“Why do you think I’m not listening?” I asked him.

“Because you’re staring in the other direction!”

Ah. From this response, I deduced that looking in the other direction when someone is talking to you must be a sign that you’re not listening, even if your ears are perfectly attuned to what is being said.

Most people naturally look at the faces of the people they are speaking to, because to them, communication involves reading people’s facial expressions. Facial expressions mean nothing to me, but once I was told that listening requires eye contact, I made an effort to look people in the eye when speaking to them.

Interpersonal relationships, to me, were no different from a game of chess. You have to get into the head of the other person and critically analyze why they’re doing what they’re doing, with the assumption that there’s a good reason why they’re acting that way. It was important for me to learn the language of communication, because although on the outside I looked like a science geek, I actually cared deeply about people.

By the time I started dating, I had learned to compensate quite well for my social deficiencies. When I met my wife, Kayla, I specifically asked her to tell me if I did anything that was socially off, and tell me she did.

“You shouldn’t announce loudly, in public, that you need the bathroom,” she said. A different time, she told me to please stop making animal faces and noises at the table. (I have a unique ability to twist my nose into a rabbit face. People found it entertaining, so I continued doing it — until Kayla put a stop to it.) But these issues were minor. On the whole, Kayla and I were very compatible, and her warm, overtly emotional personality was the perfect foil for my more reserved nature.

At the beginning of our marriage, my condition did cause some trouble with communication. Kayla had to get used to the fact that I talk in a monotone, even when I’m feeling intense emotion, and she had to compensate for the fact that I don’t understand facial expression, tone of voice, or nuance.

Once, Kayla asked me to buy parsley flakes. “How much?” I asked.

“A lot,” she replied.

I came home with two pounds of parsley flakes. Kayla laughed, and from then on, she made sure to specify exactly how much she wanted.

In order to learn how to communicate in marriage, I had to ask a lot of questions. One time, I came home from shul on Shabbos morning an hour later than usual.

“Moshe, you’re late!” Kayla said. I noticed that her voice was significantly louder than usual. By this time, I had learned to recognize that raised tones generally indicate some displeasure.

“Why did you just raise your voice half an octave?” I asked her.

“Because I’ve been waiting for you for an hour! What took you so long?”

“Well,” I began, “the davening was 13 minutes longer than usual. Also, my friend Binyamin was away this Shabbos, and earlier in the week he asked me if I could escort his elderly father home from shul and help him up the steps. That took me 45 minutes out of my way.”

“I DON’T CARE WHY YOU’RE LATE!” she answered, her voice a full octave higher than before.

I was thoroughly confused. Kayla had just asked me why I was late, and I had given her an honest answer. So why was she yelling? Applying the moron test, I reasoned that since Kayla was not deranged, there must have been something I misunderstood.

“If you didn’t care why I’m late, then why did you ask?” I inquired.

“I was just venting frustration,” she explained. “I don’t really want to know what happened. Just apologize, and next time, give me a heads-up if you’re planning to be home late.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry. Next time I’ll let you know in advance.”

Kayla smiled, and I filed the interaction away for future reference.

Some time later, I found myself in a similar situation. On the way home from kollel, I stopped at the bank, and because the lines were long, I got home half an hour later than usual.

“Why are you late?” Kayla asked.

“I’m sorry,” I said automatically. “I’ll try not to be late again.”

“Huh?” she said. “I wasn’t telling you not to come home late, I just wanted to know what happened.”

My oh my. Last time she didn’t want to know why I was late, and this time she did? How on earth was I supposed to figure out whether to answer the question? This was tougher than any chess game.

It took a few more interactions like these until I was finally able to notice a pattern and apply deductive reasoning to develop a solution. When Kayla really wanted to know why I had done something, she’d wait for me to respond, and if I didn’t answer, she’d ask the question again: “Moshe, I asked why you did that.” If she wasn’t interested in an answer, and only wanted to vent frustration, she’d move on to something else within a few seconds. So after hearing her ask why I had done something, I’d wait five seconds. If she repeated the question, I’d give an explanation. If she didn’t, I’d remain silent.

Subsequently, I developed a variation of this algorithm, for statements that followed the construct of “Why did you do X? You should have done Y.” If Y was a reasonable possibility, and the reason I had done X depended on a factor that Kayla was unaware of, then I would explain my motivation for doing Y. But if X was clearly the right thing to do, and Y was irrational, then there was no reason to explain my actions. I would mentally congratulate myself for having done the right thing, and understand that Kayla did not really have a problem with what I had done. Perhaps she was sleep deprived, or hungry, or under a lot of pressure at work, or in a bad mood.

It helps a lot, for shalom bayis, that Kayla is only too happy to provide me with the right scripts to read. We actually have excellent communication, because we have to be very straightforward with each other and say exactly what we are thinking and feeling. This helps us to stay on the same page and avoid misunderstandings and arguments.

Early on, when Kayla would complain about something someone had done — whether it was a family member, a coworker, or a friend — my first reaction would be to apply the moron test and try to find reasonable motivations for the person’s actions.

One memorable evening, she said to me, “You know, Moshe, you’ve been invalidating me all day.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. “Can you explain what you mean by invalidating?” I asked.

“At least three times today, I told you something that someone had done that bothered me, and each time you defended that person! Can’t you ever validate my feelings?”

“How am I invalidating your feelings by judging the other person favorably?” I asked.

“Because it makes no difference why they acted the way they did! I’m expressing my feelings, and those feelings are real!”

“Oh,” I said. “How would you like me to validate your feelings?”

