Apologies that this week’s  blog is a little late – we have had a big week with our sons appearing in a play at school so lots of taxiing and evenings spent in the theatre for us. Also I have realized that this is a really big topic so I am going to break it down into a few posts. So welcome to Part 1.

One piece of advice that I often see repeated on forums which attempt to support neurotypical partners is that in order to make our relationships work we should “lower our expectations”.  This is a statement I find problematic because it feels like it might be equivalent to giving up on the relationship, it seems to come from a narrative of lack rather than growth and I also think it is a bit patronizing to our partners. So in the next few blogs I want to consider how it might be necessary to change your expectations of your relationship, and of life, in order to make a neurodiverse marriage work.

I think the first thing we need to consider is what our expectations are and how they are formed. Our expectations might come from anywhere. Perhaps your expectations of a relationship come from your parents’ relationship, either because you want to copy it or get as far away from it as possible. Perhaps you read a lot of romance or watched a lot of Disney movies as a child and expect your man to be Prince Charming and sweep you off your feet. Perhaps you have a strong cultural or religious background that dictates the roles a man and woman should play within a marriage.

When anyone goes into a relationship they naturally have expectations, whether they have explicitly sat down and thought about what those are or not. Matt and I got married in a Church of England church and before the ceremony we had to meet with the vicar several times. At these meetings he asked us questions to make sure we had thought about important issues that might come up in our marriage – did we both want children, what were our opinions on debt, what would we do if we felt an attraction to another person and so on. This might seem a little intrusive but it was done to make sure that we were both going in with the same expectations of life together. Even if we had disagreed the vicar would still have married us, he wasn’t there to judge, just facilitate the conversation. He told us that several couples had called off their weddings after these chats when they realized how far apart their expectations were.  So one really important thing in any relationship is to understand what expectations the other has come in with. This requires a conversation about them. This doesn’t necessarily have to be facilitated by a vicar!

Once you have found a person who has similar expectations to you, you have a better chance of having a successful relationship. Yes you might have to compromise a bit because Prince Charming doesn’t really exist, but Prince Charming Enough probably does. So what’s different in a neurodiverse relationship? If no-one has all their expectations met and accepting that is part of growing up and into adult relationships, why is it just us partners of the neurodiverse that are told to lower our expectations?

A quick search of the internet will bring up many articles on how having lower expectations will lead to a happier marriage, not just in neurodiverse relationships but in marriage in general. These articles say that couples with less expectations of each other thrive better.  This makes sense, because the constant disappointment of someone failing to live up to your expectations is bound to eat away at you, them and your relationship. If you were never expecting anything, you will never be disappointed. However there are other articles which claim that lower expectations of a partner actually perpetuate worse treatment. This is because if we just accept situations we don’t like, to maintain the status quo, we lose self-confidence over time and start accepting worse and worse treatment. So what are we to think? Which is the key to a happy relationship  – high or low expectations?

I think that as ever the answer lies in the middle ground. Having expectations that are realistic is the key. No-one should be settling for things they are not comfortable with but they should also be aware that no-one can really be the perfect man/woman all the time.  And perhaps this is where we partners of the neurodiverse need to acknowledge that what is actually realistic to expect of our autistic and ADHD partners is dependent on their autism and ADHD and also on how overloaded they are on that particular day. Sometimes it might be different from what we would get from a neurotypical partner and that’s OK. But I prefer to think of having expectations that are different, not lower.

For example, take cleaning. I am a full time working woman so I expect Matt to help with the cleaning. For many years I thought that Matt and I should be doing the same things on alternate weeks.  I got exceptionally cross with Matt because I could do a lot of cleaning in a day and he seemed to do barely any. I became resentful. He wasn’t doing his fair share. But one day instead of fighting against what was, I decided to look at our respective styles of cleaning. Yes, Matt is slow but he is exceptionally thorough. I, on the other hand,  can cover a lot of rooms but I don’t really do that deep down clean. I  began to see that if I changed my expectation of fair from “exactly the same amount of rooms” to “an equal amount of time” and we worked to our strengths we could actually achieve a much higher standard of cleanliness. So now we work as a team. I give the whole house a quick clean every week so it never looks too terrible and Matt does a room at a time giving it a really thorough clean. Sometimes Matt goes for a few weeks without doing his room. He is overloaded and can’t cope with it. But I always know that when he does do it, he will make a really good job of it. My expectations of Matt are no longer “he will do exactly the same as me” but “he will do his best when he is able”. And that best is actually a far higher standard of cleanliness than mine.

The unexpected outcome of this has been that as I have become less critical, Matt has become more willing to help. Because I am no longer holding him to such high standards he is more willing to have a go because he is not destined to fail. So maybe what we need to do with expectations is to negotiate them better and work out how to work with our strengths to achieve the best outcomes. Obviously cleaning is only one area where we have expectations. In the next few weeks I will look at how we manage expectations about other things, starting on Valentine’s Day with one of the most tricky negotiations we have had – expectations around romance. See you then.