TRIGGER WARNING
Discussions of mental health, s**cide and body image present.
Sections within this post
- What are these blog posts about?
- Introduction
- Setting the scene
- My first (and only) break-up
- Learning how to be single again
- A fateful message
- To be continued
- Until next time…
‘Husband off the Spectrum’ posts are based around our relationship with each other. Any posts by my husband as a guest writer will be clearly stated, otherwise they are by me.
Introduction
As of writing this post, my husband and I have recently celebrated our anniversary - we have spent fifteen years together, with 5 of those in marriage. I had briefly touched upon our meeting in the ‘Young Adulthood’ part of my diagnosis story, but have never explicitly gone into detail on how this came to be.
Now is the time to share…
Setting the scene
(Trigger warnings apply here - please skip ahead if you need to)
Let’s go right back to the years between 2003 and 2008 - when I was in secondary school (middle school). In either 2004 / 2005 (I cannot remember exactly which), I had my first ‘boyfriend’, who I solely talked to on MSN Messenger, met in person once, and ‘split’ after two weeks. My best friend at the time said that my first ‘boyfriend’ told her that he had split with me because he thought I was “frigid, fat, and ugly” - not the words a self-conscious and terribly shy teenage girl who is desperately trying to fit in would want to hear. In my timeline of relationships, I hate to even count that one, but I was really off to a great start (that is sarcasm).
In 2006, I started my first proper relationship that lasted three years. I was fourteen when it started, and it only ever started because my friends at the time helped to get it off the ground (not forgetting my undiagnosed autism and difficulty with any sort of relationship with any other human in general - nor those brutal words from the first ‘boyfriend’ crushing any level of confidence I had for potential romance).
Jumping forward to 2009 - I was in my second year of college (high school) and still in the relationship that started in 2006, both attending the same college together. I was finding college much easier socially than school, but in terms of the studies and workload, it was a big step-up in difficulty that I had not expected. It was also the year where we were to niche-down and narrow-in on what exactly we were going to pursue as a future career, as we were to apply for university in this year and had to ensure our subjects and grades were meeting the degree acceptance criteria.
Source: Pexels
I was an outlier amongst my peers, though - I switched my career path from what I wanted in my heart, to what made more sense logically (in my head) for future career prospects. This meant I was ditching my current roster of subjects, to pick up new ones, and therefore I was to stay at college for a third year (in the UK, the standard length of time spent at college is 2 years). There is more on this in the ‘Young Adulthood’ post on how this affected me in relation to undiagnosed autism, but this gives the context of the situation that I was in… and also my husband (but in a different way, which I will get to at some point in this now multi-part series).
My first (and only) break-up
I had spent my school years and even some time during my stint at college falling out with and distancing myself from friends, either via drifting apart or from a ‘final blow’ event (meaning that one of us upset the other too much and that was the end of our friendship, rather abruptly). I was used to that happening, but breaking up from a long-term romantic relationship was another level.
My ex attended the same college as me, and like most college students at the time, he was getting into partying, clubbing, and drinking alcohol. This was mostly due to the fact that we were all becoming of legal age to do those activities (if you have ever seen any of the UK television show, ‘The Inbetweeners’, then that is a great summary of what it was like to be at a UK college / sixth form in 2009). My friendship circle differed from my ex’s, and my circle was (for want of a better way of putting it) late to the party on those newly-legal activities. With these differing social circles, my extremely bad trust issues (from all the fall-outs and struggles of friendships in the years prior), and our interests and personalities steering in opposite directions, the drifting apart eventually hit a ‘final blow’ event - my ex was to “get out, it’s over”.
Source: Pexels
The number of parties that my ex was getting invited to was outnumbering mine, and I was never invited to them as a plus-one (which in hindsight makes our friendship circles look incredibly cliquey and like you were forbidden from overstepping and mixing with other circles). My trust had already dwindled in my ex from past events between us, and so my extreme view of an upcoming party that I wasn’t invited to taking precedence over our relationship was the final straw.
