The Neurodiverse* Couple

Opening Orientation

Neurodiverse couples often find themselves struggling with patterns that do not respond to ordinary relationship advice.

When partners experience and respond to the world in fundamentally different ways, effort alone is rarely enough to resolve misunderstanding, conflict, or distance.

Recognition

You may recognize yourself in some of these thoughts:

“My partner seems to lack empathy and doesn’t care how I feel.”
“I can’t find a way to communicate with my partner.”
“My partner feels attacked or criticized if I disagree.”
“We’ve been together a long time, and I feel lonelier than I ever have.”

If these feel familiar, you are not alone.
They are commonly voiced by neurodiverse couples trying to make sense of challenges that don’t improve despite care, effort, or good intention.

Two Ways of Experiencing the World

In neurodiverse relationships, partners often experience the same events in fundamentally different ways.

Many autistic individuals describe moving through the world without access to what others experience as automatic context. Social expectations, emotional subtext, and unspoken rules are not reliably available in the background. This does not reflect a lack of intelligence or care, but a different way of perceiving and processing information. Life can feel effortful, requiring constant attention and analysis in situations others navigate intuitively.

Neurotypical partners often experience the same relationship from the opposite position. They tend to carry much of the invisible contextual labor, anticipating needs, smoothing interactions, and filling in emotional or social gaps. Because this work is largely unseen, it can become exhausting over time.

These differences are structural, not moral. Neither position is superior, and neither represents a failure of empathy, effort, or love. Difficulties arise not because one partner is wrong, but because each is operating with a different internal map of how relationships function.

Understanding this difference is often the first step toward reducing unnecessary conflict and self-blame.

This perspective is explored in greater depth elsewhere for readers who wish to engage with it more slowly and thoroughly.

My Role

My role is that of a translator.

I help each partner understand what the other is actually communicating, rather than what is being inferred. Our work focuses on reducing unnecessary conflict by clarifying differences in perception, communication, and emotional processing.

As couples develop more effective ways of understanding and responding to each other, my role naturally becomes unnecessary.

Credentials and Scope

I am a licensed psychotherapist and coach specializing in supporting neurodiverse couples, including relationships in which one partner is or may be autistic.

I am also a high intelligence specialist and work with couples for whom cognitive intensity, analytical thinking, or asynchronous intellectual development contributes to relational strain.

Explore Further

Learn about neurodiverse relationships:
Twenty Questions for Couples
Working With Me
Courses
Writing and Resources