You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mama Maya acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is.
Recorded on Kristen Lakson, and she goes, hey, you know that thing where we were just trying to fix our marriage. I was like, yeah, yeah, basically the last eight years of course, what's up. She's like, well, I don't want to do that anymore. I'm out. I can't do this marriage thing with you anymore. And I was like holding my underwear. I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute, what do you mean you're You're out from Mama Mia.
This is no filter and I'm mea Friedman. Before David and Kristen Finch were married and they were just dating, she found some photos on his camera that were really well, they were really weird, not sex weird and not cheating weird. This wasn't one of those situations where you accidentally find
incriminating evidence of infidelity. It was not that these weren't dick pics, but they were photos of David taken by David, and I guess you could call them selfies, but they are not the kind of selfies that you imagine.
When you hear that word.
The photos that Kristin found of her boyfriend were in different situations, like normal situations, watching TV or driving his car, even sitting on the toilet, very everyday things, and he'd taken photos of himself while he was doing them. So yeah, not the usual kind of photos that a guy or anyone really would take.
Because why would you. So of course.
Kristin asked him about it, and David told her that he wanted to understand how he looked to other people when he was doing normal stuff. And they laughed about it together, and even though David couldn't explain why he did it, Kristin just kind of dismissed it as a little quirk. I mean, she knew that David had a bunch of quirks things that he did that seemed, you know.
A little odd.
A few years later, though, after they were married and had kids and David hit a really rough patch in their relationship and it sparked a discovery about David that would change everything. This discovery even led to him writing a book about How to Be a Perfect Husband, which became a New York Times bestseller. And this part's quite funny. His determination to be a perfect husband is what ultimately
made his wife call time on their marriage. This is a story with a lot of surprises in it, mostly for David and also for you when.
You hear it. So the best place to start is at.
The beginning, when David was just a kid trying to figure out how to be in the world. So let's dive in with the very delightful David Finch.
Tell me where you grew up, David.
I grew up on a farm in northern Illinois. It's about sixty miles northwest of Chicago, pretty close to the Wisconsin border, and it was fantastic.
What kind of kid were you?
First of all, I know that I was a very, very happy, to a large extent chill kid, and I would say quirky too. There were moments where, like my parents were having a dinner party just with a bunch of friends, and I would scoot along on the floor of our house on my hands in my knees with my forehead against the carpet, and I loved the brushing sensation of the carpet against my forehead. It was like very calming. It kind of transported me into this utopian
like state of mind. Even when I was real young, you know, and I was like, this feels great. So I did it all the time. My parents were awesome. They were just like, Oh, that's just Dave. Don't mind him. He's fine.
He's just vacuuming the floor with his face, not a problem. Did you have friends, David, Like, did you socialize easily? Or did other kids think that you're a bit weird?
These are great questions. I love these. Okay, So after we'll say third grade or fourth grade or so, I always had a very small and unchanging friend group, and those same people are still my closest friends today. But for the most part, I was not likely to be the kid who was invited to we'll say, just a party, like, Oh we're doing a big party Friday night, everybody come over. My number was not on that list. So I would find out that everybody got together, did fun things whatever.
Looking back, that was it was really okay with me. I always felt this notion of like, what am I missing out on? Why am I not being invited to participate in these sorts of things. On the other hand, if you had asked me put yourself in that environment, in that party, in that situation, hanging out with you know, people on a Friday night, would you want to be doing that? The answer would be no, I'd rather be at home, you know, practicing my sax phone, drawing pictures
or whatever. I always had a core group of friends. I was lucky in that way because I think I was regarded as sort of the funny kid, the comedian of the group or the school. I don't know, looking back, if I was funny or if I was just willing to be more obnoxious than the other kids were willing to be, and so they thought that was funny.
But well, you in on the jike, Well, were you sort of bewildered about You'd say something that you didn't think was funny and everyone would go, oh, Dave, you're it's so funny when you were like, I wasn't trying to be funny, or you would you actually push on that button deliberately.
