I’m on the autism spectrum, and I have kids on the spectrum and with ADHD and former partners with ADHD. I love them all to bits, but it can be tricky to navigate what behaviours should look like without an attainable standard of comparison. 

People who are neurodiverse are a minority in society. We perceive and think differently, so we will behave a little differently as well. It’s a bit similar to being left-handed. We used to force people to write with the right hand which caused all sorts of problems. Now we’re in a place where we accept this difference and have accommodations in place, like left-handed desks. But ND is different from left-handedness, of course, in that it affects our basic personality — who we are, and some traits common to ND brains are overwhelmingly seen as undesirable.

Like being unreliable.

About twenty years ago, I had a partner who commonly got distracted from tasks. The only time he wasn’t distractible was when he was engrossed (hyperfocusing) on something of specific interest to him. This is a common ADHD issue — or a common way of being for a specific group of people. One day he offered to make dinner for me as I marked final exams on my front porch: fresh fish on the BBQ. I watched him leave for the market and then return. A few hours passed, and I went to get an ETA for dinner only to find the fish unwrapped and sitting on the counter, covered in flies because the back door had been left open. I found my partner under his car changing the oil. It had occurred to him on the ride home with the fish that he hadn’t done an oil change in a while, and something in his brain told him it’s vital to do it RIGHT NOW. Not after dinner, but immediately. When I asked him about his choice, he insisted that the problem is that I just don’t understand cars. It’s kind of hilarious, if we’re allowed to laugh at idiosyncrasies, but also kind of annoying. It didn’t always happen like this, but it did just often enough to make it hard to trust that he’d follow through. 

CAN’T OR WON’T

How do we best live with people who just can’t do what they say they’ll do? Part of the problem is what it means to us when people let us down. We associate caring and loving with remembering things: our likes and dislikes and what makes us feel cared for and special dates. I have a mind like a sieve, so every recipe card has a list of who likes and hates it, with many crossed out as their tastes change, and I have an ongoing list of potential gifts for people, which often end up returned anyway, so it’s complicated. Our level of memory for detail is sometimes used as proof of our level of care, when it might be more of a fluke. Some people are just better at keeping those facts in mind, so they appear to be more invested in us when they might not care about us at all. It’s not always clear evidence of affiliation, yet we can’t let go of it as evidence.  

In my dinner example, it’s not that he didn’t want to make dinner. He wanted to, and had every intention of it, but it just didn’t happen. What his brain planned was thwarted by what his body actually did. It can be frustrating for both parties when things just don’t happen as planned. 

If someone make no effort to help, then it can feel like they don’t care about our well being and are just using us as a maid. We need to feel like people in our inner circle want to do things for us even if they’re not able. In fact, the belief of it might be all we need. I’m reminded of a group of guys I roomed with in uni who told me that guys only ever have to tell women they were about to do something nice for them, you never actually have to do anything. Of course, I insisted, I would never fall for that. Then, single on Valentine’s Day that year, I came home to, “We pooled our money to send flowers to your work, but we got confused over who was actually making the call, and it all fell apart!” I thanked them profusely, and told them not to worry that it fell apart. They’re so sweet to have thought of it!

You can guess what they said next. 

Part of shared chores and little niceties is feeling like someone else has our back or at least wants to have our back. We want some certainty that we’re special to them, or at least that they won’t throw us under the bus if push comes to shove. 

STRATEGIES AND DEFENSES

There are tons of books and videos about that one amazing thing that will work to keep you on task. And many of them work really well some of the time. Body doubling has become mainstream now with lots of apps cashing in on the need for the presence of another human being. I have a friend who has post-it notes of a checklist of tasks to do on doorways in his home so he doesn’t run from room to room in the morning scrambling to get ready. This simple accommodation makes mornings more efficient by keeping him in one room until he’s finished everything on the list. I have alarms on my phone that tell me when I need to make dinner or even shower. A well-meaning friend once remarked that I do that to have a sense of safety, which is a interesting assumption. The reality is, without a reminder, I might not ever leave for work in the morning or stop work to have dinner. It saves me from the effort of reminding myself over and over to make sure to do these simple thing that most people don’t need prompts for. 

But some people are resentful of reminders. Instead of being a mere prompt towards action, it’s an ongoing crack of the whip that says, ‘You’re screwing up again.’ There’s an internal belief fostered by society that we should be able to do all the things without help of any kind. Neurodivergent children and teens are often bombarded with criticisms for their differences. Without someone in their corner to counter all the condemnation, their struggles get an added layer of shame to work through, which makes it hard to admit when they need help to do things. Years of being told you’re a fuck-up can make the need for strategies hard to accept.

