Neurodiversity has become one of those words that sounds like it’s doing work even when nothing else is. I use it way too much, myself.

It floats. It reassures. It allows everyone in the room to feel progressive without having to move a chair, dim a light, or rethink a deadline.

It is the verbal equivalent of applauding accessibility from a standing desk no one else can use.

Autism, by contrast, remains stubbornly physical. Loud. Exhausting. Inconvenient.

It still requires things—particularly when differences in sensory processing reliably affect pain thresholds, attention, and fatigue in everyday environments, as documented in adult autistic populations by Crane, Goddard, and Pring in Autism.

This difference matters.

As I said in my last post, Neurodiversity is a framework. Autism is a diagnosis. Treating them as interchangeable flatters institutions and strains bodies.

Autism is a diagnosis.
Neurodiversity is a framework.

They are often used interchangeably online, which is efficient for discourse and disastrous for clarity.

One term opens access to services, accommodations, and legal protections.

The other opens access to moral approval—and applause from institutions that prefer language to logistics.

Institutions tend to favor the second.
It’s cheaper.

I’ve learned that autism is not a personality aesthetic.

Autism exists as a diagnosis because certain neurological patterns cluster reliably enough to be studied, identified, and—most importantly—accommodated.

Differences in sensory processing, social cognition, executive functioning, and motor coordination are well documented, with measurable impacts on daily functioning, employment, and health outcomes, as summarized across decades of research in journals such as Autism Research and The Lancet Psychiatry.

I’ve been working with autistic children and their families for roughly twenty hours a week at a public mental health clinic for the past thirteen months.

That proximity has taught me something no amount of discourse ever could.

Before anyone sends me an email beginning with “Well, actually,” let me open with an apology—the academic kind, not the sincere kind.

Besides Marriage and Family Therapy, I also have a degree in Labor Studies, and I am a published researcher in the field.

Which means I have spent an absurd amount of time understanding workplaces, workers, and the elaborate mythologies they construct about their own competence.

So if this piece sounds judgmental, know that I say all of this with respect for working people and… let’s call it realistic expectations of their self-awareness.

With that out of the way:
A new study in Autism Research shows that autistic employees are far less susceptible to the Dunning–Kruger effectthan their non-autistic peers.

If you’ve ever worked in an office, you already knew this.

Every marriage is a sensory marriage, though very few partners have language for that reality.

Couples come into therapy reporting “communication issues,” as if clearer sentences alone could soothe a nervous system that’s been running a silent emergency operations center for two decades.

Beneath the arguments, under the finely memorized rituals of blame and rebuttal, something earlier and quieter is always in the room.

Two bodies.
Two sensory systems.
Trying to share one life.

If couples understood even a little of how much the nervous system governs their relationship, half their recurring misery would dissolve into recognition.

And this is doubly true for neurodivergent couples.

Mixed-neurotype couples often arrive in therapy with the same expression: the polite but vaguely startled look of people who have survived a long winter indoors without central heat.

Not traumatized. Not defeated. Just… cold. A little worn down.

A little bewildered at how two intelligent adults, armed with modern conveniences and a shared mortgage, can still feel this tired.

This is the quiet signature of neurodiverse relationship burnout—a particular sort of relational fatigue that’s less dramatic than despair and more persistent than everyday stress. It doesn’t crash into you. It accumulates. Like weather.

And with weather, the story is never the storm. It’s the atmosphere.

So let’s begin with Anna and Marcus.

You don’t marry a highly sensitive spouse.

You slowly come to understand that your partner is running a more advanced operating system than anything you’ve ever owned, and frankly, you’re not sure you would’ve passed the compatibility test if someone had administered it beforehand.

At first, it’s charming.
Your spouse notices things.
How thoughtful.

They point out the tension between your two friends at dinner.
They say that your mother “seemed off.”

They pick up on “an undertone” you absolutely did not hear—largely because you were focused on buttering a roll.

But then one day you realize they’re not overreacting; they’re over-perceiving.
And it’s not mystical, either—it’s rooted in what we know from the foundational research on sensory processing sensitivity as a temperament trait, described in Elaine Aron’s original work in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Highly sensitive spouses aren’t fragile.
They’re observant to the point of being haunted.