I'm laughing because that actually happens more now that I'm an adult. I'm not in on the joke. When I was a kid, I had a little more credibility. No, when I was a kid, it was half and half half the time. I would architects sort of a funny situation or a funny line on things, I would present it or I would share it with people, they would
agree it was funny. And whether that was you know, just in a conversation like real time, or if the assignment for the classroom was we're making posters about, you know, recycling or something, then I would draw the most ridiculous poster and I know people would laugh at that. Right then there are other times when I clearly was not trying to make anybody laugh, and I was just sharing my actual lived experience and people thought it was hilarious.
And so sometimes I felt othered. We'll say, to use that fake verb.
We didn't have that word back then, but now you can see that's how you felt. Tell me about dating, because that can be difficult for anyone to navigate. But when you have a different view on the world, how was it for you?
Dating was always a really interesting proposition for me because it's said often you know of people who are on the spectrum that do they really engage with people on an emotional level? Do they really understand, you know, the sort of the social dynamics, And you know, for the most part, there are challenges with that and maybe certain limitations if you want to call them limitations or differences
if you want to call them differences. But for me, dating was an interesting proposition because there was always somebody that I was like, Oh, well, she's cute, she's funny. I like her personality, you know, And so there's always somebody I was interested in for one reason or another. But when it came time, like basically in high school, is really when I first started to maybe have girlfriends. So I do really well when I have a model in my head for how something is supposed to be done,
and I can kind of work that model. But until I have that model, I don't always do well with improvisation in such a way that the improvisation is tolerable to others. I can improvise my way through anything, but the key socially is to do it in an agreeable, socially nice manner. Right, So, like, what I knew about dating, especially when I was younger, is anything that I would have seen in TV shows, cartoons, and movies.
So that's what you were emulating. That was the model you were working.
I was emulating that, which is dangerous when you're emulating Peppi Lapu and you're like all this this amorous like ooh, you know you're so beautiful now yeah nowadays, Yeah, i'd be thrown in jail. Yeah.
Tell me about the improvising. Give me an example of a situation where you improvised, but because you didn't have a model, it didn't land.
God, that's such a good question, because I always referred back to models all this levity and joking for the last couple of minutes. The moment of biggest import for me personally in terms of not having a mod and feeling completely fish out of water about it, was when my best friend Kristin, who is now my wife, lost
somebody very very important to her. She lost her fiance and I don't want to get ahead of the story, but she lost her fiance, Mike, in a car accident when we were in our early twenties, and Mike was somebody that I had grown up with in school as well and along with Kristin. I remember I was always Kristin's funny, dorky friend as we were just discussing. But when Mike died, I did not know how to show
up for a friend who was grieving. I knew how to show up for a friend who was happy or annoyed, a little bit sad, you know, all these different emotional states, but truly grieving and not feeling like yourself anymore, and not being able to process the enormity of what just
happened in your life, the tragedy of it. I felt like a terrible friend because there was a period for about a year and a half where I just I had no idea how to show up for Kristin, And normally I was somebody who always knew how to show up for her, how to get a laugh out of her.
You know, that's interesting that you say that, David, because I don't think anyone would have known how to show up for Kristin in that situation. I wouldn't, at age fifty two as I am now, with all the social awareness and insight that I have, and I'm not neurodivers in the same way that you are, I wouldn't know what to do in that moment. Like I've got a friend whose father just died and she's devastated. I don't know how to show up for her in the right way.
So just must have been an incredibly tough thing, you know, neurodiversity aside, How did you navigate it with her.