Kayla thought for a few moments. “You can say, ‘Oh, that’s really hard.’ Or, ‘Oh my, that must have been horrible.’ Or, ‘Wow, I can’t believe what you went through. You must be so hurt.’ ”

I mentally filed away those statements for future reference. Now, when Kayla expresses an interpersonal grievance, I respond with an empathetic statement and wait until she seems satisfied. Then, if she seems receptive, I offer a possible explanation for the person’s actions in order to defuse Kayla’s turbulent emotional response.

The moron test and being dan l’kaf zechus are actually quite similar. Both involve the assumption that the other person did not act out of malice and had reasonable grounds for behaving in a particular fashion, even if on the surface the actions seem wrong or inappropriate.

At times, I’m able to read situations and understand people better than non-Asperger’s people can, because my interpretations of events and actions are strictly logic based. Once, Kayla told me that she had met her friend Sarah in the supermarket, and instead of returning Kayla’s friendly greeting, Sarah had grimaced, and then let out a sigh. “She obviously was not happy to see me,” Kayla said. “She didn’t even say hello! What did I do wrong to deserve that?”

“It sounds like you’re feeling hurt,” I said.

“It’s not so much that I’m hurt,” Kayla reflected. “It’s more that I want to know what she was thinking, making that sour face at me.”

“Would you like to hear what I think?” I knew, by now, that it was better to ask rather than offer an unsolicited opinion.

“Of course I want your opinion!” she replied. “Why else would I be telling you this?”

Using my pattern recognition skills, I identified this as a rhetorical question, and refrained from pointing out that she might be telling me this because she wanted empathy or was looking to vent.

“If you didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, “then chances are, her response to your greeting had nothing to do with you. She is probably going through a hard time in her life, and her sigh was her way of communicating that to you without going into the details. Since she considers you a friend, she felt safe grimacing instead of saying hello, and it didn’t even occur to her that you would take it personally.”

Later, Kayla found out that indeed, Sarah had been going through a rough time.

I wasn’t surprised. I may be less emotionally savvy than other people, but I’m also less subject to the blinding effects of emotion. I have built solid interpersonal relationships — including a beautiful marriage — not by relying on my gut instincts, but by carefully studying the dynamics of human relationships and learning what works and what doesn’t.

I still struggle with social nuances, and I get under people’s skin sometimes. But I rarely make the same mistake twice. If people react differently from how I expect, I ask them why. Perhaps there was something about my words or my tone that came across as yelling or otherwise negative, when no negativity was intended. Not everyone is always forthcoming with an answer, because they are sure I know what I did, and they think I am being facetious by asking. But enough people are willing to work with me that over time, I’ve pretty well mastered the norms of social interaction, and I am proud to say that I have a lot of friends — normal people, not just geeks.

In general, I’ve come to recognize that while most people are in touch with their feelings, they may not always be in touch with the reasons behind their feelings. For a person with Asperger’s, like me, emotions are purely a function of logic. If there is a logical reason to be angry, or sad, or scared, then I will feel those emotions and express them. If there’s no clear reason for me to feel a certain way, then I won’t.

Which gives rise to interactions like this one.

“The Sendrowitzes invited us for a meal this Shabbos day,” I told Kayla one day. “Would you like to go?”

“It’s not a good week for me,” Kayla said. “I’m very busy at work, and I’m too tired to go out.”

Every serious ben Torah knows that when the Gemara makes a statement and then gives reasons to back up the statement, that is an invitation to challenge the reasons and question whether the statement would apply in the absence of those reasons. Taking that approach, I proceeded to point out to Kayla why her reasons were illogical.

“If you are busy at work, then it will be easier for you to go out for a meal and not have to cook,” I noted. “And they invited us for the day meal, which means that you will have plenty of time to sleep Friday night, so you won’t be tired anymore by the time we go to them.”

“Why are you pressuring me?” Kayla asked.

Me, pressuring her? I wasn’t trying to pressure her at all, I was just explaining why the concerns she had expressed should not have been factors in her decision.

I learned, at that point, that just because Kayla gave a reason — or two or three — that didn’t necessarily mean that those were her only reasons, or her main reasons. Instead of challenging her reasons with logical arguments, the correct thing to do was to program myself to follow up with a question of this nature: “If not for those reasons, would you be interested in going to the Sendrowitzes?”

In this particular exchange, Kayla eventually admitted that she did not feel comfortable around Mrs. Sendrowitz and had no interest in eating there.

In a similar interaction that happened several weeks later, Kayla offered a list of reasons why it wasn’t feasible for us to have company for Yom Tov. “It’s too much work,” she said. “I’d have to do tons of shopping and cooking, and I’ll have mountains of dishes to wash.”

Now, I needed to figure out whether the reasons she was giving were just excuses because she didn’t want to have company, or whether she really did want to have company but was holding back because of the reasons that she had expressed.

“If not for the shopping, the cooking, and the dishes, would you want to have company?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said.

That gave me license to forge ahead and offer some problem-solving strategies that would make it possible for us to have company on Yom Tov. Kayla was delighted with my ideas — which included me doing most of the shopping and cooking, and us serving on disposable dishes — and we enjoyed a beautiful Yom Tov. Our guests, who were recent baalei teshuvah, actually told us how impressed they were by our shalom bayis. “I hope that one day, I’ll have the type of marriage that the two of you have,” one of them said.

“I wish this kind of marriage on all of you,” Kayla said.

I am proud to say that my marriage is happy, loving, and harmonious. And yes, my wife feels the same way; I check that with her regularly. In fact, I see life as one big chessboard — and the only way to win is by checking in with my mate.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 615)