hit-or-miss. In the old days, if it didn't hit, the game was over.

E-books have changed all that, because e-books are forever. There is no three-week ticking clock for e-books. Once an e-book goes on sale, it has an infinite length of time to be discovered. That means that it now makes sense to put more effort into "long game discoverability." If you spend all your marketing in short-term efforts, you are going to get all your returns as short-term results. But the instant you turn off the electricity, the marketing machine stops. I suspect that there will be more winners in the future because there will be more choices. Because there is more time for each book to find its audience. Because more of the actual money goes to authors and less goes to those pesky "middlemen."

If that's true, then publishing is becoming a long game, and much more of your marketing effort should go into things that last. Things that make you discoverable next week, next month, next year, next decade. You can only be doing so many things each day. If everything you do is for short-term results, then you can never get off the marketing treadmill.

Here are a few of the thousands of things that might make you more discoverable for the long haul. These are not guaranteed to work. A lot depends on how well you execute. But these are things that last:

* Web site articles or blog articles with content good enough to attract traffic from search engines.

Imagine spending an hour to write an article on a topic related to your book. Imagine posting it on your web site. Imagine that it brings in 100 page views every day. (This is not a huge number.) Imagine having a blurb about your book on that page. In a year, that blurb would be seen by over 36,000 people. In a decade, 365,000 pairs of eyeballs would see it. That's not nearly as sexy as spending an hour on a TV show. But which do you think is more effective at selling your book, long-term?

* Guest blogs with an "about the author" blurb that links back to your web site.

I saw a question this morning on an e-mail loop for authors asking whether blog tours work. I have my doubts about the short-term effectiveness of a blog tour. But I know for certain that a link from a blog to your web site lasts pretty much forever. Incoming links really help your site get noticed by the search engines. Incoming links last a long, long time. If this is part of your marketing strategy, then do your guest posts on blogs that actually get traffic, because a link from a high-traffic blog is worth more to you. I suppose doing a guest blog isn't as exciting as speaking to 100 people in a room and selling 25 copies of your book. But guess which one lasts longer?

* Your author page on Goodreads.

Goodreads is a social network for readers. That's the whole point of the site -- to help readers discover books and authors. Any author can have a profile page on Goodreads. It lists all your books, with links to major retailers. It includes blurbs for each one. It lets readers click a button to become your fan. There is a lot to like about Goodreads. You can post excerpts of your books. You can get various widgets to embed in your blog or web site. You can link in your blog so that new blog entries show up in Goodreads. Facebook and Twitter get all the hype right now. But neither of these social networks are exclusively about books. Goodreads is. If you've got limited time to spend on social media, then Goodreads seems like the smart place to spend it.

* The "Also Bought" list on the online retailers.

On every book page on Amazon, there's a section labeled "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought". There are similar sections on B&N and Smashwords. This is the online equivalent of browsing in a bookstore. The "Also Bought" list means that each of your books is an advertisement for your other books. If you have a sizable backlist of books, then your books can cross-promote each other very nicely. This means that it's entirely possible that your best marketing strategy might be to just write more books. I don't know any way to prove this, but it's possible.

In my opinion, the days of exclusively using short-game marketing are over. If you want to see a quick bump in sales, then yes, use some of the short-term marketing methods. But a long game now makes sense. Think about marketing tasks you can do today that will still be working for

you ten years from now. And relax. Marketing isn't a lottery anymore. Now it's a matter of making smart long-term investments that will pay off forever.

This article is reprinted by permission of the author.

Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, "the Snowflake Guy," publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, with more than 31,000 readers. If you want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction, AND make your writing more valuable to editors, AND have FUN doing it, visit http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com.

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