What ended up happening was after a year and a half of Kristin and me not really connecting, not really seeing each other at all, but not even calling each other on the phone. This was before texting. Prior to that, we would see each other pretty regularly and do fun things, hang out, do social things, talk, write letters to each other, mail and back and forth. But after Mike Dad, she really shut down, like her whole self just kind of
went away for a little while. I had reached out a few times, just leaving messages on the answering machine and just saying, hey, I'm here, you know, just if you ever want to get together, let me know. No phone calls back, and that didn't bother me because I wasn't expecting one. So after about a year and a half, she and I ended up living in the same town,
across the street from each other. She called me one late afternoon, it was actually around dinner time, and she said, I would love to go get a cup of coffee. Are you around. I was like, oh my god, yeah, I would love to get a cup of coffee with you. Now that was a lie. People say like, oh, you got aspergers. You can't tell lies. No, I can lie. And that was a bit. That was a big, big, white phony lie because at the time I hated coffee. I wouldn't have touched it otherwise. But it was Kristen.
It was like this really close best friend of mine resurfacing after a year and a half. So I was like, oh, yeah, I love coffee. I can't get enough of it. So I put on my coat and I stood there at the the door and she came over to pick me up. We went got coffee that night, and it was a really interesting evening because I'm much better at banter and
small talk and just sort of social pleasantry conversation. Now, you know, if you're sitting next to somebody on a four hour flight and they start yapping at you, and I can carry that conversation finally at age forty seven. But I had at that time in my life just no ability for gab and small talk. So with Kristen, we sat down with our coffees. By the way, I
had no idea what even to order. It was a Starbucks coffee place, and so she ordered this white chocolate mocha and I listened very closely to how she ordered, and I was like that sounds good. I would also like a white chocolate mocha, and just following her lead, so we both sat down with our white chocolate mochas.
Sounds delicious.
It was delicious. I got to say it made me a coffee drinker, or maybe it was her company that made me a coffee drinker. But I just launched right into I haven't seen you in forever, how are you doing?
And she'd be like, you know, the first couple questions I asked you was just like, ah, you know, I mean, not awesome, but doing okay, putting on the brave face sort of thing, and I could see the brave face act, and so I just kind of cut to the chase and said, I don't know if there's an answer for this, but like, what would you say you regret the most having lost Mike but not being able to say goodbye to him because it was so abrupt, Like what is
the biggest thing that you've been dealing with over the last year and a half. Yeah, nobody had asked her questions like this, And it might sound insensitive, terrible, borderline cruel, or barbaric to ask those sorts of questions, but I just started asking her one after another of these these heavy hitting, like sixty minutes, you know, investigative journalism type questions.
How did it turn into love?
Well, I'm an endlessly lovable person.
Clearly, I'm already in love with you, dard book, Can I say, and it's only been twenty minutes, if.
If only we weren't literally twenty four hours separated exactly. That's an interesting question too, because, by the way, I love how your listeners are going to be listening to this episode and they're going to be like, can you just answer one of her fucking questions without this whole thirty minute preamble. There was always a love with Kristin and me. We knew each other way back when we were in preschool. She has known me. Out of all the people that I've consciously known in my life, she's
one of the people who's known me the longest. And now she's very aware of people and what's going on around her, so she would have noticed me and maybe compartmentalized me as like, Okay, that's the funny weird kid. Got it cool. Then when we were in high school, it really turned we became really I would say, good friends. In high school, we had the same line on things. We had a very similar sense of humor.
After the short break, how David got himself out of the friend zone with Kristin and embarked on marriage and fatherhood and also what he discovered about himself in the process that he never expected.
Did you ever have a crush on her? Or it was platonic for you?
It was platonic by circumstance. Then when Mike died, it was when Kristen and Mike were both in grad school. I had just graduated from undergrad and had started working already. After Mike died, it was a year and a half. Then Kristin and I started hanging out and started getting coffee, and she was still my very beautiful friend. But it wasn't like that high school mania of.
Desire and lost in home minds.