And living with someone who notices everything—especially the things you’d prefer went unnoted—is an intimate education in how much of your life you assumed was occurring off-camera.

There are marriages that move gradually, like weather systems drifting across a landscape.

And then there are neurodiverse marriages—marriages that move in epochs, where each era has its own climate, its own logic, its own form of truth. These marriages don’t simply “grow” or “change.”

They enter distinct emotional eras shaped by the dynamic interplay of two differently wired nervous systems.

Where neurotypical couples talk about communication patterns, neurodiverse couples live inside neurobiological time zones.

Their conflicts often seem to arrive from different centuries. One partner floods; the other disappears. One interprets patterns; the other follows precision. One senses danger; the other senses noise.

Both believe they’re making sense—because within their own nervous systems, they are.

Every ND couple has a moment—often several moments a day—when they realize they are not fighting about dishes, tone, lateness, or even the infamous “You interrupted me again” refrain.

They’re fighting about sensory overwhelm.

No one admits this, because it sounds trivial.

But ask any autistic–ADHD couple, any HSP paired with a sensory-seeking partner, any relationship built on two fluctuating attentional systems: the entire emotional climate can change because one partner heard too much and the other didn’t hear enough.

And still, most therapists treat this as a communication problem, as if you can talk your way out of a dysregulated nervous system.

There are moments when the world feels engineered for someone else.

Someone louder, faster, more resilient to fluorescent lights and notifications.

And then—out of nowhere—the internet offers you a ritual so gentle, so absurd, so strangely effective that you wonder how long you’ve been living at war with your own body.

The shower orange.
A fruit. A faucet. A nervous system finally catching its breath.

This is the sort of thing modern life accidentally invents when it has exhausted every sensible solution to chronic overwhelm. It looks ridiculous from the outside. But so does anything that provides genuine relief.

My clients don’t ask whether a monogamous neurodiverse marriage can survive infidelity because they’re looking for a simple answer.

They ask because something fundamental in the relationship—its orientation, its sense of direction—has shifted.

Neurodiverse couples already live inside a subtle daily negotiation: two nervous systems with different processing speeds, different ways of reading emotion, different thresholds for overload, trying to construct something shared.

Infidelity doesn’t interrupt that negotiation; sometimes it collapses it.

Not always loudly.
More like a building quietly failing behind its own walls.

This isn’t melodrama.
It’s what happens when a relationship built on translation loses the structure that once made that translation possible.

And it leads to the question no exclusive couple ever expects to need:

Is there anything left here that can be rebuilt?

The short answer is yes.
The longer answer—and the one that matters—is how.

Every house has one: the spaniel who blasts through the living room like a joyful meteor; the cat who regards your affection as performance art; the pug who collapses into dread at the sound of keys.

Humans, unable to resist organizing the world into familiar neuroses, reach instantly for the labels: “ADHD dog,” “autistic cat,” “anxiously attached pug.”

It’s affectionate shorthand.
But it’s also diagnostic cosplay.

And yet—and this is where things get uncomfortable—beneath the jokes and projection lies a quieter biological truth: some animals really do show neurobiological variations that echo human neurodivergence.

Not literally. Not diagnostically. But structurally, chemically, behaviorally.

So the real question isn’t “Can a dog be autistic?”

The real question is:
What happens when a mammalian nervous system doesn’t match the environment we put it in—and why are humans so desperate to name it?

Universities like to imagine themselves as the birthplace of every serious idea.

According to this charming fiction, knowledge flows downward: first the journal article, then the classroom, then—after several years of peer review—the public.

But the last fifteen years of queer microlabels tell a different story.A truer one.A more human one.

Terms like autochorissexual, aegosexual, fraysexual, lithromantic, quoigender, cupioromantic, and nebularomantic did not come down from the ivory tower.

They came up, from people who had no language for their lives and no patience left for institutions that refused to provide it.

Academia did not invent this lexicon.Queer communities did.

And they did it with more speed, precision, and ethical clarity than any institutional framework has managed in decades.

This wasn’t rebellion. This was repair.