In my practice, this is a sticking point that comes up again and again when working with neurodiverse couples. Two people recollect the same experience — a dinner, a spat, a vacation — with radically different points of view.
The neurotypical (NT) wife might say, “You didn’t even think to ask me what I wanted for dinner.”
The husband on the autism spectrum (ASD) responds, “What? I thought I did and you said, ‘Get me a salad,’ so that’s what I did!”
The NT wife insists, “I didn’t want a salad, I wanted a soup tonight. It’s so cold, something warm would have been nice.”
Does this exchange sound familiar to you? Is the husband telling the truth or is his wife? Or did she say actually “soup” and he heard “salad”? For both of them, this confusing situation can feel intentional, “crazy making”—like being in “the twilight zone.” Even if the wife might feel used to the idea that this type of thing happens often, she might still feel invalidated and betrayed. The husband on the other hand might feel that his wife is out to get him, sabotaging his efforts towards pleasing her.
Why Does This Happen?
These types of exchanges are a reflection of the ASD-NT brain differences, especially how autistic and NT brains understand the elements of what’s happening around them and encode the memories related to the particular incident.
The NT wife might see that all the people around them, save their ASD husband, perceive events very much in the way that they do. But when it comes to their ASD husband they feel as though they are in the twilight zone. He seems to be living in an alternate reality, misunderstanding what happened, attribute negativity to the incident, and then blame her for the conflict. He just doesn’t get it! Everyone else seems to understand her—except her autistic husband.
But what looks to the NT wife as denial or gaslighting or a rewriting of the past may truly be the ASD husband’s interpretation of the events as they believe it to be true.
The ASD husband feels the same way his NT wife does. Everyone seems to understand him—except for his NT wife. And, he loves his wife. He feels he does everything in his power to make her happy. He works really hard at work to provide her and their kids a good life. He’s certainly not being manipulative or making up stories to make her wrong.
So why is this happening—over and over again—tearing away at their relationship?
What Is Context Blindness?
One reason for this disjoint in memory is something known as context blindness. That means the ASD husband has difficulty understanding the big-picture context, such as the intuitiveness that comes with placing the event—in this instance—within the context of:
- the season,
- the timing of dinner or lunch,
- his wife’s general feelings about her diet,
- memory of how/when she prefers a soup over salad,
- when was the last time she had a salad,
- or what context she likes certain foods in…
Basically, the type of information that is based on constantly learning and memorizing details about one’s partner—details that might come naturally to his NT wife.
If you ask her all these questions about her husband’s food preferences, she would have no problem knowing exactly what food to order him. She’d probably be able to rattle off what his general diet has been like in the last few days, his seasonal and lunch and dinner preferences—all of which he can’t reciprocate when it comes to her.
Rather, the ASD husband may fixate on one detail, such as his wife usually loves a particular kind of salad—but not retain the other information that gives context to that preference. That one detail about the salad becomes the entire reason why he ordered her salad and thought she said salad. He was somewhat hyperfocused on this detail, which put all other information in the background.
To reiterate, the ASD partner wasn’t basing the food order for his wife on a pie chart of information such as:
- What she’s eaten recently or what her diet has been like the last few days
- Whether it’s lunch or dinner and the type of food she usually prefers at that time
- What season it is and how that might affect her food preferences
- Her general feelings about salads versus soup in this particular setting
- Whether she actually said “salad” or if it was assumed based on past behavior
- Whether she was craving something warm or light, and that being unspoken
- Any auditory processing issues that might have impacted hearing what she actually said
- Differences in expressive language and what wasn’t directly stated
- The timing and context of the conversation when the food order was discussed
Then from this pie chart, one has to discern which part is more relevant in that moment to make exactly the right decision—or explicitly ask his wife what she wants for dinner and make sure that the transmission of that information is complete. But due to expressive language issues related to his autism, he may think he asked her something, but he actually didn’t.
The Different Ways Our Brains Store the Pie
The NT wife expects that her husband will redeem all of the slices/contextual information in the pie, just as she does. But as I mentioned before, the autistic husband has a tendency to get fixated on one detail—and lose track of the others.
He is good with specific details, able to focus on things one at a time, but unable to hold on to the context of the bigger picture and memories of their wife’s food preferences—which might have been gleaned over the decade that they’ve been together—but somehow he didn’t, and maybe never will.
Or the moment he tries to store more information around his wife’s food preferences, his brain might drop off other relevant information making a mistake in some other context related to their relationship. So in a way, he might just not be wired to hold all of the contextual information in his brain.
It can be sad for the NT wife that her ASD partner doesn’t understand how to do a simple thing like order the right food for her at the right time. She may even know that it’s not about bad intentions. But the truth is, she is left disappointed and feeling alone—like her partner doesn’t even know what food to order for her.
The Elephant and the Blind Men
Like the ancient parable of the blind men and the elephant, where each of the five men feels a different part of the elephant—the trunk, the leg, the tail—and thinks that’s its main part. But they’re each in possession of only a single piece of a much larger picture.
The ASD husband might never see the whole elephant. But if he understands this, he might not argue his point and might apologize to her for not knowing what she likes in her food order.