Yes, hormonesia, and that doesn't help. It had very well calmed down to just like, Wow, look at how beautiful my friend is, and I love being here with her talking. But apparently that first night was so deeply therapeutic for her with all my terrible Barbara Walter's questions that then it was hey, let's do this again next week. So it was coffee every every week, right, every Tuesday. Then it was coffee every few days, then it was coffee
and dinner every few days. Then it was dinner every day, and then all of a sudden we just knew, Like, you know, that was months and months of just sort of surprising discovery that I had already you know, tapped out and was like, you know, we're not a thing, or we wouldn't be, so I wasn't even thinking in those terms. And then when we were spending so much time together, we both were just like, this feels really right.
How old were you guys then.
Early twenties, twenty three, twenty four.
And you talk about being on your best behavior in that early phase when you were dating, what were you masking? Like? What kinds of things were you not showing her when you're in your best behavior?
The masking thing is really interesting. If you would say, like to a twenty three year old man, single guy, what does it mean to be on your best behavior on a date, they might say things like, keep your hands to yourself, don't be leering at your date, don't suggestive rude, disgusting.
Comments, don't drink too much.
Yeah, don't drink too much right, don't get into bar fights. Maybe unless she's into that sort of thing, and you might win some favor with Kristin being on my best behavior, was anything that she wanted to do socially, I would just say yes to Blindly. Inside, I might not want to go to the Big Taste of Chicago Festival, which is this huge, hot Fourth of July festival. It's sticky,
there's food vendors. It's a nightmare. Frankly, there's shirtless guys with upside down visors spilling beer on you, and it's like, ah, it's like my worst nightmare. But Kristin, being a very social person, she loved the Taste of Chicago Festival. So the very first year that we were dating, she was like, want to go to the fourth with me? I was like, yes, there truly is nothing now would rather do more than stand there?
Well, that'd be coffee.
That the only thing that would make me happy is if I could have coffee at this festival.
Totally yeah, with two cups of coffee in each hand, Like oh.
Yeah, yeah, I'm my happy place.
Let's go. Let's go talk to some college age men. This will be fun.
Yeah.
So I'd never advocated for those sorts of things that truly I would have preferred. I was just all in on. Listen, you're dating your best friend.
Now.
If you screw this up, you've lost a girlfriend and your best friend. So high stakes, high steaks, don't screw it up. It's sort of like every day that we were dating, it was like I was showing up to reinterview for that same job every morning. So you know, when you go into an interview with someone, you're like, Hi, very great, oh man, traffic was a breeze. You know, positive energy.
Got here early. I'm always oie.
You wrote that when you slipped from your best behavior, You wrote, she seemed to find my eccentricity and endearing. I remember her laughter upon discovering dozens of pictures I had taken of myself to see what I might look like to other people at any given moment, Me watching TV, me about to sneeze, me on the toilet, looking pensive.
Why did you take these photos?
Day?
Right around my twenties, it really started to occur to me because I was working in an office then, and it was starting to occur to me. I knew what everybody else looked like, and I was studying their mannerisms, but I don't know how I'm coming off to other people.
Part of what was fueling this or driving this was I would have people come and stop by my cubicle at work a couple of times a week and just be like or even in the middle of a meeting, like in a conference room somewhere, somebody would kind of pull me aside and be like, are you okay? Everything okay? Like, yeah, everything's fine. Why do you ask? Like you look so angry right now, Like you look like you want to kill someone. And it turns out you've heard of resting
bitch face. Yeah, so I've got resting psycho face apparently. So the thing was I had this digital camera, so I was like, oh, this is cool, you know, and I could review it in real time. I must have left the camera on the kitchen counter or something. That's how my memory places on the kitchen counter. Kristen grabbed it and she was like, oh, what are these and she just started flipping through them and it was no photos of our pet, it was no photos of our house.
It was just a million pictures of me making different facial expressions.
And this is before selfies, the selfies wasn't even a word, right, so that must have been really interesting for her, right, And how did she react?
