The morning after our last counselling session, and after I’d been able to reflect just a little on what had been said the night before, I told my husband a couple of thoughts and feelings that I’d had. He was still a bit groggy, not long having woken up, so we agreed to talk about it more another time.

Yesterday morning, he said that he was feeling low. I asked if he’d like to talk about it later and he agreed.

This is how things went later…

After counselling, I’d told him that I was still upset that he’d attempted to blackmail me into giving him more sex by threatening to leave me. Husband reminded me that I got quite aggressive when he said that and reacted by saying a lot of very unkind things (“your libido is abnormal”, “you can only feel love through sex”, etc).

I had thought about this situation: there are direct comparisons between my demands that I find a Dom to help me explore my kinks since he could not. Unlike my response, his was more considered and kind. He actually tried to accommodate me and we attempted to open up the relationship.

I wanted him to know that I appreciated and recognised the kindness and love in his response versus my aggressive reaction to what was essentially the same type of situation. I can’t name how I felt as I was speaking, but it was emotional and I had tears as I spoke.

He said the two situations were very different. They were. Not least because I was perhaps 23 or 24 at the time and had zero maturity, he was 59.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we’d talked for an hour at this point. It had been a good talk, but I was tiring.

I tried to summarise, then he said “that’s all very well, but when will I get to talk about all the other things I want to talk about?” I said that “the trouble is that by talking about one thing it seems to mean we have to talk about everything”; I had tried focusing on one thing in detail and owing my poor behaviour. I wanted to wrap things up on a good note, but I’ll admit that I was a little irritated that he wanted to keep going.

He wondered, a little insistently to my mind, whether it’s given any thought to his question about whether, if I thought we could remain friends afterwards, that would make it easier for us to separate. He sees it as a simple yes or no question. It was only really in the day that I had realised that my thinking was clouded by knowing that if we separated that it would be forever (because he’s told me so). I released that I need to approach the question as though I don’t know that.

Which led to him say that I’d never truly known him because I make incorrect assumptions on how he would react to things. I believe that I’m not really any good at predicting human behaviour anyway – it’s one of the ways that ASD weakens my relationships.

I said that clearly I want to repair the relationship because I keep working and volunteering for these horrible conversations.

He talked at length about doubts in our future and his need for certainty. I told him that I though that the only way to remove all his doubts would be for us to separate.

Then he said “if I want to do what I want when I want then I should be single”; this really pissed me off and I said “I just need to know what he expects from me”.

What I need to know are clearly defined rules on what these expectations amount to: I have never got on well with the vague and unqualified statements about too much time being spent on my own interests and not enough on him/us. I’m afraid that I need to translate it into so many evenings a week on my own stuff, or “Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays do your own thing”. He sees me needing to pin down a schedule as controlling, yet it is absolutely necessary for me to manage my anxiety. I believe that it will also help him to manage his by clearly defining our expectations of each other.

We agreed to pick it up the conversation on Sunday.

At the end of that, glue brain had really begun to set in and I was exhausted. The whole thing was just short of two hours.