I wish you the best of luck going forward, my wife is in the process of an autism diagnosis.

It was such a relief when my wife and I realised that she might be autistic, so much made sense to both of us finally. Being completely honest, I always had this niggling feeling that my wife was being 'fake' with me, or something I could not put my finger on - of course in hindsight, I realise she was masking! But this behaviour (and others) made me feel very scared and unsettled at times in the first years of our relationship. We both tried to 'fix' these traits but of course this was futile.

Obviously my wife has many loveable traits and I've held fast to the relationship to make it work, and in the last 3 years, our relationship is getting better and better. But we went through some really tough times together in the early years (we've been together for 10 years). I'm somewhat neuro-diverse myself (highly sensitive) which has both helped and hindered our relationship, depending on the situation.

It's really heartbreaking and unfortunate that so many neuro-diverse women are overlooked because of rigid ideas about what autism looks like (because the studies focus on men to a high degree).