She laughed. She laughed so hard and for so long. It wasn't just in the moment. Days later, anytime she thought of it, she would just start like deep belly laughing that would come from deep inside her soul would just like erupt for she just thought it was great. She was like, what a weird guy that I'm dating. She loved it. She really loves people who are authentic. She loves people who are not, you know, mass produced humans that are kind of unique and quirky and strange.
You also wrote, she loved the story of how I took an emergency leave from work to boil my glasses after they'd fallen from my shirt pocket in a minute room stall. She found it pitifully charming when I would stand alone at parties kind of dancing, or follow with her from room to room, unable to engage with anyone else. That's just how it goes with Aspergers. Of course, you didn't know that's what it was then, you were just quirky.
But she had a clue because she worked as a speech pathologist who works with kids who are on the spectrum right exactly.
And that's an interesting twist in all of this. So I mentioned she really loves and just prefers in life to be around quirky, unique individuals, and something that we find in a lot of folks on the spectrum, the autism spectrum certainly is this sort of quirkiness, and it's a quirkiness that comes from a very innocent place. It's not this wilful denial of social norms. It's just if those norms haven't been presented to me in a way that I've internalized and am willing to perpetuate and emulate.
I don't have time for it, so we end up just acting the way we act. Her first professional love in life was autism. Right after grad school, she was working with kids with autism in the elementary school kind of age group. And that's also when we started dating, and she never quite lined up the two cards of like autism and Dave. Then she started working with kids with Asperger syndrome diagnoses, which is no longer technically a thing,
but it really is a thing. A lot of us identify as having this particular quote unquote version or expression of autism. However, you want to put it. She started working with that population of kids, and then she started meeting the dads and the moms of those kids, and she was like, huh. And that's when she started to see, like, gee,
Dave's rigid flexibility. It wasn't called masking, like we didn't have that word masking back then, but just the way that Dave sort of puts on different characters, like he wears personas, like other people wear outfits of clothing for any different circumstance socially, you know, the way that I would insist on sort of a routine. And there are very clearly defined parameters for what constitutes a breakfast. And if you haven't served me orange juice, we haven't had
breakfast yet. I can't get my day started yet, so can you please get me some orange juice? All that sort of stuff. She really then started to piece together that, you know, gosh, Dave's very similar. I'm seeing a lot of things that are consistent with these children and adults with Asperger syndrome. And it's important to note here, and I'm sure we'll get into it. It's important to note here that at that time we had been married five years and our marriage was not going well.
After this break, how David finally gets the diagnosis that will change his life.
We will get into that you were married, you had kids. Both of those.
Things can be quite to his nonderstatement, but can really change the dynamics of a relationship and really be a lot of stress on a person.
Particularly if the way your.
Aspergers manifested was that rigidity and around routines. Well, that's one of the ways. What was marriage and fatherhood like for you in those early years in terms of the biggest struggles that were caused by your asperges?
So importantly we can draw a thick, solid line right down the middle of what is a challenge because I had aspergers, and what is a challenge just because it's marriage and kids. So in some ways you almost have to look at them separately if you really want to get to the nuances of things. We'll start with marriage. For me, marriage was okay, we are living together now in the same house, and there's no shutdown period for me.
So when we were dating and we were not living in the same house, we each had our own apartment. I could spend the day with her, being the greatest version of a boyfriend you've ever seen in your life, like the quintessential excellent boyfriend, high energy, you know, very positive, very willing to show up and do things, do that all day long and then say all right, good night, go back home to my apartment, and I could just recharge.
Didn't have to be on your best behavior.
You you didn't have to be on my best behavior.
Which is what we now call masking.
Yeah, yeah, totally.
You could do all you we'd stuff alone.
I could take the mask off. And the mask was crucial because as far as I was concerned, the mask is what Kristen loved, not what was behind the mask. So I was like, I don't wanted to see what's behind the mask. You don't forget that. It's like the Phantom of the Opera, right, Like, don't take that off. Then when we were married, we were living together, there was no opportunity to take off the mask without really revealing what a troll I could be when you just leave me to be one, right.
