There are many types of love – I am talking about romantic love here. The love you have for your spouse.

NT Experience

“Your well-being is as important as my own.”

For NT people, love is a complex and multilayered emotion. It typically involves:

• attachment
• care
• attraction

These are communicated through vibes and social signals. The people in love feel mentally connected – on the same wavelength. This results in a shift in salience (importance) where the partner becomes the most vivid person in their perception. NT people expect their partner to intuit their needs rather than give explicit requests. The couple forms a singular “we” identity. Love provides a buffer against the world – there is safety with your partner even if the world is cruel.

Love is probably the most complex emotion a human can feel and my description (of something I can’t experience directly) likely sounds clinical.

My Experience

I feel something I call love, but lacking Social Salience it is necessarily different from NT love. I think I feel attachment and attraction, but fall short on care.

I have been married for over 20 years and I love my wife, but I cannot express it in the same way NT people do. I have no vibes and no communication outside of explicit verbal speech. I don’t feel “mentally connected” but I do have great familiarity with her thought process: I can predict what she will say even if I don’t know what she thinks. I am not sure I have a “we” identity – I don’t know what this looks like. Certainly we are a couple and we work together to manage our lives. We don’t have to think the same things but we have to act in alignment. I don’t feel “social danger”, so I don’t think I get a feeling of safety. I think I do provide stability for my wife. That doesn’t sound romantic!

I guess I would have to define love through the things that matter to me:

• I trust my wife with my money, my children, and my dog
• I am loyal and when we have problems I fight for the relationship
• I didn’t realize it but I rely on her to provide emotional warmth to our children
• I admit I am probably self-centered, but I spend time and effort on my wife
• I enjoy doing things with her including travel (which I dislike on my own)

As I discovered my neurodivergence I learned how I was hurting my wife by not providing the emotional support she expected and needed. It helps my wife understand that I really don’t mean to hurt her, I have real limitations. Understanding the mechanism gives me some hope of Mitigation, but not solving the problem.

Comparison

I don’t know what NT people would call my emotion, but I think they would not label it love. It is what I have and it will have to do.

Semantic Divergence: yes.