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are like sneezes or energetic puppies—one or two aren’t so bad, but try dealing with ten thousand of them. Eventually, Kristen’s life became flooded with my neuroses, and she found herself wondering who in the hell she’d married.
    She was, for example, understanding when I first insisted that all groceries be purchased from the Jewel-Osco grocery store, but when I started demanding they be purchased from the Jewel-Osco grocery store two towns over, rather than from the one right by our house, she protested. “‘Because that one has a better vibe’ is not reason enough,” she said, but I had no other way to explain why the routine of going to that store was so critical. It just was.
    When we were stuck in a traffic jam following a multiple-vehicle pileup, she listened for an hour as I speculated on the questionable driving habits of the victims before turning up the volume on the radio and saying to me, “People are probably dead. Can you please try and have an ounce of compassion?”
    And annoyed by my constant questioning about how long the Thanksgiving feast at Aunt Deb’s might last she snapped, “Why does it matter how long the dinner will be? I have no clue. None. Get over it.”
    Ashamed by my apparent insanity, by a personality I couldn’t seem to control, I slowly withdrew from Kristen over the first few years of our marriage. Confused and disappointed, she allowed herself to do the same. I resigned myself to the belief that we were fundamentally incompatible and that this was to blame for our resentment toward each other, the terrible distance between us, the way she was cold to me but would spring to life around everyone else. For years we just didn’t know how to fix it. This wasn’t the life I had imagined living, and so I felt all along that our marriage had failed me. It had never occurred to me to step back and look at the situation differently—to concede that perhaps our marriage had failed because I had failed our marriage.
     
    My diagnosis changed everything for us. The impact of the knowledge was deep and immediate. “This explains so much,” we kept saying. Of course, when I said it, the implication was that the diagnosis explained so much about me and my life. Now, looking back, I understand that when Kristen said it she had meant “This explains so much about us .” (How’s that for egocentricity?) The instant my score was calculated my alienating, baffling behaviors were transformed into well-documented symptoms of a known disorder—they no longer seemed malicious and unexplainable. Kristen understood that the damaging behaviors were not my fault, exactly, and was able to see me in a new light. Her resentment vanished; I was forgiven.
    Kristen went to bed that evening feeling better than she had in years, she told me. After she went upstairs I stayed in her office, in front of her computer. I decided to research autism spectrum conditions, knowing that I would not be able to shut off my brain and go to sleep that night. Every website I visited, every personal account I read, every clinical paper I skimmed was another helpful resource, more good news for me.
    At some point, in the hours that I spent absorbed in research and raw self-discovery, something occurred to me: I process things differently from Kristen, I’m as socially functional as a tuba, I don’t look beyond my own needs and my own interests, I haven’t been talking to her, and I behave very strangely. No wonder our marriage sucks right now. I think this Asperger syndrome may just be what’s destroying our marriage! I know, I know—great detective work. But with that discovery, I felt as though I’d been reborn. The reason we struggled for so long to find solutions to the problems in our marriage was that we hadn’t understood their causes. Identifying the source and knowing that it affected millions of other people made for a very short leap to the conclusion that I could finally do something about it.