Yes you read that right, Ryan and I got married in Hell. Hell Michigan that is. Turns out Hell isn’t so bad, it’s a little stop off a wooded road in Michigan that consists of a bar, a gift shop, a putt-putt course and a little wedding chapel Ironically the gift shop doubles as an ice cream parlor, but we opted to go to TGI Friday’s for our after-wedding celebration instead of risking having our ice cream melt. Pretty fancy if you ask me, they even wrote out “congratulations” in Hershey syrup on my giant Oreo sundae.
Needless to say, Ryan and I are pretty quirky. We are different from “normal” people, and then even different from each other. We met as two high school outcasts in marching band. I was a good-two-shoes track star who dressed a little too odd for everyone’s taste and played the trumpet. He was the floppy haired autistic kid who played the tuba and had a genius level IQ. Most people thought I was a lesbian because of my short hair, odd sense of style and lack of a boyfriend until Ryan. Ryan on the other hand earned himself the nickname “Spazfeld” by our peers for having yelled obscenities and flipping of the bus driver one too many times. As adults we now think his “freakout” resulted from not being challenged intellectually enough combined with being an anstey high school guy, but we’ve both grown a lot as people since then. We connected over the emotions that only high school outcasts understand and we might not be weird in the same way anymore, but we still connect over our shared rejection of normalcy.
In high school, Ryan was a Christian. He didn’t go to church on Sundays, but did a lot of bible reading and praying on his own. I was a Christian too, not that I went to church often either or really even read the bible that much, but I prayed every single night and made a genuine effort to be a good person. Then 5 years ago, Ryan converted to Islam. It’s been a learning experience. Scary at first, but really just learning things like, not all Muslims are terrorists, and about the existence of beef bacon (it it’s not already apparent I grew up in a very small, primarily white town).
What affects us more though is the fact that Ryan is autistic, and I am not. Technically he has Asperger’s Syndrome…in recent years though I believe they took away the diagnosis of Asperger’s from the DSM and have instead taken to just saying that all autistic people (high functioning, low functioning, Asperger’s, blue, pink, gold, or purple) are on the spectrum. Ryan hates that phrase though, he thinks we don’t need to use flowery language in attempt to cover up the fact that he’s werido, because it’s okay to be an autistic weirdo.
I don’t think that being a “neurotypical” (as some people like to call it) who is married to an autistic guy is actually all that complicated. Or…maybe we are just really used to it, but honestly, for the most part it’s pretty easy. I just have to be ready to hear a LOT about hockey (autistic people tend to have a few very specific and intense interests, for Ryan those interests are hockey and math) and he just has to know that sometimes I will go through social interactions whose purpose does not make a lick of damn sense to him. Sometimes that means he has to make small talk (which he thinks is stupid and pointless, he would rather just jump to the deep stuff) and other times that mean I take charge of social scripts, like saying “have a good day” to the cashier at Kroger instead of him just saying “weeeee” to fill the empty space we pick up our groceries. But that’s okay, I know a lot about hockey now and we get some good laughs out of the times when he lacks the social scripts so instead just says “weeee.”
Now the part about Ryan being vegan, well that is kind of a lie. He’s trying to go vegan and probably would be if I weren’t in the picture. See, I am about as carnivorous as you can get without keeling over due to lack of nutrition. I eat just enough fruits an vegetables to get by. I will admit that it’s my fatal flaw. We do okay though, it’s just sometimes while he is going through his rather long transition into veganhood he meats meat, and sometimes as he tries new vegan recipes, I try them too (life hack: vegan macaroni is healthy and absolutely delicious.)
It’s funny though because despite the many differences, we still have entirely more in common. We both love cheesy movies like Fiddler On the Roof, we think the epitome of fine dining is seeing who can eat the most breadsticks at Olive Garden, we think 70’s music is far superior to the mumble wrap the kids these days listen to, and we both think the Renaissance Festival is the most wonderful time of the year.
So for today, I will leave you with this, sometimes in life we spend entirely too much time trying to embody whatever normal is and we devote too much of our thought process to seeing the differences in people. In fact, we spend so much time looking for and striving for those things that we loose sight of all the ways that goofy is good and normal gets boring, so much so that we don’t see the fantastic similarities that make our differences compatible.
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