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Tuesday, November 18, 2014

An Apergers Fiance

Not long after we were engaged, we decided that we'd done a really poor job at picking roommates in the past and decided we would be able to live together much easier.  We each called our parents and gave them a choice.  We could get married before we moved in together or we could wait until I graduated but we would be living together either way.  Both sets of parents unanimously agreed they wanted me to graduate before we got married.

I moved into our apartment first, while he went home for the summer to complete an internship.  He went ahead and moved his things from his old apartment into our apartment.  He set all of his kitchen stuff in the middle of the living floor and went home.  I walked around it for two weeks.  After he didn't pick it up the second weekend, I put it away and asked him about it.

Me: How come you left your kitchen stuff in our living room?
K: Because I wanted you to set up your kitchen the way you wanted it.
Me: How many times have I cooked for you?
K: Once
Me: And what did you do with it?
K: I threw it across the room.
Me: So what makes you think I'm going to cook for you again?
K: Oh

That was just the beginning.  Right away, we had a problem with the shower.  It had a nice window in it that opened to air out the bathroom. Gotta love those things.  He'd leave it open and shut the shower curtain so I didn't realize it was open.  He could not understand why I had a problem with this.  I tried to explain that I did not enjoy being undressed and then realizing the window was open when I opened the shower curtain.  To him, I should just remember to check first.  He refused to change.  I HAD to get a third party involved.  His mind was not going to change on this one.   Finally, he agreed to at least leave the shower curtain open if he was going to open the window so that I could see it was open when I entered the bathroom.

Then he started applying for jobs. One job at a time.  He refused to have more than one job application out at a time.  He waited until that job was filled before he would send another off. He pretty much refused to apply in a city of any type.  My degree was such that I needed a city in order to get a job.   When he did not get a job, he got angry like I'd never seen before.  He once knocked my recently arranged books off the shelf I'd just organized and another time broke the then expensive laser mouse my mother had gotten me for my birthday.  The mouse was never replaced and the books were never picked up...at least not by him.

Everything was explained away by the stress of his internship and trying to find a job.

During the first semester, house work was easy to keep up with. He was gone for most of the day.  I could do my homework while I was doing our laundry and tidy up while he was gone. 

The second semester did not start well.  His beloved grandmother whom he thought of as a mother passed away at the end of Christmas Break.  This sent him into an extreme depression.  I tried to be there for him.  I understood when he woke up crying in the middle of the night for most of the first 6 months.  However, he mostly sat in front of the TV watching static because we were too cheap to pay for cable and the house became impossible to clean up since he was always in it and not even doing the basics of cleaning up after himself.  I tried to explain that they would be showing our apartment soon and he didn't care.  The landlord showed it a mess.  I had school work that needed to be finished and I ended up having to drop classes to plan a wedding all by myself and make attempts at house work.  This meant I would still be going to school for the first two weeks we were married.  During this time I also felt forced to quit training for the triathlons I'd come to love.  Taking care of him, planning a wedding, and trying very unsuccessfully to take care of our apartment left me no time.

In May, his grandfather passed away.  He had gone on a trip across the state with his job.  His parents knew this and still failed to inform him when things were getting serious with his grandfathers health. They left a message on our answering machine about the family being called in and I spent 6 hours trying to track him down.  He had ridden down with a co-worker and had no car.  He wasn't quite old enough to rent a car but since I'd had to go through multiple sheriffs/police departments to get his whereabouts (his work refused to help and he didn't own a cell phone.) they were able to  get him in a rental car.  I told him I'd meet him at the hospital.  He calls me from a pay phone an hour from where he started and tells me he's stopping to eat.  I was furious.  He said "What? Do they think he's going to die?"  Umm yeah.  That's why I spent my entire day tracking you down!

He handled this one much better since this grandfather wasn't a father figure to him.  And just when I thought things couldn't get any worse, they finally seemed to get better.

During this time, I began to think about backing out of the wedding and decided it would be a crummy thing to do someone.  I assumed that this was just a phase that was caused by a stressful year for him.


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