This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
Six years ago, my now-husband, Sam, asked my father if he could marry me. They sat in my dad’s Volvo in my parents’ driveway in San Antonio, Texas. It was raining. With Sam, my father would offer wisdom that was far more demonstrative and thoughtful than any insights he had ever shared with me. And even as I understood that transitive properties were at work and that my father loved Sam for loving me, I felt there was a closeness between them that I would never know.
My father was a workaholic. Quick to anger. By the time my husband came along, he’d softened. He’d become gentle. He laughed easily. He’d started indulging in that old-man habit of incessantly humming. The first time he met Sam, he hugged him. I was appalled. This was a man who shook my hand in greeting even after months of separation as though I were a business associate whose presence he merely endured.
Sam and I have been together for nine years now. We are, by many measures, extremely compatible. Neither of us wants children. We are both sensitive, prone to anxiety, and firmly encamped on the side of those who arrive at the airport stupidly early. Once, on vacation in a popular beachside town, I turned to him on the third day and was thrilled to discover that he was also having a miserable time.
On May 24, 2023, at age 43, I was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. I sought assessment on the heels of an exasperated parting shot from Sam as he left the apartment mid-fight. Before he turned away, he said to me in a half-joke, “Jesus, I swear you’re autistic or have a personality disorder,” then shut the door.
Perhaps you’ve sensed autism Zeitgeisting, the way pants are getting bigger or how raw milk appears to be a thing. As of 2020, according to the CDC, one out of 36 8-year-old children has autism — a significant jump from one in 44 in 2018.
The ASD diagnosis didn’t not make sense, but by that point in my life, I’d already landed on a tidy narrative that explained my perpetual strangeness with others, my constant beleaguerment in social situations. After all, mine is a classic tale of immigration and assimilation with a few asterisks for variety.
There’s a saying in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous — “Let go and let God.” But I rather prefer a different version: “Let go or get dragged.” My autism diagnosis offered a salvation; if I could surrender, I would be delivered. I could finally get some peace.
For Sam, the diagnosis altered everything. Provided a sense of relief that was oceanic. The framing of our relationship changed. I learned about pathological demand avoidance, a pattern of behavior that is still up for debate in the ASD world but that for me represented a seismic OS update. It explained why I would unfailingly refuse to do something when asked, and why a demand or request would trigger an overwhelming sense of panic and certitude that I would only disappoint the person asking. This was me when Sam knocked on my door.
It’s mostly an apocryphal joke that I got diagnosed with autism because Sam made a crack about it. In truth, it was because of my father.