So in your view, in my.
View, right, So the insisting on you know, it's hamburg er Tuesday. Why are we trying to now make a taco Tuesday? We've always done hamburgers let's keep it with Hambergers, right, so that that sort of inflexibility, persistent and intense preoccupations
with random, weird things. Those were the challenges in being married was how do I adequately continue to show up for Kristin when I have built this completely unsustainable masking initiative or this and finding now that that is not sustainable. And it's not like I was trying to trick Christin into thinking I was some great version of myself. It was more just that's what you do when the stakes are high, right, So that was marriage, And in a
marriage there needs to be or in any relationship. You know, marriage is just a piece of paper in some ways, but in any worthy close relationship, I think the responsibility for both people in that relationship is to love the other person so freely that they're free to be themselves at whatever stage in life they're in, whatever they're into, and to celebrate that and to share moments together. In my case, my only goal after the end of a
workday was preservation of sameness. And it was like Kristen didn't want to be married to an agenda around preservation of sameness. She wanted to be married to somebody who could go and do fun things out in the world without completely boiling over and having little man tantrums and pouting and all the things that I would do, stomp around and act mad for three days because my favorite TV show is canceled or something.
And also withdrawing. You know you wrote in this essay for the New York Times. It wasn't working any of it. Our third year of marriage threatened to be our last. I'd become cynical and withdrawn, obsessive and preoccupied, dismissive and unhelpful.
Ashamed by my seeming insanity, I withdrew until our life together became long car rides without conversations and laughter, silent evenings watching TV in the same room but feeling worlds apart, months without any real connect The circle breaker didn't come for another couple of years. Really, When one night Kristen asked you to come to her office after the kids were asleep, sounds like you're being someone to the principal's office.
She wanted you to take an online test for Aspergers, but first she let you complete your eight thirty PM routine.
What was that routine?
At that time? The layout of our house was such that after the kids would be in bed. They were both like just single digits agely, like three and five or something. They were both very young. I would basically start in the kitchen and I would walk counterclockwise around the first floor of our house, and I would just go from room to room in a sequence and observe which lights were on. The lights that were on, I wouldn't necessarily shut them off. I would just want to
know which ones are on. And sometimes I would kind of like stare into it, have a moment with a light bulb. Then I would stop at the front door where we had two windows, and I would look out the window and notice, like how I had to stand so that the neighbor's rooftops would come into perfect parallel alignment with each other. And you know, if you cock your head a certain way, it kind of creates an angle.
So just getting that right, and when I could do it so that the rooftops all lined up perfectly, it would be this amazing relaxation, you know moment. It would be like similar to when I was a kid pushing myself along the floor with my head on the carpet. For some reason, my shoulders would relax. It would feel amazing. So then once I did that, I continue around, continue my loop, just see what's on the TV. If it's something loud and obnoxious, turn it off. If it's something good,
keep it on. It was a way to essentially reset for my evening, which was to get the lay of the land. What's going on in the house. Are there any variables or factors that I want to address, like do I not feel like having a bright evening? Which lights would I turn off? Right? So it was like this very deliberate, but very essential to what we would
call now my emotional regulation. It was very essential to that to getting me regulated for the rest of my night, because the rest of my night was now I have to really show up and try to be a good partner to Kristen. I needed that time and she knew that.
So you did the test, You iced the test. If the objective of the test was to be.
Diagnosed with aspects, how did you feel once you had a word for the quirkiness?
That was Dave, It was so interesting. I didn't know that we were doing an Asperger's test. She did, obviously, but I thought it was some kind of magazine quiz, like a Cosmo quiz. You know what kind of celebrity pet would you be? Answered these ten questions. I just thought it was this, but then it ended up being one hundred and fifty five questions or something crazy. But
I scored so high on this thing for Asperger's. It was like, first of all, it was an online test something called like Asperger Quiz or aspe quiz or something, and it was all these qualifying questions and it was by no means a genuine or reliable diagnostic tool that diagnosticians would use. It was more like directionally accurate a weather vein.
