Love with an Autistic Heart: Learning to Be Understood, to Set Boundaries, and to Love Myself First

By Frankie — Disabled Air Force Veteran | Chronic Illness Advocate | Social Scientist

“Autistic love isn’t loud. It’s deep, loyal and sometimes misunderstood.”

The Quiet Weight of Feeling Deeply

For most of my life, I’ve loved with my whole nervous system.
Every connection, every friendship, every relationship I’ve ever had has lived somewhere beneath my skin — pulsing, sensory, almost electric. I notice everything. The pauses in a conversation. The way someone’s tone changes mid-sentence. The subtle cues of distance that other people might miss.

That’s the thing about loving with an autistic heart — it’s not casual. It’s never halfway. When I love, I catalog every detail, every moment, and I hold on tightly. But what I’ve learned — sometimes painfully — is that not everyone loves that way in return.

When Love Hurts: The Ache of Being Misunderstood

Recently, I had a tough conversation with one of the few people I truly believed accepted me fully — even with my new disabilities, limitations, and the ways my brain now works differently.

It started as an honest attempt at connection. I wanted to understand why the friendship had grown distant, why communication had become one-sided. I thought I was being direct, respectful, open. Instead, it turned into anger. They accused me of being critical, judgmental, hurtful.

I left that conversation gutted.
I’m tired of being misunderstood.
Tired of loving fully and receiving a fraction of that love in return.
Tired of being an afterthought — of giving so much emotional labor that I end up depleted and unseen.

That moment reminded me of every time I’ve been punished for being honest. Every time someone mistook my transparency for coldness or my silence for disinterest. But what they didn’t see was the overwhelm behind my words — the thousand invisible calculations happening in my head just to keep the interaction afloat.

The Autistic Way of Loving

Autistic love is often quiet, but it’s not weak. It’s detail-oriented, deeply loyal, and fiercely protective. We love through actions, through consistency, through showing up.

We memorize (if we don’t have a brain injury impairing our memory like I do), your favorite snacks. We remember the songs you hum when you’re anxious. We replay conversations in our minds for days, trying to understand what we might’ve missed.

“I don’t love halfway — I either love with my whole nervous system, or not at all.”

But the world doesn’t always recognize that kind of love. In a society that celebrates spontaneity, we’re the ones who crave stability. In a culture that rewards small talk, we speak in depth. That mismatch often leaves us loving loudly in a language most people can’t hear.

Communication, Shutdowns, and Masking

For years, I thought the only way to be loved was to make myself easier to understand — to mask my needs, quiet my honesty, dilute my intensity.

In relationships, that meant saying “I’m fine” when I wasn’t. It meant hiding sensory overload behind a forced smile. It meant apologizing for being “too sensitive” when my body was simply responding to too much noise, too much light, too much everything.

There were times in my marriage when I shut down completely.
When I couldn’t speak, couldn’t make eye contact, couldn’t explain the storm inside me. To someone neurotypical, that can look like disinterest or withdrawal — but in reality, it’s the opposite. It’s my system protecting itself from breaking entirely. Unfortunately, I also had another layer of difficulty, dementia and hearing loss from a brain injury following gamma knife brain surgery.

It took years for us — for me — to understand that love can exist in stillness, too. That needing silence isn’t rejection. That boundaries aren’t barriers.

Rebuilding Connection and Learning Boundaries

When my husband and I made the intentional decision to rebuild our relationship, we didn’t start from where we were — we started from scratch.

We learned each other’s communication styles. We stopped trying to fix or correct each other and started observing instead. We created new rules for safety in conflict — no yelling, no walking away mid-conversation, time-outs when either of us was overstimulated.

For the first time, I stopped apologizing for needing things like structure, reassurance, or quiet. And he stopped taking those needs personally.

That’s when love started to feel safe again.
Because it wasn’t about changing who I am — it was about creating space where I could exist fully.

Loving Myself First

Somewhere along this journey, I realized that I had spent most of my life waiting for someone to make me feel understood. But the real breakthrough came when I learned to give that understanding to myself.

“Maybe the real love story was learning I never had to earn acceptance in the first place.”

I learned to stop shrinking to make people comfortable.
To forgive myself for needing solitude and boundaries.
To understand that I am not “too much.”
That my way of loving — deep, loyal, deliberate — isn’t broken. It’s beautiful.

When I started treating myself with the same empathy I gave everyone else, everything changed. The friendships that were meant to last began to feel effortless. The relationships that weren’t aligned quietly faded, and for once, I didn’t chase them, just told them what I’m seeing, how I feel and what I need.

Because I finally realized: I can love others deeply without abandoning myself in the process.

The Quiet Power of an Autistic Heart

Autistic love is different — not lesser, not colder, just different. It’s a kind of love that sees what others overlook. It’s love that listens beyond words, that remembers small details, that holds space for the entire truth of who you are.

And while being misunderstood will always hurt, I’m no longer afraid of that pain. Because I know who I am now. I know how I love. I know that I’m not too much — I’m exactly enough.

And that’s what resilience really is.
Not hardening — but softening toward yourself.
Not pretending — but being fully, radically real.

If this story resonates with you don’t forget to follow my journey on FB & IG by following the links below.

and as always, Stay Resilient ❤️‍🩹