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.
Clarissa's Blog 
HA!!!!!!!!! I think you might be married to my partner! OMG. Word for word. Sounds just like him.
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We really have many things in common, eh? 🙂
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Hahaha! You and N. sound like me and my husband.
“I know immediately that he is answering the question as to whether he wants any pomegranate juice that I asked him 20 minutes ago.”
I totally recognize this, I will ask my husband something, and then the question lingers in the air. Often I will get impatient and prompt him for an answer “While we’re young, please!”
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We will soon be able to start a club, it seems. 🙂
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Lovely! ❤
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Sounds like what they call “pressure of speech” or “pressured speech.” My SO is also a heavy case, and I am very much affected by N-syndrome—never an unrehearsed word.
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“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.”
You are obviously more evolved than he is.
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Isabel, you have already exhibited your extreme tactlessness on may occasions. No need to insist so much.
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I think you are taking yourself a little too seriously here; that was an obvious joke.
You are the one who just called all humans who don’t read or write or use language unevolved, and even implied that they didn’t have real human emotions. You said being shot would be better than belonging to an indigenous culture and you say I am tactless?
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You are not only tactless you are also either completely stupid or a nasty liar.
Only a really bitter little jerk who is loved by no one in the entire universe would think of spoiling such a nice, heart-warming thread with stupid lies.
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Lies?? Just go read the evolution thread, jeesh. You are the one who regularly says nasty, vile things, often to me. Why would I want to be “nice” after that?
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Haha, I love this story. I’m very similar to you in that regard, and the men I tend to date are very similar to N…so this is a good lesson for me.
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We used to know a guy who was always asking us how we felt about things. I think he was trying to figure out how real people felt.
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