Spouse Diagnosing Spouse

It must be modern love: In the "Modern Love column of tomorrow's New York Times, David Finch, a marketing engineer for a semiconductor company near Chicago, writes about how his wife, Kristen, diagnosed him with Asperger's Syndrome. Kristen is a speech pathologist who's worked with severely autistic children and also children with Asperger's. In their their year of marriage, Finch writes that he'd become "cynical and withdrawn, obsessive and preoccupied, dismissive and unhelpful"; Kristen had her "suspicions" and administers an online test for Asperger's after which, as Finch writes:

I laughed and cried as the questions so perfectly revealed me. My score: 155 out of 200. That meant, as Kristen put it, “a whole lot of Asperger’s” — an armchair diagnosis that would later be seconded by a health-care professional.

I’d spent two decades trying to understand why I didn’t fit in. Now I had my answer. As a control, Kristen evaluated herself. Her score: 8.

With the data on the table, it was obvious. But naming my problem was one thing. Fixing it was something else altogether. How does someone with Asperger’s rid himself of the very coping mechanisms that allow for day-to-day functioning?

Autism spectrum disorders are not cured with medication, but their associated behaviors can be worked with. What I needed initially were communication skills and a sense of empathy, neither of which, in my case, had been factory-installed.

His wife being a speech pathologist, instruction in communication and dealing with anxiety (when his routine is disrupted, when he has to do something that he does not want to--such as family get-togethers) are readily provided. As Finch writes, "we're not out of the socially crippling woods yet, and we probably never will be"; nonetheless he writes, " I’m a good patient, and we’ve made steady progress." And there's more than might be thought in that last "we," perhaps a tacit acknowledge not only of his own efforts to communicate better, but of his wife's to understand his and his needs.

There's a novel, Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee in which the protagonist's wife is a speech therapist; Henry Park, the first-person narrator, is an "undercover operative for a vaguely sinister private intelligence agency" who's loath to reveal what he actually does---who he actually is---to his wife. There's a tragedy (or rather, tragedies) in the novel, which traces Park's gradually learning to understand himself. No, there's no mention of Asperger's in the novel, though I've often thought (for what it's worth) it possible to "diagnose" the character of Henry Park with it.

And no, I'm not diagnosing my own Jim with it---he (and I) already have our own diagnoses.

Guess that's modern love for you.