Maybe get this checked out by a professional.
Totally like you might want to go see somebody for this.
And you got the yeah, maybe head straight to a professional as soon as the sun comes up. Maybe rush drive now, can't you call?
It's right when we click to calculate my score, just the emergency bells started ringing and psychologists were repelling down the side of my house in swat Here.
Didn't feel good to have a word for it.
It felt amazing. And the reason why is it can be a very different experience for everybody, and nobody's reaction to getting an autism spectrum diagnosis is the wrong reaction. It's always going to be the right reaction for them. For me, it felt like this big moment of relief. It actually felt like I was witnessing myself at a point of rebirth, or witnessing my own birth. It was, Oh,
that's who I am. All of these questions, which were things like, do you find it vitally important to remain uninterrupted or undisturbed when you're focusing on interests that you're absorbed in? Do you require lengthy periods of time to recharge? Do you do better in social situations when you can script your responses to potential questions well in advance and rehearse them. All these things that I did that I knew none of my immediate friend group or my peers
were really doing. And so when you're going through life in a way that is markedly different from the folks around you and sort of your cohort growing up, you start to feel like a broken toy or what somebody once described and I don't know who described it this way, and I would give them credit if I could remember. They describe it as being a failed version of normal. You feel like a failed version of normal.
Ooh yeah, you.
Know what I mean. And then somebody hands you this moment where they essentially give you the user manual to your brain and they say, you're not a failed version of normal, You're a very successful version of Dave. You are exactly what you're supposed to be, and this is, by the way, how your brain works, and it's not supposed to be the same as everybody else's. For me, the moment was electric. For Kristen, it was the same
exact way. I just remember her eyes were dancing like champagne with a with a megawatt flashlight shining into the glasses. She was so amped up about like, dude, this describes you, Like isn't this amazing? So she as somebody who just adored, loved and was a big fangirl of the autistic brain, she was electrified. She was like, this is amazing. So
we both took this as fantastic news. What I then ended up doing, you know, she kissed me on the forehead and she went upstairs and she said, this explains so much. You know, all this stuff in our marriage that has been challenging and making me want to kick you in the teeth multiple times a day, all the things that are causing such challenge. She's like, I know now that it's not your fault. You're not willfully being
this pain in the butt. This is really important For some reason, that gave her license to see me in a different light, to forgive me. She kissed me on the forehead, she said, I love you. She went upstairs and she slept better than she had slept in years. Oh wow, Now I just found out I had a form of autism. So I was like blown away. I couldn't sleep. I was like what, So I started googling
everything like that crisis. Probably the worst thing anybody can do is start googling autism spectrum conditions because there's so much misinformation, gloom and doom. You really have to be judicious about what information sources you are going to when you're trying to learn about autism and related conditions.
Like googling anything anything that in totally it's interesting what you say about the manual, because you I then decided to write a book called The Journal of Best Practices, a memoir of marriage, Asperger Syndrome and one man's quest to be.
A better husband. What was the book about and what was in it?
The book, interestingly enough you can take autism aspurgers right out of it. Because in the end the book ended up selling very well because in the end people recognized in it that Chrisin and I are just a couple. We're working our way through our stuff. But at the end of the day, it's couple stuff. It's stuff that everybody deals with, just we might be dealing with some
things to a comically high degree. That book was really truly the story behind all of the maxims that I started to write down these little personal rules for myself about how to be a better husband, how to be a more successful version of normal, we'll say, a more
traditional looking kind of guy. And anytime Chrisin and I would get into an argument a debate, anytime I realized I had screwed something up and I could take lesson away from that, I would then write down the lesson learned, like don't take just what you need from the dryer, take all the clothes out and fold them, don't just pick through and find the right socks right, don't sneak up on her and scare her. These are good lessons to yes, like don't change the radio station when she's
singing along. Just stuff like that. But then that's like, how to not be part of my expression is how to not be an asshole?