It’s also hard to be an adult in our independence-obsessed culture and come to terms with needing help to do something as basic as getting out of bed on time or remembering to eat. I largely self-accommodate and finish all the things as required, so reliability isn’t a problem for me. But I have other issues that just don’t budge. I can’t do groups. I wasn’t aware of this as such an inability until I went back to school and couldn’t manage all the groupwork. It’s not a hearing issue, but a processing one that makes it difficult to differentiate the voice in front of me from all the other noise in the room. I also can’t insert myself in overlapping conversations, which is how people typically talk despite being raised with rules around interrupting. 

It’s a bigger problem, though, when people think these skills are necessary to becoming an adult. As a teacher, I once had students come to me stressed out by another class in which they were marked for participating in a class conversation without raising hands and turn taking. The teacher explained, that’s what being an adult looks like. I appreciate the desire to want to help kids have these normal kinds of interactions, except there was no skill development involved. It means some bright kids lost marks for something beyond their capacity. It also means some of us on the spectrum will never appear to be adults by this teacher’s standards. My brain just shuts down when people talk at once. On the inside it’s painful and confusing; on the outside it looks like something ranging from cool aloofness to embarrassing awkwardness. I would have failed that class, and it’s part of the reason I left school. It’s not something disability services will accommodate. 

Our bar for what people should be able to do as adults is created from a neurotypical standard. In school, we need to have something to measure kids against, but there are other ways to measure ability that don’t set ND kids up for failure. It’s complex but possible. 

PATRONIZING AND INFANTILIZING

If one partner can’t do things, should the other watch over them, cajoling them to keep going? The last thing I’d want in a partnership is to feel like a nag or a manager or a mom. Instead of just the chore list being uneven, it can create a power dynamic that turns one party into the boss, and that’s far more difficult to undo. It makes one person into a problem with a cultural agreement that can be too heavy to bear, which says: Of course we should be able to rely on our partner to follow through on tasks.  

In an article in Psychology Today, the author points out that the paternalistic attitude with someone with a disability or difference “can be considered a micro-aggression … as if saying ‘I’m a better adult than you’. … such as speaking to the adult with disabilities in a higher frequency voice as one might with small children.” We think of adulthood as a time when we’ve got our shit together, but when we measure adult-ness in terms of productivity and task-completion, we leave people out, and we include a lot of people who are cruel and selfish and decidedly immature. We’ve pushed some functional tasks to a perfectionistic extreme that doesn’t allow for grace. Alternatively, adulthood could be measured in terms of kindness, other-centeredness, warmth, affection, and other traits that are more relational than efficient. Without any reliability, society is less functional, but we can fill in the gaps for one another to keep it from collapsing when things aren’t getting done. We already do. 

However, what’s the difference between a harmful micro-aggression and useful socialization that guides people towards behaviours that lead to more connections? If an adult is yelling or crying in a store, is it a problem with emotional regulation or is it an autistic meltdown? If our attitude towards the behaviour hinges on how much we think it’s possible for the shopper to change, then we either have to ask a lot of questions before reacting, or err on the side of understanding. Compassion provoking a desire to support others in ways they request. Erring on the side of bringing down consequences for behaviours keeps us in that infantilizing space in which we hope to train others. We can’t do that within a horizontal connection, only from a vertical position looking down. It’s brings a stance of righteousness. I understand the urge to tell someone to get grip to end the embarrassment of making a scene, but that would be merely to assuage my own discomfort in a way that accepts the status quo.  

We might look at other couples who don’t seem to have these problems and feel like it’s not fair. But “fair” is a comparison trap. It provokes us to look around to what we should be getting, what we deserve for our efforts. It keeps us striving for more and better while we live in a constant state of aggravated  disappointment. If only I could fix him… 

EQUALITY VS EQUITY OR WHATEVER WORKS

Kate Manne recently posted an article on her marriage. Her husband does all the things and accommodates her late nights writing by taking the kids in the morning. She laments that they do an equal amount of work all told, but she’s compared to other moms and found lacking, while he’s compared to other dad and appears amazing, since he’s “graded on a curve that is skewed by shitty, entitled, lazy men.” The key to this dilemma, it would seem to me, is to stop comparing. 

