People seem to enjoy stories from my personal life, so here is one I especially like.
N. and I have very different styles of communication. I’m very impatient, verbose, intense, passionate, loud (you would have never guessed, right?) I have these endless, animated monologues going on in my head. They spill out onto the blog, then when N. comes home from work, I continue the monologues aloud for his benefit, then my sister calls and I continue delivering them to her, and so on and so on. I speak very fast, think very fast, make decisions instantly, constantly analyze every aspect of my life and every shade of my emotional state.
In short, I’m a circus show. I have this very expressive gesticulation and this huge range of facial expressions that I use to entertain people and myself all day long.
N. is very different. He is quiet and he always thinks hard before saying anything. He feels things instead of analyzing, classifying and verbalizing them like I do. He often can’t explain why he feels a certain way, which drives me up a wall. I mean, how is it possible not to know why you are in a bad mood? It’s your mood, isn’t it? Weird.
And he never says things just to say something. He needs to construct each utterance very carefully in order for it to come out precisely as he wants it to.
The first two and a half years of our relationship were long-distance. So we talked on the phone a lot, which I, as an autistic, detest passionately. Once, when we’d just known each other for a little over a month, I called N. from Montreal.
“So do you miss me?” I asked in the course of the conversation.
A silence ensued.
“He doesn’t miss me!” I realized. “He wants to break up but he doesn’t know how to say this to me.”
The silence continued.
“The jerk!” I thought. “He must have met another woman. A really nasty, vile horrible woman who is going to make him miserable.”
The silence went on.
“And then she will dump him and he will be really sorry that he’d left me and he will come back to me and I will proudly reject him!” I thought.
“Yes, I miss you a lot,” N. finally said.
“Why did it take you so long to answer?” I asked.
“I was thinking about how to word my answer,” he responded.
It took time to get used to but now I don’t get worried when I sit in the bedroom reading a book and N. comes in and says, “Yes.” I know immediately that he is answering the question as to whether he wants any pomegranate juice that I asked him 20 minutes ago.
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