There is a particular kind of forgetting that happens only in the aftermath of an almost-relationship.

It is not graceful, and it is not poetic.

It is the kind of forgetting, for some, that feels like a survival strategy invented by someone who has never actually survived anything.

This is Situationship Amnesia—the neurological blackout that convinces you the person who barely showed up for you might, under slightly improved astrological conditions, be the great love of your life.

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.

Emotional austerity happens when emotional availability, responsiveness, and warmth get rationed in a relationship.

Here’s how it begins, how to recognize it, and what neuroscience and attachment research reveal about getting out of the scarcity cycle.

You never catch emotional austerity early. No one does.

If people were skilled at noticing emotional shifts on time, couples therapy would be a charming niche job performed out of a converted garden shed. Instead, emotional austerity arrives the way most relationship trouble arrives: quietly, politely, and entirely off the books.

It doesn’t start with a crisis. It starts with a shrug.

You ask how their day was and they offer a single syllable that conveys absolutely nothing. You share something meaningful and get a nod so faint it should be checked for a pulse.

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.

There are mornings when the house looks peaceful—sunlight on the floorboards, coffee quietly percolating, the kind of silence that feels borrowed. Then someone walks into the room, touches the back of a chair, and says, gently, “Do you have a minute?”

It’s a harmless question.
It’s practically nothing.

And yet your body responds with a quiet internal flinch, the nervous system version of a low battery warning.

You’re not impatient. You’re not angry. You simply do not have a minute—not emotionally, not neurologically. The budget is gone.

This is emotional bandwidth mismatch: when two nervous systems have unequal capacity at the exact moment one reaches for the other.

Early morning, half-light.
The house is quiet in the way houses rarely are. You stand in the kitchen watching the coffee drip, holding onto the stillness like it’s the last clean surface in your life.

Then you hear it—the soft, almost apologetic way someone clears their throat in the hallway. It’s not loud. Not hostile. Not anything that should matter.

But your body reacts anyway. A small tightening behind the ribs. A shift in breath. The faint sense of being summoned.

Nothing has happened yet, and you’re already tired.

This is where attunement fatigue begins: not with conflict, but with the slow, steady depletion of your ability to track another person’s emotional life without abandoning your own.

We talk about attunement as though it’s a spiritual achievement—limitless presence, infinite empathy, a kind of interpersonal sainthood.

But attunement in its physiological form is not transcendence.

It is labor. Real labor. And the nervous system, generous as it is, has a limit.

Attunement fatigue is the moment the body sends the invoice.

There are moments in a marriage—small, unremarkable moments—when something inside the body gives its verdict before the mind has even filed the paperwork.

A partner walks into the kitchen. A child drops a backpack by the door. Someone exhales with just enough force to alter the air in the room.

You feel it. Not emotionally, not conceptually. Physically.

Your body settles or braces.
There is no in-between.
Here’s the thing. The autonomic nervous system has no diplomatic wing.

Here’s some new data. The human brain does not “grow,” it changes regimes.

It abandons one architectural logic and adopts another, the way empires shift capitals when the old city feels too cramped.

Neuroscientists now argue that the brain moves through five distinct epochs, each ushered in with its own quiet upheaval at ages 9, 32, 66, and 83.

These are not symbolic ages. They mark nothing ceremonial. No one receives a congratulatory card for entering their “modularization period.”

The skull does not vibrate to alert you. Yet the architecture shifts all the same—restructuring your inner life with the indifference of a city planning department updating zoning laws.

This is the brain’s real story: not ascent, not decline, but reorganization.

Published recently in Nature Communications, the research confirms something clinicians and parents have sensed intuitively: the brain is not a straight line. It’s a renovation schedule.

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?

Let’s talk about a new order. A clearer frame. A deeper excavation.

Trauma reorders perception. It alters the nervous system’s interpretation of reality. The facts remain the same, but the meaning is different.

The room is the same, but your body reads it differently. A trauma survivor walks into ordinary spaces and senses what others do not: threat in the tone, tension in the air, danger in the pause, reversal in the silence.

A thousand small signals, each carrying its own implication.

When rest becomes part of trauma recovery, it has to follow this altered architecture.

Not the mind first. Not the feelings first.
The order must match the way the nervous system actually experiences the world.

First the world.
Then the body.
Then the inner life.
Then the meaning.

This is how rest is restored.