As an undiagnosed autistic individual, the break-up being a massive change, a sense of loss / grief of what is now gone, mixed with my difficulty dealing with emotions ‘appropriately’, was a huge shock to my system. I went for the ‘no contact’ approach - I didn’t want to see or hear about anything to do with my ex ever again. Luckily, this was not too hard to achieve as we did not share any classes, but at the time, social media and easier means of instant messaging via mobile phones was becoming more commonplace, so I had to resist temptation to contact them electronically at least. Also, us both being at the same educational institution meant I saw them in passing a few times - and often with their new partner of the time (they moved on quick from me).
Learning how to be single again
(Trigger warnings apply here - please skip ahead if you need to)
The first three months after the break-up were hard, and I was reaching mental health lows all over again, to the extremities of s**cidal ideation due to my inability to emotionally process anything in a level-headed manner. I am no longer in contact with the two friends who I clung on to for dear life with during these first three months, but now, many years after our drifting apart / falling out, I am still grateful for them being there at the time as they did their best to help me process the break-up and eventually see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Something to help me get over the grief of the break-up was to start looking at the world around me for future potential suitors - I wasn’t specifically looking for another partner so soon after the break-up as studies were mentally taxing enough as it was, but it was an activity to help me see that ‘there are plenty more fish in the sea’ and that I surely wasn’t going to be alone romantically forever (I was only eighteen-years-old and had a whole life of love and loss ahead of me).
Source: Pexels
With my undiagnosed autism to hand, I was starting to laser-focus in and fixate on certain individuals, all of which I saw as potential future partners. I got blown off a few times, but took the hits and moved on to the next suitor once I got the hint that I was firmly in the ‘friendzone’ with the current one. The boom of social media at the time made it easier for me to contact these people, who were all at my college alongside me (and not complete strangers from the internet). It was almost offensive to not have people on your friends list if you knew them just briefly and in passing - which meant in most cases, I could just pick the next victim from my Facebook friend list and start an instant messaging conversation with them that way.
Not having to approach people in person to start with made it easier for me to speak to them out of the blue, and each time doing so helped me grow in confidence to move on and speak to the next. When it came to meeting them in person, this never really happened as I was far too shy. A brief smile of acknowledgement in the corridor was as brave as I got in real life.
A fateful message
To this day, this cycling through messaging random young men in my year at college on social media is completely alien to me and I have no idea how I was confident enough to do it at the time (I would definitely not do something like this nowadays even just for platonic friendships) - but it would have been out of sheer desperation to fit in and look ‘normal’ to others by having a romantic partner. The pool of people I could contact as potential suitors was wearing thin and there was one guy on my Facebook friend list that, after showing my family the list (for some reason, of which escapes me), caught their eye as ‘lovely-looking’ and ‘had a great smile’.
I agreed, but I had no icebreaker I could use that made any sense to start talking to this person. He was in a different friendship circle entirely, was no longer in the same class that we had shared, was probably due to leave college within months like everybody else (except me) and my randomly reaching out to him out of nowhere would surely make him run a mile. The fact he looked like a minor celebrity that I had had a crush on since high school (middle school) was probably notnot something to bring up with him just yet either.
Source: Pexels
During Christmas break of 2009, sat on my nan’s frustratingly-slow computer and after spending half an hour staring at a blank Facebook chat window with this person, riddled with butterflies and ‘the shakes’, I eventually had the gall and sent the message:
“Hey, sorry for the random question but are you still taking English [class]?”.
To be continued
Keep your peepers peeled for part 2 of our ‘how we met’ story where I will discuss how that first Facebook Messenger conversation played out, subsequent dates-that-weren’t-really-dates-but-kind-of-were, and the eventual ‘making it official’.
Thank you very much for reading this blog post. I appreciate you spending time here on my corner of the internet. Hopefully you got something out of reading the essay above.
Stay tuned for upcoming posts and be the first to read them by following me on the social media links, in the menu bar, to know exactly when new posts are published.
Until next time,