Comments on that post include women who refuse to settle for an “unequal relationship”. It appears to be some kind of a badge of honour for women to have a man who is our equal in chores, which leads to a different kind of hierarchical comparison when things can’t be 50/50: If a woman can’t manage chores, and her husband takes care of all the things, then he’s a hero. If a man can’t manage chores, and his wife takes care of all the things, then she’s a martyr or a victim of abuse, and she should definitely leave him. I understand why this is a gendered issue. Women have tolerated being treated as second class and doing the bulk of housework for so long it feels like moving backwards to accept anything less than a perfect division of tasks. But even in NT couples, someone’s going to get sick or disabled at some point. It’s often just a matter of time when that split shifts. 

Instead of aiming for the same number or duration or whatever measurement we use to ensure it’s all fair and balanced, we could follow the line popularized by Marx: “From each according to ability to each according to need.” The fear here is of getting played. What if it’s all learned helplessness and he really can do the things but hasn’t learned to do them (which is often, somehow, his mom’s fault)? Or worse, what if it’s manipulative helplessness? We don’t respect women who do more than their share. They’re being taken advantage of, and allowing it to happen means they’re weak or have no self-respect or something. It’s embarrassing to get taken, but it’s also a lot of fruitless work to continue trying to hit an ideal that doesn’t work in reality. Perhaps it’s important to try to gauge fairness generally to make sure no group is getting shafted, but not regularly, measuring our lives against our neighbours. Something like that.

Competition can be useful and motivating when tasks are within our control. When I was in school, marks were posted and tests returned from lowest to highest grades so more competition was fostered. That’s got all sorts of problems, but I was near enough to the top that it was very motivating for me. I needed only study more often and more carefully to get higher up the ladder. I could have a direct effect on the results. 

But relationships are entirely a different kettle of fish. No amount of effort on my part can provoke another person to change who they are. I can nag and complain and go on strike and threaten to leave, but none of that makes it more possible for someone with time blindness to show up on time or to hyperfocus on the “right” task. And if they do act from the fear of threats, it makes for a horrible relationship if one person feels like they’ll be abandoned if they don’t stay in line. 

ACCEPTING DIFFERENCE 

What sometimes comes to mind when I work on having greater acceptance is a scene from American Ultra: A young couple plans a trip. The boyfriend is a nervous flyer, but he insists he can make it this time. But he can’t. He spends some time in the bathroom of the airport beating himself up over it, but his girlfriend is completely understanding that they can’t go on this trip, or maybe any trip ever, and that just is what it is. Choosing him as a partner means staying close to home forever, and she’s made peace with that. But the difference is — spoilers — that she knows he’s actually a sleeper agent about to be activated. He was programmed to fear flying in order to keep him from escaping. Most of us got our differences more naturally, and we aren’t on the verge of activation and change of a heroic nature. We’ll always struggle with what might appear to be simple tasks. Some of us might fail to get through mundane tasks without being distracted, and that just is what it is, and we chose them anyway. 

Because our unwritten standards are based on neurotypicals, NDs can seem both deficient and extraordinary. We can’t do some simple things, yet can sometimes do other, seemingly much more difficult things with ease. For instance, someone could be an expert on dead languages, but unable to use a cash register, which keeps them out of entry-level jobs. It appears to be a bizarre split of brilliance and idiocy only when compared to NTs because the unwritten NT hierarchy of tasks leads to assumptions around levels of difficulty. Bloom’s Taxonomy, a foundation of teacher education, provides a clear vision of these assumptions: memorizing facts is at a lower level than analysis. I speculate that it’s ordered in this way because most people find spewing out facts easier that integrating them. But for NDs, the order might be reversed. It explains why some people do poorly in earlier grades, and so well later on, when marks are no longer based on regurgitating facts and exams are replaced with major papers. It doesn’t just affect education, though. When our partner can easily do something we find difficult, then we might assume they should also be able to do something that’s easier for most people, like to continue making dinner once they’ve started it. It’s sometimes viewed with suspicion as if this person must be up to something by feigning inability. 

If we err on the side of grace, we’ll sometimes get taken advantage of, but like the Paradoxical Commandments suggest, do it anyway. If we’re compassionate with a lack of reliability, people might keep being who they are, distractible and inefficient, but they might have a lot less shame about it. And while people with ADHD might struggle with being consistently reliable, the other side of that trait is being spontaneous and playful with moments of incredible insight and depth. Some people are so uncomfortable with unreliability that they don’t see any other solution than to end the relationship. That was me twenty years ago. But if we can get past that, there’s also good reason to stay.