An asshole? Yeah, but you weren't being deliberately an asshole. You just literally had to learn these things. I want to know more. Tell me more of those rules that would seem so obvious but clearly helped many many men when you wrote them down.
It did end up being nice breadcrumbs for other men to follow, I will admit and other partners. But some of the other ones were a little more we'll say, less playful. So the more playful ones were like don't change the radio station when she's singing along. But there are other really important ones like apologies don't count when you shout them, for instance, or listen within hathic mind like so I had to actually practice empathy. I remember one of them, probably the one that stands out so
clearly in my mind. The most for whatever reason, is initiative, and the best practice was take initiative, but don't ask Kristin for a high five after you've taken initiative, right, So I had to tape that one to my mirror. So in our marriage, when the kids were real little, I thought my role as husband. The paradigm was I work, make the money, and then I come home from work. The rest of the day should be about me recovering from a workday and not having to do too much. Right,
I'm not alone in that. Everybody wants that. Of course, it's the dream, and it's the selfish dream.
Right.
So, Kristin I perceived her role as being anything related to the kids or general household upkeep. Kristin is like the first lines of defense on that, and if she needs help with any of it, she can pull me in and tell me specifically what she needs me to do if I have time to do that. Right. Like, That's how selfish and horrible I was at the time.
I'm not like that anymore. I just want to say, but that was such a huge blind spot on my part that when I told Kristin, hey, listen, thank you for bringing to my attention that I'm on the spectrum. This is really helpful. I noticed that our marriage sucks. I can't help but think that to a certain extent, I kind of suck. So I want to learn how to not suck anymore. I want to do the things that would make me a better husband, a better partner.
First of all, to her credit, she never said, oh good, I can capitalize in this and I can sort of custom make my own custom version of a man that I want to have.
Build her own husband.
Yeah, yeah, build her. She looked at it and said, Dave, I appreciate what you're getting at here, but you need to understand you're not broken. Our marriage is broken. You don't need to be fixed or repaired or change our marriage. Our relationship fundamentally has broken down and needs to be repaired. We can do that together. We're not going to be fixing you or making you something you're not, but we have information now that we can build a context around
the reality of who you are. And I was like, oh, that makes a lot more sense.
Right.
So, but with this initiative thing, one of the very first things early on that she said was it is exhausting trying to stay a few steps ahead of you so that you don't have some emotional downward spiral and lose your mind because we didn't have the right kind of sandwiches for you know, the guests or whatever. That's exhausting, But it's also there is so much going on, just keeping the house going, keeping the kids fed, clean clothes whatever. That.
She's like, I feel like you're just kind of standing on the sidelines watching me do it. And I was like, well, yeah, that's that's what I feel like my role should be right now. I don't want to get in your way. And she immediately called bs on me. She's like, you don't care about getting in my way. You just don't want to get your hands dirty doing all this other shit. She was absolutely right.
Which sounds like this stuff just of marriages, right, Like, that's an argument that my HU and I have in different ways all the time, and I think is just typical of most couples because it seems on paper you were working so hard, so diligently, you were making it such a project, your life's work. Almost literally, you wrote a best selling book on how to be a better husband. So tell me about the day you were in the bathroom and she came to you and said, I want to get unmarried.
My gosh, yeah.
Now if you like me any thinking, Wait, hasn't David been kind of killing it as a husband. Not a lot of men are willing to do so much work on themselves and with their partner. I mean, he literally wrote a book about how to be a better husband. So why did his wife want to unmarry him? It seems unreasonable and what does getting unmarried even mean? And obviously you know I'm going to ask him about sex because this is no filter, after all, and I have none.
Spoiler alert. Unmarried the way.
David describes it, it is incredibly appealing.
There's a link in our show notes. Don't miss it. See you in part two.